Jefferson Hagen
MacEwan Athletics
EDMONTON – Two separate lessons were learned by the Griffins men's hockey team out of a 5-2 loss to the No. 2-ranked UBC Thunderbirds on Friday night.
- They have the game to play right with them.
- Make a mistake or two and they'll make you pay rather quickly.
With dogged determination all over the ice, they held the top offensive team in Canada West to a single goal through the first 42 minutes.
When the upstart Griffins gained a 2-1 lead early in the third period on Loeden Schaufler's powerplay point blast, they started to believe they might become the first team to beat UBC this season.
But on the other bench, all that tally did was wake up a sleeping bear.
The Birds needed just 1:19 to tie the game back up when Jack Wismer put a rebound past Ashton Abel, kicking off a run of four unanswered goals to put the game to bed.
"They're a very good hockey team," said MacEwan head coach Zack Dailey. "They're coming in 8-0, so they have a lot of confidence in their game. We saw a really big pushback by them right away and I think that derailed our momentum when we gave something up right away after we'd been working quite hard.
"They raised their level, and we weren't ready to raise ours."
After the Thunderbirds got one, the floodgates poured open as the Griffins played the rest of the period defending in a tight box around Abel, who had been – fantastic, electric, even – in the contest to that point, but even he couldn't save them.
Jake Kryski, Carson Miller, and Ty Thorpe completed the scoring spree that lasted just over 10 minutes as the shell-shocked Griffins were left to wonder how it all went so wrong so fast.
"I feel we ran out of gas in the third period and got away from putting pressure on their D up ice," said MacEwan head coach Zack Dailey. "That led to us sitting back and playing a lot of defence."
You wouldn't blame the Griffins for believing they deserved a better fate. They opened the scoring on Ryley Appelt's goal 5:54 into the contest and never trailed until the third.
Of course, full marks for that had to go to Abel, who finished with 40 saves in the game, almost half of them of the high danger variety. Two of his biggest stops were blocker one-timer saves off UBC's second-leading scorer Sasha Mutala.
"I think I've always found it easier to stay in games when you get lots of action," said Abel, who is no stranger to lots of shots at MacEwan. "When you're hanging down there and not seeing pucks, you get a little out of it. Seeing lots of action, with guys buzzing around, you see lots of action. It's fun to play in those games."
Added Dailey: "Unfortunately, some of those goals, he didn't have much help on, but he made some big saves for us. He kept us in the game for a lot of the game."
If there is a positive for the Griffins to take away, it's No. 1 above: they have the game to play with UBC when they play the right way.
"That's certainly it," said Dailey. "I know I've said this multiple times, but the consistency piece is the hardest thing in hockey. I think in the third period, we made too many mistakes, which led to us defending a lot. Once you're defending a bunch, you don't have energy to play offence and put pressure on the other team. Those little mistakes just led to too much D zone time, and we spent too much energy in our D zone to spend it elsewhere."
The teams will meet again on Saturday (3 p.m., Downtown Community Arena, Canada West TV). For the Griffins to flip the script and get a win, it's going to take a full 60 minutes of what they were doing early on Friday.
"I think we've just got to keep it simple," said Abel. "We got away from our D zone there in the end. We got running around in our own zone. I think we've just got to find a way to shut down their top guys and keep our own game simple.
"It will come eventually if we just keep chipping away."
