College hockey is, almost more than anything, a game of momentum.
The best teams have the ability to string together wins–even ones in which maybe they aren’t the better team on the night.
For Minnesota State, finding ways to win a couple in a row had been eluding the Mavericks in the second half of the season. Since returning from the holiday break on Jan. 10, the Mavericks had trouble winning more than two in a row. They didn’t sweep any weekend series, and the one time they did win back-to-back games (Jan. 11 at Northern Michigan and Jan. 17 against Michigan Tech) they failed to keep that string going.
This weekend’s series against Augustana helped break that string of inconsistency. The Vikings came into Mankato holding on to first place in the conference standings by virtue of points percentage, but left the Mayo Clinic Health Systems Events Center in second place as Minnesota State earned a sweep. After MSU beat St. Thomas in overtime last weekend, it’s their third win in a row.
“We needed to have our nose against the wall a little bit and go arm-and-arm through it,” Mavericks head coach Luke Strand said in his postgame press conference on Saturday, referring to his team’s splits in the second half. “We needed to string a few (wins) together. In the second half here it’s been a little bit of a hump to string some things together, and now it’s starting to move forward.”
The Mavericks (20-8-2, 15-5-2 CCHA) won 4-1 Friday thanks to four different goal scorers, then eked out a 2-1 victory on Saturday thanks to a pair of first-period goals by Rhett Pitlick and Fin Williams and 28 saves by Alex Tracy.
“I thought it was gutsy. We have some guys dinged up, from illness to just being flat-out injured, but they gutted through it,” Strand said. “We showed some resilience there to bend and not break. We might have set hockey back in time some moments there in the second period with the ways we were doing some things there, but I thought we gathered ourselves back up very well and got very comfortable in that one-goal game.”
Pitlick, who added two assists on Friday, is tied for the CCHA lead with 32 points through 30 games. St. Thomas’ Liam Malmquist and Michigan Tech’s Stiven Sardarian are also in contention for the conference’s points leader.
Tracy, who has played in the net for every minute of MSU’s season, stopped a combined 53 shots over the weekend. His goals-against average of 1.53 leads the country and his save percentage of .942 is No. 4 nationally.
“He’s just fantastic. When he’s a warrior behind you, you know what’s going on,” Strand said. “I thought he fought to find rebounds; he fought to fend off traffic in the crease. He didn’t let many pucks roll off him. It was dynamite for our guys.”
The Mavericks are off this weekend and will watch as two of the teams behind them (second-place Augustana and fourth-place Michigan Tech) play one another for the right to gain some ground. As of right now, the Mavericks are going to be tough to catch, but it’s not impossible: MSU has 46 conference points with a 0.697 points percentage. Augustana is at 26 points and 0.619, Bowling Green is third at 29 and 0.591 and Tech is at 35 and 0.583.
Despite MSU’s place in the standings, Strand said he wasn’t doing much scoreboard watching. There’s still a lot of hockey left to play.
“I’m not. Our guys, though, I did hear them saying that if we won today we clinched home ice,” Strand said. “So whoever’s got the formulas out there, I’m not sure. But we’ve just got to put our heads down. We’ve got a job to do here, take care of each other, and play united. I thought we did a good job with that this weekend.”
