MINNEAPOLIS — It was a different chapter of the same story on Saturday night for Minnesota.
The Gophers vastly outshot their opponent for the second consecutive game, but found themselves tied 2-2 with RIT after regulation one night after losing 3-2 to Merrimack.
Saturday night’s game ended differently as Kyle Rau tipped in a rebound created by a Hudson Fasching shot with 2:26 remaining in overtime to give the Gophers a 3-2 victory over RIT.
“We found a way to win, our captain came through for us tonight,” Minnesota coach Don Lucia said. “Hopefully now we can get healthy and get the guys back from the World Juniors team and kind of put our team together, because we’ve had very few games with everybody available to us.”
The win meant that Minnesota finished third in the Mariucci Classic. Massachusetts-Lowell defeated Merrimack 3-1 earlier on Saturday to take the title.
The Gophers outshot RIT 48-21. They outshot Merrimack 42-17 in Minnesota’s 3-2 loss on Friday. Lucia said that he challenged his team to get more opportunities off of tips and rebounds before Saturday’s game.
“We had a lot of shots, but if you look at out shots, I could have saved half of them,” Rau said. “We need to crash the net. We had one tip goal and that was stressed and that rebound goal was stressed, too. So we got both of those and won the game.”
Vinni Lettieri scored the first goal of the game at the 3:45 mark of the first period when he tipped Christian Isackson’s shot from point past RIT goaltender Mike Rotolo.
“That’s something that we talked about this afternoon,” Lucia said. “I said, ‘When’s the last time that we had a tip goal? When’s the last time that we had a rebound goal?’ We had one of each tonight and the rebound became the game-winner.”
Minnesota’s lead was short-lived however. Near the midway point of the first, a badly timed defensive pinch gave RIT a two-on-one opportunity in which Dan Schuler elected not to pass the puck and scored his first goal of the season to tie the game. Minnesota goaltender Adam Wilcox seemed to be playing pass all the way and pushed over to his right at the last second, giving Schuler a large chunk of net to work with.
Like Friday, Minnesota held a large shot lead after one period on Saturday evening. The Gophers outshot the Tigers 16-5 in the first but the two teams went into the break tied at one.
Mike Reilly broke the tie in the second period on the power play when he took a one-time pass from Travis Boyd and blasted a shot past Rotolo from the middle of the center of the blue line.
Michael Thompson got behind the Gophers defense with about seven minutes remaining in the game and put a shot off the crossbar and in to even the score.
“We made a couple major breakdowns to give up the goals,” Lucia said. “Those are things that we have to clean up and stay with it from a defensive-standpoint.”
