Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 5, Brown 1
Union 2, Brown 0
Well, that'll bring us back down to earth.
Just a few days after a huge win over Yale and on the heels of our best weekend of the season, the Bears took the weekend off in the Capital District, being outscored 7-1 by RPI and Union.
Or maybe the Engineers and Dutchmen are just that good. The standings would certainly seem to indicate that, and both teams are on a roll right now and swept the weekend over Brown and Yale.
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| Borelli had his first so-so outing of the year on Friday, allowing five goals on 33 shots against streaking RPI. Photo courtesy of TimesUnion.com |
This stellar performance validated him, in a way for a fairly poor performance against RPI Friday night. Though the Bears couldn't muster anything on offense all weekend, Borelli's play needs to be heralded, because the Dutchmen absolutely peppered him on Saturday.
Union outshot Brown at a 2-1 ratio (48-24), and yet Borelli only conceded one goal and an empty-netter. That's pretty great.
Some sobering news is that the penalty kill, which has actually been a strength of late, allowed RPI to go 3-5 on the man advantage Friday. The unit successfully held Union off the board Saturday night, but RPI showed that if you can break the levee, power play goals will flow.
Excluding Friday's debacle, the penalty kill had killed all but 4 of its last 32 man-down situations, good for an 87.5% kill percentage. That would place us in the top ten in the nation. The abysmal play of the unit for the first half of the season makes it looks a lot worse than it is.
The problem now is that RPI was one power play goal away from matching that total, which dated all the way back to the AIC game at the UConn tournament. The problem is that there is now a blueprint for other teams to take advantage of our penalty kill.
The Bears have been very disciplined lately, allowing five or more power plays just thrice since the first Yale game back in early December, in which the Bulldogs scored four power play goals on seven opportunities. That game, along with the next game against Union, were the turning points for the penalty kill unit this year. It's been nearly impenetrable since those two games. Until this past Friday night.
Hopefully the RPI game was an anomaly. But we definitely need to bunker down and play tighter defense going forward. The Quinnipiac game this upcoming weekend will be very telling in terms of the penalty kill, because two weeks ago they went 1-for-5 at Meehan. If they get that many chances in their own barn, you have to think they'll convert a couple times, especially coming off a frustrating weekend.
It was a rough weekend for the Bears. While there is considerably less optimism for a first-round bye (it's all but impossible now), there is still plenty of hope for home ice. We need to get points in at least three of our final four games, and at least two of those need to be wins.
Buckle up. It's going to be an intense and bumpy finish.
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