After seeing their 11-game unbeaten streak end Friday night, the No. 7 Northeastern Huskies came out with extra motivation and shutout the Merrimack Warriors 3-0 Saturday. <\/p>\n
“This is the time of the year when you are playing back-to-back games, often against the same team,” said Huskies’ coach Greg Cronin. “It’s a unique dynamic there; its like a fight. If you get punched in the nose, you gotta come back and swing the next night. I thought we had better intensity tonight, and I thought we were much better away from the puck.” <\/p>\n
Northeastern took the lead at 6:13 of the first period when David Strathman tapped in a beautiful cross-ice feed from Chad Costello. Strathman just tapped the puck with his backhand over the shoulder of Merrimack netminder Andrew Braithwaite. <\/p>\n
“I was coming off a change and I saw Chad [Costello] coming down the far side and the defense didn’t see me coming backdoor, and he just made a great pass and I tried to put it on net and luckily it went in,” Strathman said after the game. “He made a great pass. I’ll give him all the credit, he saw me coming down the wing and that’s it.”<\/p>\n
Northeastern added another tally in the first when Tyler McNeely scored a power-play goal, deflecting in a Steve Silva blast from the point. The assist gave Silva, a freshmen, ten points on the season.<\/p>\n
“[The power-play] has been one of our main focuses coming into tonight,” McNeely said. “Joe [Vitale] made a great play up to Steve [Silva]. Steve walked in and took a shot and I was in front of the net and it just tipped of me and went in. You get those lucky goals; it happens sometimes.” <\/p>\n
Coming into the game, the Northeastern power play had been struggling, scoring only nine goals on their 89 chances. This time on the power-play, Cronin had five forwards on the ice, Silva and Russo on the point with Northeastern’s top offensive line of McNeely, Vitale, and Wade MacLoud.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been struggling on the power play all year and coach has been trying to find some combinations and today he put five forwards on the power-play and me and [Jimmy] Russo on top and I think we were working it pretty good, finding lanes,” Silva said. “I think as a whole our unit was just clicking. Generally, forwards have a lot of creativity and I think we all we move and get open and find each other. I actually like it.”<\/p>\n
Northeastern kept the hammer down in the second period, adding their second power-play goal of the game when Vitale scored his seventh of the season, a deflection that hand-cuffed Braithwaite as the puck trickled through the five-hole. <\/p>\n
Neither team scored during the third period, though Northeastern seemed content to kill the clock a majority of the time<\/p>\n
Northeastern goalie Brad Thiessen pitched his first shutout of the season in tonight’s game.<\/p>\n
“It’s always nice to get a shutout,” Thiessen said. “We played really well and were able to keep them to the outside and whenever there was a rebound they were able to clear the puck away.”<\/p>\n
Next up for Northeastern is a pair at the University of Vermont; Merrimack hosts Boston University on Friday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After seeing their 11-game unbeaten streak end Friday night, the No. 7 Northeastern Huskies came out with extra motivation and shutout the Merrimack Warriors 3-0 Saturday. “This is the time of the year when you are playing back-to-back games, often against the same team,” said Huskies’ coach Greg Cronin. “It’s a unique dynamic there; its […]<\/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\/8608"}],"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=8608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8608\/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=8608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8608"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}