Last weekend, BGSU hockey (14-6-4, 11-4-3) claimed six points towards the Central Collegiate Hockey Association (CCHA) standings by sweeping the Bemidji State Beavers (9-14-3, 7-8-3) at BSU’s Sanford Center in Bemidji, Minnesota.
This weekend, Bowling Green will play a home-and-home series against Notre Dame (5-18-1, 1-13-0) of the BIG Ten, with Friday night’s game in South Bend, Indiana, at NDU’s Compton Family Ice Arena and Saturday night’s game at the Slater Family Ice Arena.
During BGSU hockey’s weekly press conference held on Jan. 27, head coach Dennis Williams discussed his team’s scoring and defensive depth, the team’s goal to extend their season for the seniors, the upcoming Notre Dame series, and the universal effort that has allowed the team to succeed recently.
Here are the Falcon Four takeaways from the press conference:
Scoring and defensive depth
During Bowling Green’s 3-1 and 5-1 victories over the weekend, multiple players from up and down the lineup contributed offensively and defensively. In total, 11 different players contributed at least one point over the course of the weekend and 14 different players blocked at least one shot between the two games.
“Anytime you get depth scoring is great,” said Williams. “I think what’s really good about our group, all four lines, is if you look through it, all of them played against their top line at some point. It doesn’t matter to me because I don’t really match a line against a top line because I feel if I gotta do that, then we haven’t prepared our guys to play well enough without the puck. Everybody should be able to play well enough without the puck, defend properly, structurally, good habits, good details, and have pride in it.”
Coach Williams emphasized his confidence in his players’ abilities to defend and contribute without the puck.
“If you can’t defend and compete hard without the puck, you probably can’t help contribute, and I feel all our guys can do that, and I have confidence in all of them playing against any line out there, so it’s great to see the balanced scoring, but it’s even better to see the balanced defense.
Slowing down the hourglass
Including this weekend’s series against Notre Dame, there are only five weekends and 10 games remaining in the Falcons’ regular season. With this in mind, Bowling Green is only guaranteed six more weeks of hockey and the Falcon’s seniors are only guaranteed six more weeks in their college hockey careers.
Willi explained the goal of extending the season for the seniors.
“One thing I challenged the guys is, the hourglass when we started the year had all the sand in it. It’s getting lower, lower and lower and our job is to do what we can to prolong our seniors and give them the longest tenure of being able to play hockey and that’s who we play for this time of year is trying to extend as many games as we can as we move forward so that our seniors can enjoy the longest senior season,” said Willi. “But the hourglass is getting, the sands getting lower in it, and it’s up to us to either slow it down, otherwise it speeds up too fast.
Notre Dame
This weekend’s home-and-home series against Notre Dame will be the last nonconference play of the season for the Falcons and the first time the Orange and Brown and Blue and Gold faceoff against one another since November of 2019.
Following this weekend’s series, BG will have four straight weekends of conference series against teams that are currently sitting in the top five positions in the CCHA standings to end the season, and will go directly into playoffs with no breaks.
While some wouldn’t be surprised if coach Williams wanted to use this weekend as a rest for his players as they prepare for the final push into the playoffs, Williams made his goals for the weekend quite clear.
“Everything is to win. You and I wanna play checkers right now. I’m here to beat you. Everything is a win,” said Willi. “We’re not here for participant ribbons. Our mindset is we wanna, we’re prepping to continue do what we do. Whether it’s exhibition games, regular season CCHA games, nonconference games, they’re all important games. Especially coming down the stretch, this second half, and we have good momentum right now. I think we’re playing good hockey, but that can also turn. So, we have to keep our mind focused, we have to understand that we have a really good opponent coming out the other side that we’re gonna face two nights in a row, and we’re gonna have to play our best hockey, and I say that each weekend. Each weekend is the next biggest weekend.”
Contributions from everybody
Across the last six games, Bowling Green swept Ferris State (4-22-0, 3-15-0) by scorelines of 3-1 and 5-1, split a series against Lake Superior State (9-16-1, 6-12-0) by winning 3-1 on Friday and falling 1-0 on Saturday and swept Bemidji State by scorelines of 3-1 and 5-1.
Over the past six games, on top of acquiring 15 of a possible 18 points towards the CCHA standings, Bowling Green has only conceded one goal in each of their games.
Coach Williams credits the feat to everyone on the roster and multiple different areas of the game.
“When you do something like that, it’s everybody,” said Willi. “It’s a contribution by everything you said. O-zone time is a big one because if you can hang on (to) the puck in the O-zone, you wear them down, they’re tired, by the time they get out of their zone, they gotta dump it, and then they gotta change, and you get puck possession going back. I think we’ve done a really good job of negating teams to get to the middle. When we do have breakdowns, we’ve had really good goaltending, our penalty kill’s been really strong, so it’s just a lot. The guys have done a good job.
