Once again, a graphic illustration of how outrageously bizarre Atlantic Hockey — and the teams in it — are transpired on Saturday evening.<\/p>\n
Just 24 hours after getting humbled badly in its own rink, Mercyhurst played an opportunistic hockey game and earned a huge, paramount, 3-2 victory over Niagara in freezing Dwyer Arena.<\/p>\n
“It is a good feeling,” said Mercyhurst’s Paul Chiasson, who scored the game-winning goal early in the second period. “We were a completely different team tonight. I guess that is why the Saturday games are always better for us. We learn a lesson on Friday and come back and play better than before.”<\/p>\n
The Purple Eagles came into the game riding a seven-game unbeaten streak, and had bludgeoned the Lakers, 6-1, in Erie on Friday night. However, Saturday was a totally different hockey game.<\/p>\n
The win upped the Lakers to 12-5-4 in the Atlantic Hockey Association, and gave them 28 points, one ahead of Niagara, and good enough to retake the conference lead in points.<\/p>\n
After Chris Lochner gave the Purple Eagles a 1-0 lead at 13:15 of the first period, Mercyhurst’s Daniel O’Donoghue tied the game with just 54 seconds left in the period.<\/p>\n
However, the Lakers seized control of the game in impressively rapid fashion.<\/p>\n
First, Jones scored a power-play goal when he skated into the slot and banged the rebound of Tyler Shiplo’s shot past Niagara goaltender Chris Noonan to give the Lakers a 2-1 lead at 1:53 of the second period.<\/p>\n
Just 26 seconds later, Chiasson scored the eventual game-winner when he blasted a shot past Noonan after Niagara’s Dan Weiss pinched and created a two-on-one situation.<\/p>\n
“Their ‘D’ pinched on me and I chipped it by him,” said Chiasson, who has 11 goals this season. “I already made a mistake of passing on a two-on-one earlier, and I decided to shoot this time. I hit the right corner and it felt great. It felt nice to put the guys up by two goals.”<\/p>\n
Niagara, which had built its winning streak with industriousness and intelligence, was collectively not very smart in this one.<\/p>\n
Appropriately, Purple Eagles coach Dave Burkholder took a shot at his club — as well as the referees — in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n
“The scouting report on them (Mercyhurst) is that they are skilled up front and have a great power play,” said Burkholder, whose club fell to 11-5-5 in Atlantic Hockey play and still has 27 points. “Tonight, we thought we would give them nine chances on the power play.<\/p>\n
“It was a little tilted, nine power plays to four; you don’t see that very often. We took a lot of stick infractions that were unacceptable.”<\/p>\n
The Lakers were one-for-nine on the power play while Niagara converted on one of its four attempts.<\/p>\n
Ryan Murphy also scored for Niagara, while Noonan recorded 29 saves. Mercyhurst goaltender Jordan Tibbett made 33 saves.<\/p>\n
Niagara power forward Scott Arnold, who earlier in the week talked to the local media regarding his successful recovery with testicular cancer, missed his second straight game with a upper body injury. Burkholder said he is listed as day-to-day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once again, a graphic illustration of how outrageously bizarre Atlantic Hockey — and the teams in it — are transpired on Saturday evening. Just 24 hours after getting humbled badly in its own rink, Mercyhurst played an opportunistic hockey game and earned a huge, paramount, 3-2 victory over Niagara in freezing Dwyer Arena. “It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14647"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14649,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14647\/revisions\/14649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14647"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}