The Wisconsin men’s hockey team (3-4-1 WCHA, 4-5-1 overall) traveled to St. Cloud, Minn. this weekend, looking for its first road win of the season against St. Cloud State, but after a disappointing loss on Friday and a hard-fought tie on Saturday, the search goes on.
After impressive outings against quality opponents like North Dakota and Nebraska-Omaha at home, the Badgers’ young team finally seemed in over their heads against St. Cloud State in a 7-2 romp Friday night.
St. Cloud opened the scoring with goals from sophomore Andrew Prochno and junior David Eddy before UW junior defenseman and assistant captain Justin Schultz scored his second goal of the season to put Wisconsin on the board.
After falling behind 3-1, freshman forward Matt Paape scored his second career goal as a Badger to cut the lead to one, but that would be as close as Wisconsin would get. St. Cloud would close out the game with four straight goals, including the fourth and fifth of the season for Husky captain Ben Hanowski.
Special-teams failure (0-for-5 on the power play) and defensive mistakes made life easy for St. Cloud in the rout, facts that were not lost on Badger head coach Mike Eaves.
“I put the blame on us because the goals [St. Cloud] got were holes in the way we were playing defensive zone coverage. It was holes in our game that helped them get the victory,” Eaves said after Friday’s loss.
Eaves’s young team had always seemed to find a way to battle back and play close games early on this season, but Friday’s loss was the first time the Badgers were completely outmatched from start to finish this year.
Freshman goaltender Landon Peterson gave up seven goals on 37 shots in the loss, his worst outing of the season, but the blame could certainly be spread among the entire Badgers team. Junior defenseman John Ramage deflected two Husky goals past Peterson, Wisconsin gave up two more power play goals while failing to score any of their own and the offense never seemed to gain any control over the game.
Wisconsin came out Saturday night looking for redemption and hoping to prove that Friday night’s loss was nothing more than a fluke. Schultz opened the scoring once again for the Badgers, but St. Cloud State would battle back and tie the game by the end of the first period.
Two more goals by the Huskies put the Badgers down 3-1 early in the third period, but just as they have done so often early on this season, Wisconsin would not give up, battling back to tie the game with two goals in the final five minutes.
Paape pulled Wisconsin within one with 4:19 remaining before Schultz, who is playing some of his best hockey to date, scored the tying goal with only 40 seconds left in regulation. After a scoreless overtime, the Badgers escaped with a 3-3 tie.
Eaves was not overly concerned with the final score on Saturday, but put more emphasis on having his team play a complete game.
“I told the boys [Friday] night that it didn’t matter if we won or lost or tied tonight, it was how we played,” Eaves said after Saturday’s game. “How we played got us back into this game and got us a point on the road. It was a real good effort by a young team”
As young as the Badgers are this season (20 players are freshmen or sophomores, while there are just five juniors and one senior), they have shown incredible poise in their ability to fight back from multi-goal deficits this season, but games like Friday night’s are unavoidable when facing teams that are led by experienced upperclassmen, like St. Cloud State.
In order to win games this year, Wisconsin is going to need to rely on their best weapon—Schultz.
“We see him every day and maybe we take him for granted,” Eaves said of his star defenseman. “Every night he provides something.”
A Hobey Baker Award finalist from a year ago, Schultz has 14 points in ten games (four goals, ten assists) for the Badgers this year and is unquestionably their most consistent player. After all of the losses from last year’s team, Schultz is the face of Wisconsin hockey and he will have to play like it if the Badgers want to make a return to the NCAA tournament this season.
The Badgers return home this coming weekend for a series with archrival Minnesota at the Kohl Center.
UWBadgers.com contributed to this report.
