NORTH ANDOVER, Mass.<\/b> — Merrimack headed back home battling for a home-ice playoff bid against Vermont after a split with Maine last weekend.<\/p>\n
The game was a defensive battle that saw Merrimack open up offensively and take the 4-1 win Friday night.<\/p>\n
“I thought we did some good things tonight,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy. “I thought the first 50 minutes were really solid and we didn’t give away much. We capatilized on a couple of our opportunities and did a good job of controlling the puck.”<\/p>\n
The first period was a battle of the goaltenders as Merrimack’s Drew Vogler made 11 saves in the period. Vermont’s Packy Munson was just as good stopping 13 shots. <\/p>\n
Merrimack’s offensive opportunities came from their fourth line of Derek Petti, Michael Babcock and Chris LeBlanc, who sustained pressure in the offensive zone throughout the period.<\/p>\n
“I think they were plus-10 in the first period in shot differential,” said Dennehy. “At that point as a coach, you want to put them on the ice as much as you can. They all bring something a little different to the table.”<\/p>\n
The second period saw Merrimack break the ice with a pair of goals after generating multiple offensive chances. LeBlanc got things started off when he scored going left to right to beat Munson up high, giving Merrimack the early 1-0 lead.<\/p>\n
After getting out of the penalty box, Babcock rushed up the ice, making a pass to teammate Hampus Gustafsson, who then made a cross-ice pass to Justin Hussar who tipped it in to add insurance and a 2-0 lead.<\/p>\n
The third period saw the most offense of the the entire game as Merrimack buried two and Vermont recorded one of its own. <\/p>\n
Ben Bahe fired one hone 3:24 into the period on the power play as he walked in and shot one short side to give Merrimack the 3-0 lead. Vermont tied things up later in the period when Brady Shaw fired a puck on net that took a weird bounce and got past Vogler to cut the lead to 3-1.<\/p>\n
With just over two minutes to go in the period, Jonathan Lashyn fired a puck on net that got past the blocker side of Munson to ice the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — Merrimack headed back home battling for a home-ice playoff bid against Vermont after a split with Maine last weekend. The game was a defensive battle that saw Merrimack open up offensively and take the 4-1 win Friday night. “I thought we did some good things tonight,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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\/21992"}],"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\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21994,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21992\/revisions\/21994"}],"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=21992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21992"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}