A young Wisconsin Men’s Hockey program could be growing up before our eyes. A night after drubbing Alaska-Anchorage the Badgers and Seawolves battled it out to the bitter end with Wisconsin eeking out a 3-2 victory and sweeping the WCHA series. Once again Mark Zengerle and Justin Schultz rose to the occasion, helping Wisconsin big time in Saturday’s matchup.
“Sweeping in the WCHA is huge for us, and especially this time of year, ” said junior Forward
Derek Lee. “In the new year we want to get to the top six and get home ice for the playoffs. It’s huge for us right now.”
The Badgers (12-10-2, 7-9-2 WCHA) are riding a wave of confident play and it shows in their record. Over the last 10 games Wisconsin is 7-2-1 overall and last night they did something this team hasn’t done all season. They won a game in which they gave up the first goal in the contest.
“Our hope as a coaching staff is the fact that we hope this helps us mature as a team,” said Mike Eaves in his postgame press conference. “One of the things that we felt was frustrating after the first period tonight we didn’t come out and play nearly as hard or as effective as we need to, which was disappointing… To play championship caliber hockey you got to play consistent. It was disappointing and we talked about that… but forging the win the way we did tonight we were hoping that leads us to some maturity and understanding of what we need to do before we get in this type of fix.”
Wisconsin and Alaska-Anchorage (6-14-2, 3-14-1 WCHA) skated to a scoreless draw through the first period on Saturday night as both teams fired off 8 shots in the period. For as little action as there was in the first period the second 20 minutes saw a flury of action.
The Seawolves opened up the accounts for the night just 3:36 into the period on a Power Play goal by Austin Coldwell, his 2nd of the season. However, unlike the rest of the season the Badgers didn’t fold. In fact it took less than a minute for Wisconsin to respond.
Just 16 seconds after Coldwell found the back of the net Tyler Barnes answered back for the Badgers, scoring his 8th of the season at the 3:52 mark of the 2nd period. Joseph LaBate and Mark Zengerle assisted on the goal.
Wisconsin would make it 2-1 just over a minute later as Derek Lee slotted home a shot that deflected off the Seawolves netminder for just his 3rd goal of the season. Grabbing assists on the goal were Justin Schultz and Michael Mersch.
The action would continue hot and heavy though and Alaska-Anchorage wouldn’t back down. Just over 2 minutes later Curtis Leinweber netted his 7th goal of the season, adding his name to the leaderboard for the Seawolves.
After that 4 minute flurish things settled down and it seemed like it would be a game heading into overtime. But Wisconsin kept working and were rewarded when with just 4:03 left in regulation Joseph LaBate gave the Badgers the game winner. It was a beautiful piece of teamwork as Mark Zengerle gave LaBate a nice centering pass by the Wisconsin blue line, LaBate raced up ice, dumped it deep to a streaking Justin Schultz who got it back to LaBate in front of the net for the finish.
For the series Schultz finished an amazing +7, while ratcheting up his point total to 37 points. The only person outdoing him at the moment is Mark Zengerle, still sitting just one point in front with 38 points on the season.
Freshman goalie Joel Rumpel got the entire weekend series and looks to have cemented the job for now. He stopped 25 of 27 shots on the night and now has a record of 9-5-2 for the year.
Wisconsin enters next weekends series at North Dakota sitting in 9th place in the WCHA standings with 16 points, but are just 2 points shy of 6th place UND, so this series could go a long way to helping the Badgers vault into home ice contention come playoff time. Friday’s contest is a 7:30pm CT start and Saturday the Badgers and UND take to the ice at 7pm CT.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
