History was made at the Bright Hockey Center tonight, but this particular record was one Harvard could have done without. <\/p>\n
Riding a three-game win streak, the Crimson (4-3-1, 3-3-1 ECAC) was shut out for the first time in its history against the Golden Knights (6-4-3, 3-3-1), losing 3-0. Harvard’s defeat came a night after it shut out Clarkson’s North Country rival St. Lawrence, and Clarkson managed to rebound from a 4-1 loss to Brown to have what Knights’ coach George Roll called his team’s “best game of the season.” <\/p>\n
Coinciding with the Knights’ best game was the outstanding performance of goaltender Dustin Traylen, who stopped all 31 Harvard shots. <\/p>\n
“I thought our goaltender played very well tonight,” Roll said. “He made some key saves, especially early on during the five-on-three in the first period. He gave us some momentum.”<\/p>\n
That five-on-three advantage came with just over four minutes gone by in the first period. Clarkson’s Mike Nagai was whistled off for holding at 4:04, and he was followed not 30 seconds thereafter by Chris Brekelmans, cited for roughing.<\/p>\n
Faced with two Harvard power plays and a penalty kill down two men for more than one and a half minutes, Clarkson survived an early test and kept the score knotted at one.<\/p>\n
That helped set the tone.<\/p>\n
“[A five-on-three situation] definitely builds momentum either way … they were able to stop it and that’s a momentum builder for them,” Crimson captain Kenny Smith said. <\/p>\n
“It wasn’t a decisive factor in the game,” he continued.<\/p>\n
Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni might not agree about a situation early in the opening period being decisive, but he did think that his team’s failures on the power play were the primary cause of the historic shutout.<\/p>\n
“It’s very difficult to score when you don’t capitalize on the power play,” he said. “We had a five-on-three situation in the first. We had numerous opportunities thereafter, and we didn’t finish.<\/p>\n
“You’re not going to win many games when you don’t score a goal.”<\/p>\n
Roll saw the opposite side of the same coin, crediting his penalty killing for stymieing Harvard’s special teams.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know how many power plays they had, but I really thought our penalty kill did a great job,” he said. <\/p>\n
In contrast to the Crimson’s power-play problems, Clarkson scored the game’s first goal on the man-advantage. <\/p>\n
With Harvard defenseman Noah Welch whistled off for obstruction at 11:04 of the first, the Knights set up in the offensive end and stopped an attempted clear by defenseman Ryan Lannon. After some speedy puck movement around the zone, Mac Faulkner found a wide-open Chris Blight, who one-timed the puck past sliding Harvard goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris, beating him up high on his stick side. <\/p>\n
That goal gave Clarkson a 1-0 lead — all it would need. The Knights got their second goal, again the result of a failed Crimson clear, off the stick of Jay Latulippe in the second, and Latulippe added an empty-netter at 19:46 of the third to ice the game.<\/p>\n
But given the play of Traylen, and the futility of Harvard’s power play, the Blight goal was all the Knights would need.<\/p>\n
“It comes down to your goaltender … [Traylen] made some unbelievable saves,” Roll said.<\/p>\n
Clarkson will look to begin a winning streak next weekend against Hockey East opponents UNH and UMass-Lowell at Cheel Arena, while Harvard faces the tough prospect of trying to rebound at Colgate and Cornell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
History was made at the Bright Hockey Center tonight, but this particular record was one Harvard could have done without. Riding a three-game win streak, the Crimson (4-3-1, 3-3-1 ECAC) was shut out for the first time in its history against the Golden Knights (6-4-3, 3-3-1), losing 3-0. Harvard’s defeat came a night after it […]<\/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\/4764"}],"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=4764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4764\/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=4764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4764"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}