In a battle of two injury-laden teams, No. 8 Michigan used an emotional first period to grind past Lake Superior State, 2-0, on Friday night at Yost Ice Arena.<\/p>\n
The Lakers had their chances, especially in the second and third periods when they outshot the Wolverines 23-12. But Michigan’s defense, which gave up 15 goals last weekend, did a turnabout, shutting out the Lake Superior attack.<\/p>\n
Michigan goalie Josh Blackburn stopped all 29 shots to earn his second shutout of the season.<\/p>\n
The injury tally didn’t help the Lakers (10-13-0 overall, 6-10-0 CCHA), who by the end of the game hurt even more. Already down several players including Jeremy Bachusz, Lake Superior lost defenseman Ryan Knox in the first period.<\/p>\n
Knox missed five games earlier in the season and did not return for the rest of Friday’s game.<\/p>\n
“It’s been an unbelievable year,” said Lakers’ coach Scott Borek, whose team lost for the 11th time in 14 games. “We’ve had an injured player in every game.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Wolverines (14-5-3, 8-3-1), still down several players including three defenseman — Dave Huntzicker (knee), Jay Vancik (knee) and Mike Komisarek (playing in World Juniors) — used only five, and some, like last year’s walk-on Brad Fraser, were extremely rusty.<\/p>\n
But after a week of concentrating on defense, Michigan’s forwards tended to play back a little more. The Wolverines scored two first-period goals quickly, which was all they needed.<\/p>\n
The defense, including a penalty kill unit that held the Lakers scoreless on nine tries, couldn’t come at a better time after a hellish weekend at the Great Lakes Invitational, where the Wolverines lost 7-3 to Michigan Tech (which entered the game 3-13-1) then were shellacked 8-5 by Boston College.<\/p>\n
“Our team is not stupid,” Berenson said. “We had a nightmare of a weekend. We’re a better team than that. <\/p>\n
“We felt a lot of pressure tonight and we responded well.”<\/p>\n
The Wolverines’ first goal, tallied by sophomore Jed Ortmeyer, came off a bounce from Geoff Koch. The puck trailed towards the point, where Ortmeyer slapped it past Lake Superior goaltender Jayme Platt.<\/p>\n
“We knew the first goal would be important, particularly coming off last weekend,” Berenson said. “The second goal was luck.”<\/p>\n
Craig Murray scored off a big rebound that floated into almost the same area as Ortmeyer’s to put the Wolverines up 2-0.<\/p>\n
Michigan outshot the Lakers 17-6 in the period.<\/p>\n
“That first period was all emotion,” Borek said of the Wolverines’ flurry. “Unfortunately, we did tell our team [about Michigan’s losses in the GLI]. We knew about their emotion.”<\/p>\n
The Wolverines felt they owed Lake Superior after the Lakers trounced Michigan twice at Yost last season.<\/p>\n
“We know,” Borek said. “They have a sign about last year in their locker room.” <\/p>\n
Both goaltenders had successful games. Platt played one of his best games this season, according to Borek. <\/p>\n
“[Platt]’s been working hard to get his game going,” Borek said. “Blackburn, he didn’t just play well, he controlled the game.”<\/p>\n
“The guys did a great job keeping the shots outside,” Blackburn said. “We didn’t have any odd-man rushes.”<\/p>\n
Borek called time out after the second Wolverines’ goal. The Lakers then regrouped with opportunities to score in the final two periods.<\/p>\n
“If we played the first period as we did in the last two periods, the outcome would have been different,” Borek said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Josh Blackburn earned the shutout, as a charged up Wolverine squad took out their frustrations on Lake Superior in the return to CCHA play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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\/1560"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions"}],"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=1560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1560"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}