Findlay’s Rigel Shaw did most of the damage himself with a hat trick, but the Findlay supporting cast pitched in with three additional goals as Findlay defeated Niagara for the first time ever, 6-3, Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Niagara got on the scoreboard first as Randy Harris continued his offensive streak and took a Matt Ryan pass and put it past Findlay goaltender Jamie VandeSpyker to give Niagara the 1-0 lead just 1:34 into the first period.<\/p>\n
It looked as though the events of Friday night’s Purple Eagle victory would play out again with Niagara taking an early lead, but that was not to be. <\/p>\n
Shaw scored two goals just over three minutes apart to give Findlay a 2-1 edge, and from then on, Findlay would never trail, though Niagara tied it up when Hannu Karru took a shot that he neatly lifted over VandeSpyker’s glove hand to make it 2-2. The first period would end with the two teams deadlocked at 2-2, but the game was far from over.<\/p>\n
The second period saw another Findlay goal only three minutes and 44 seconds into the period when Brian Sherry took a feed from Brant Somerville on an odd-man rush to give Findlay the lead back at 3-2.<\/p>\n
Niagara head coach Dave Burkholder had seen enough and replaced freshman goaltender Mike Pataran with another freshman in Ryan MacNeil. MacNeil, seeing his first game action since he received a serious concussion and numerous stitches in the second game of the season versus Umass-Amherst, fared no better. Both netminders were forced to make spectacular saves as a porous Niagara defense allowed Findlay too many scoring chances. <\/p>\n
MacNeil gave up his first goal against of the game at the 6:37 mark of the second period as he too fell victim to Shaw. Shaw’s third goal of the game was a blast from the slot that he neatly placed inside the left pipe.<\/p>\n
Findlay then went on a scoring “drought” for eight minutes until receiving its fifth goal of the game from Kris Weibe. <\/p>\n
To save face for the Purple Eagles, Paul Muniz stuffed home a loose puck with only six seconds to go in the second period to cut the Niagara deficit to two goals. However, that was as close as Niagara would get.<\/p>\n
The only scoring of the third period came on an Aaron Weegar empty-netter and Findlay skated off with the 6-3 victory — the first victory against Niagara in Findlay hockey history, a span of 15 previous losses.<\/p>\n
Niagara falls to 12-7-0, 5-3-0 in the CHA and Findlay improves to 6-10-0, 2-4-0 in the CHA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Findlay got its first-ever win over Niagara Saturday night, using Rigel Shaw’s hat trick and three more goals to take a 6-3 decision that ended the Oilers’ 15-game losing streak to the Purple Eagles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2690"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}