Re: 2014-2015 Division I Scores & Results Thread
I missed the first period. Quinnipiac didn't look great tonight. They made it an even game for the first five minutes of the second, and for the five minutes after BU went 3-0 up, but other than that BU applied pressure much better than Quinni did. The defense was by and large very effective, with fast reactions and the ability to get pucks out of the zone quickly, and did a great job killing a full two-minute 5-on-3 (first penalty on Uden Johansson for interference, second a bench penalty for I presume not liking the first one). They did a reasonable job passing the pucks up the boards on their own side to start the move in the other direction.
However, the forwards seemed pretty uncoordinated. Cross-ice passes seemed not to connect, there wasn't much passing in the zone (except on the one PP, which they managed well except the BU PK managed better). By the third period they just looked slow, except for Cianfarano who didn't do a lot in the second but was Quinnipiac's best player on the ice for the last ten minutes of the game. The shots on goal figures (22 QUI, 26 BU) in no way reflect how close the game was. A lot of Quinni goal shots were taken from the far side of the circle with no support; BU felt like it had at least twice the quality chances that QU did.
QU also seemed to be pushing the envelope in terms of physical play much more than BU and could have got called for far more penalties than they were. Uden Johansson's penalty came on one of a series of dubious plays and it wasn't a surprise to see her finally go to far.
This was obviously not a good night for Chelsea Laden, and I don't want to rag on her too much, but I was very surprised by how many rebounds she gave up. She showed good reactions a lot of the time but didn't manage to kill the play the way I would expect an elite goaltender to do.
BU, on the other hand, looked much better than I expected. Poulin and Lefort were very sharp together and so were Bach and Leslie. They played very disciplined, took few penalties, and provided good support on moves forward.
Quinni will need to improve considerably to stay top 4, with BC / Harvard / Dartmouth / Cornell coming up. I feel like a lot of tonight's problems come back to Laden -- although the two goals I saw weren't terrible, she used up a lot of her and the team's energy making them kill pucks that shouldn't have been alive after the first shot.
For BC fans, the intriguing stat is that Laden is on .91 GAA (up from .74 at the start of the evening -- the sad thing about low numbers is you don't need to add a lot to them to make them significantly bigger) and Burt is now on .93, with Leveille next at 1.16. Which means that unless it's a four-goals-each-side game on Saturday, the winning goalie will also win the lowest GAA in the country. The way things look now it's tough to bet against Burt to take that.