The temperature on the UMass campus is below freezing, but the Minutemen are hot. <\/p>\n
Behind 42 saves from senior netminder Gabe Winer, the Minutemen defeated No. 3 Colorado College 4-3 in front of 3,613 fans at the Mullins Center. It’s the third win in a row for UMass, with all three coming against ranked opponents. UMass defeated No. 20 Boston University on Saturday before winning on the road at No. 5 Vermont on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
“Obviously, the mentality in the locker room is a real healthy one,” said Minutemen coach Don “Toot” Cahoon, whose minutemen improved to 4-7-0 (2-5-0 Hockey East) with the win. “We’ve battled pretty hard to play through some adversity. Tonight, we fell behind by two goals and got ours. We’ve got a long way to go before we fill the few holes that we have to become an upper echelon team, but we’re a pretty tough team to play against when we’re at our best, and obviously, getting good goaltending is an important part of that.” <\/p>\n
“We threw everything at them and they didn’t buckle,” said Tigers coach Scott Owens, whose Tigers dropped their second nonconference game of the season, after not losing to a single non-WCHA foe in the 2003-04 or 2004-05 campaigns. <\/p>\n
The game winner was scored on the power play by junior Chris Capraro, his second goal of the season. With the Minutemen leading 3-2 early in the third period, Capraro potted a rebound of a shot by freshman defenseman Topher Bevis to give his team a two-goal advantage. <\/p>\n
“The puck was going around pretty well,” Capraro said. “It got kicked back to the point, and Topher took a pretty nice shot low, and it just kicked right to where I was standing. Right place, right time.” <\/p>\n
The Minutemen struggled out of the gate as CC rang up a pair of early goals on Winer. Senior Brett Sterling opened the scoring at 4:29 on a wrist shot from behind the left faceoff circle, and classmate Joey Crabb made it 2-0 on a breakaway at 10:16. <\/p>\n
The Minutemen, however, were not about to let the visitors pull away. Team captain Stephen Werner found the puck on his stick during a scramble in front of the Tiger net and buried it at 13:08. His goal was followed less than two minutes later by Kevin Jarman, who fired a shot from Matt Zaba’s glove side that went across his body and into the net. <\/p>\n
UMass took its first lead of the game 6:01 into the second period, when freshman Cory Quirk potted a rebound at 6:01 to put the Minutemen up 3-2. It was the only goal of the second period, as Zaba stopped eight UMass shots, while Winer made 16 saves for the Minutemen. <\/p>\n
While UMass opened the third period strong, getting Capraro’s power-play tally to make it a two-goal advantage, the Tigers soon asserted themselves. The Tigers outshot UMass 18-5 in the third period, pulling within one on Lee Sweatt’s first goal of the season at 14:58 and creating several other close calls for the Minutemen. That included a waved-off goal knocked in by Crabb’s high stick, several tough shots during an 80-second two-man advantage, and a hit pipe by Sweatt in the waning seconds that some think might have been in the net. <\/p>\n
“I thought if we could get it to 4-3, they have five freshman and sophomore defenseman, and we could scare them a bit,” Owens said. <\/p>\n
However, 17 saves from Winer sealed the victory, the senior’s first of the season in his first game since November 5. <\/p>\n
“Gabe had a great first few weeks of the year,” Cahoon said of Winer. “Then he got himself into a bit of a malaise and kind of lost his rhythm a little bit. I think what’s happened is that he’s in so much better condition that he’s able to rebound, and I think tonight, you saw in the third period, late in the game, that he was alert, quick, active, and as fresh as he was at the start of the game.” <\/p>\n
Both teams are back in action tomorrow night. The Tigers visit Boston University at Agganis Arena, with the puck dropping at 7 p.m. ET, while the Minutemen welcome Denver to the Mullins Center with an 8 p.m. start. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The temperature on the UMass campus is below freezing, but the Minutemen are hot. Behind 42 saves from senior netminder Gabe Winer, the Minutemen defeated No. 3 Colorado College 4-3 in front of 3,613 fans at the Mullins Center. It’s the third win in a row for UMass, with all three coming against ranked opponents. […]<\/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\/6740"}],"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=6740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6740\/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=6740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6740"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}