Sitting 32nd in the PairWise Rankings, Colorado College isn’t what you’d call a team on the bubble for a NCAA tournament berth this season.
But with two regular-season games left, plus however far into the postseason the Tigers get, coach Kris Mayotte wants his squad to look the part.
CC’s series split last weekend at St. Cloud State included a fifth win from the Tigers’ past six games, as the visitors were victorious 4-3 in Friday’s opener. But a 4-2 defeat Saturday kept the Tigers from potentially cutting the gap on Denver in fifth place in the NCHC standings to one point.
Ultimately, at 17-14-1 this season, CC is where it is.
But Friday’s victory showed glimpses of what the Tigers’ season still could be. Eleven different CC skaters found their way onto the score sheet, and while four different Tigers scored, goaltender Kaidan Mbereko posted a season-best 42 saves, including 15 in a scoreless third period.
“Just be him,” Mayotte said of what he wants to see out of Mbereko down the home stretch. “He’s really good when he’s him.”
There was also a good, if imperfect, team effort.
“I thought we got better as the game went on,” Mayotte said on a night when CC scored three second-period goals. “We played a team that was off the weekend before, they’re going to have their legs early. That, paired with getting used to the rink a little bit, I thought our first period was pretty sloppy in terms of chances we were giving up and our connectivity, but as we got into the second, you started to see us build our offense a little better and started to see us connect a little better defensively, and we were able to build some transition off of it.
“I thought we all executed really well. The talk on the bench was good, and there’s starting to be a belief. I thought in the third, they had the shot advantage (15-8), and I think a little bit of that is just the nature of the score, but I really liked how we went out and played. We weren’t hanging on. We went out to win the hockey game, and we got the job done.”
But the script flipped Saturday, when St. Cloud State scored three goals in the first period and then held on to win, again after a scoreless third. Second-period goals from Fisher Scott and Zaccharya Wisdom couldn’t get CC over the hump.
“I liked the way we played for the majority of tonight,” Mayotte said Saturday. “Unfortunately, we got down early, but we played a lot better than I think what the scoreboard reflects.
“You outshoot a team 44-20, you win 70-plus percent of the (faceoff) draws, I loved our discipline tonight, I thought we were generating chances the right way, I thought we were using our speed. We were driving, we were getting to the net. Sometimes it’s hockey, and their goalie (Isak Posch) played really well tonight. I thought he was the difference in the game.”
CC now has one last bye week before finishing the regular season with a home-and-home set March 7-8 against Denver. The teams split their first two Gold Pan series games back in December.
“Get prepared for a long run,” Mayotte said of his team’s approach the rest of the way. “Continue to get better, obviously, but at the same time, we know we’ve got to go on a run here and win a lot of games to get to where we ultimately want to be.”
