A shorthanded BGSU hockey team was not able to end its struggles over the weekend at home against Nebraska-Omaha, losing two CCHA contests.
The Mavericks’ (6-7-4, 5-6-1) offensive skill and goaltending proved to be too much for the Falcons, (3-12-1, 1-9-0) as UNO won 4-1 Friday and 7-1 Saturday.
The losses bring BG’s current losing streak to eight games. The Falcons will have two games next weekend at Alaska to attempt to break the streak before a 20-day layoff.
“You try to look at positives over a course of a season and we’re here in an eight-game losing streak right now,” said forward Derek Whitmore. “As a team, we’ve got to have some accountability for each and every guy in the locker room.”
In Friday’s action, UNO’s Bryan Marshall recorded a natural hat trick, scoring three goals in the first period to lead the Mavs to the 4-1 victory. BG let up three UNO power-play goals, while going 1-7 with the man-advantage.
Kai Kantola scored the lone goal for the Falcons with assists coming from Todd McIlrath and Mike Nesdill. BG goalie Jimmy Spratt (2-6-0) made 31 saves on the game.
“We just played way too much of the game shorthanded against a team that has too many skilled hockey players, which was clearly the difference in the game,” said coach Scott Paluch.
The Falcons came out with some intensity Saturday, hanging with the Mavs for the first 25 minutes of the game before the UNO offense exploded for six goals in the final two periods. Nebraska-Omaha outshot BG 45-23 in the win.
Defending CCHA player of the year Scott Parse notched UNO’s second hat-trick of the series, scoring three times to lead the Mavs’ scoring attack.
“The first period [BG] came out with a lot of jump like we knew they would,” Parse said. “In the second period we got some power-play goals and that was kind of it.”
Whitmore recorded his team-leading 10th goal for BG on a deflection with seven seconds left in the first to square the game at 1-1. Kevin Schmidt and Brandon Svendsen had assists on the power-play goal.
Eddie Neville (1-6-1) stopped 38 shots for the Falcons.
“We didn’t handle [UNO’s] skill well. They had a feeding frenzy there as the game went on, capitalizing on our mistakes,” Paluch said. “We needed to play a perfect game tonight and we weren’t obviously close to that.”
BG flies to Alaska this weekend for a pair of conference games against the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
