Tom Serratore had a bit of a sly smile on his face on Tuesday afternoon as he compared his team to another well-known Minnesota team.
“Our team exceeded our expectations,” Bemidji State’s head coach said in his weekly Zoom press conference. “We’re still trying to figure out a lot about our team. We were 9-5-4 in the first half, which is good, but I wasn’t born yesterday. We’re a lot like the Vikings. What are they, 11-0 in one-score games? Well, we’ve played eight overtime games. So to put things in perspective right there, it’s been tight for us.”
Serratore was making reference to the fact that the Vikings are 12-4 but have a scoring differential of minus-19. His Beavers’ scoring margin isn’t nearly that bad – BSU has scored 51 goals and allowed 43 – but Serratore was making an important point. His Bemidji State team this season isn’t going to win any scoring titles, but they’re the type of team that is great at winning close, grind-it-out games.
“A lot of tight games, a lot of one-goal games,” Serratore said. “Overall, the guys found a way to get it done, but it could be reversed. It’s always challenging, but I think our guys stood tall. They improved. They got better. I like our mindset. I hope it carries over in the second half. The guys exceeded our expectations. In my book, they got a pretty high grade.”
The CCHA-leading Beavers are 3-1 in one-goal games – with all three victories coming in overtime. They’ve also won by two goals twice – both of which were games in which the opposing team pulled the goalie and the Beavers scored on an empty net. So Serratore’s team has become very skilled at playing with, and defending, tight leads. They’ve almost made it into an art form.
“For us, we talk a lot about puck management,” BSU senior forward Carter Jones said of his team’s ability to survive in tight games when the pressure is on. “Knowing late in the game when you have a chance to make a play, when you need to live to fight another day. And it’s also about capitalizing off mistakes. Teams are going to try and score goals late. Mistakes are going to happen, so it’s about capitalizing off those opportunities and managing the puck in situations where you need to.”
That’s how the Beavers were able to defeat Minnesota State before Christmas. Down 3-2 in the third period, BSU managed to tie things up following a Maverick penalty and a couple of missed poke check attempts to clear. Jones assisted on Aaron Meyers’ game-tying score before Kyle Looft’s overtime power-play tally gave BSU the 4-3 win in overtime – good enough for a five-point weekend.
Serratore on Tuesday said he recognizes that it won’t get any easier in the season’s second half, noting the Beavers did not have a true series sweep in the first half, meaning that while they had a few five-point weekends, they were unable to manage any six-point sweeps.
“You have to learn how to win different ways, but the biggest thing is, you have to learn how to win 2-1,” Serratore said. “And the second half of the year is always tighter. It’s hard to get sweeps. And we didn’t get a sweep in the first half. When I mean sweep, I mean all six points. It’s hard out there when you’re playing the same team back-to-back in the second half of the year when there’s so much more on the line. Well, I shouldn’t say there’s more on the line. There’s as much on the line in October as there is in January, but the hard reality is you’re really looking at the standings and you’re looking at the big picture the second half of the year.”
By “big picture,” Serratore was mostly talking about winning the conference and positioning his team for the CCHA tournament, but he also talked about the possibility of the Beavers earning an at-large bid for the NCAA tournament. BSU is just outside the bubble in the Pairwise rankings, currently No. 19.
“You‘ve gotta win games. You can look at the at-large stuff, but if you don’t win games, it doesn’t matter,” Serratore said. “That all takes care of itself. I don’t even need to look at the Pairwise rankings if we lose two in a row, and we shouldn’t be looking at the pairwise rankings anyway. You have to let some of that stuff play out.”
The Beavers are the highest-ranked CCHA team in the PairWise this season. The only other teams in range are co-conference leaders Michigan Tech (No. 20) and defending conference champs Minnesota State (No. 24).
This weekend’s home-and-home series against Minnesota Duluth is BSU’s final chance to pick up some wins out of conference and move up in the standings.
“If you lose games to teams that are lower in the Pairwise, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and that’s going to happen (in a tight league) because there’s such a small margin of error and there’s such a fine line,” Serratore said. “I guess what I’m getting at is, I don’t look at the Pairwise right now because we’re on the outside looking in. I just want to make sure we’re playing good hockey and we’re ready to play hockey this coming Friday.
“We need to be looking at the short term and not the long term right now.”
