Badgers Post Six Goals on W. Hockey

Friday night’s matchup between Wisconsin and the Harvard women’s hockey team lived up to its billing as the Harvard Shootout. But when the smoke cleared, Harvard was left down and out.

The No. 4 Crimson gave up its most goals of the season, dropping a 6-4 contest to the No. 5 Badgers. It was the two teams’ first meeting since November of 2000.

Both Harvard (6-2-1, 6-1-0 ECAC) and Wisconsin (10-3-0, 7-3-0 WCHA) were top defensive teams a year ago and have begun this year with some shaky performances mixed in with more dominant ones reminiscent of last season. In Friday’s game, both teams felt that they gave up some uncharacteristically easy chances.

“They made a couple very nice plays coming over the blue line, but we were the ones who turned the puck over and missed assignments,” Harvard coach Katey Stone said. “Those are the things we need to clean up. We got beat out of the corner pretty handily a couple times. We need to be ready to play—all of us, not only a few of us.”

The difference in the game came in the third period, when Wisconsin stepped up its defensive coverage and kept the Crimson from equalizing the score again.

“My defense did a great job keeping the puck away in the second and third,” Wisconsin goalie Meghan Horras said. “It made my job a lot easier.”

After giving up a power-play goal to Harvard tri-captain Nicole Corriero—her second of the game—the momentum shifted at the midway point of the last period.

The Badger’s Nikki Burish took a pass from Meaghan Mikkelson—who had made a good play to keep the puck in the offensive zone—and banged home the wide-open chance to make the score 5-4.

From there on, the Wisconsin defense took over and kept the Harvard offense off the scoreboard while adding on an empty-netter.

“As the game progressed, a lot of the kids got more comfortable with the atmosphere,” Wisconsin coach Mark Johnson said. “I thought for the first eight or nine minutes our defensemen were a little bit nervous and back on their heels.”

Although this whole season has seen more penalties called, Wisconsin saw more than its normal share in the opening two periods of play. During that stretch, the referees whistled the Badgers for eight violations, while the Crimson skated a man down just three times.

“I knew it was going to be called tight. I just didn’t know it would be tight one way,” Johnson said. “You try to get into the flow of the game, and you get four or five penalties called on you. It’s tough to get back in the rhythm, because usually your good players are killing penalties, and they get tired, and it’s a tough grind.”

One of the more important calls came when Burish was called for tripping 11:06 into the first period, setting up a 5-3 advantage for the Crimson and an easy power-play goal for Corriero which knotted the score at one apiece.

Corriero’s hat trick was her third in her last four games, for a total of 12 goals in that span.

On the other side of the special teams coin, the Crimson was not as effective on its own power play as it would have liked, highlighting its troubles to find consistency in the defensive zone.

For the season, the Crimson is killing an average of almost nine out of every 10 penalties, but before Friday had yet to face the teams with the stronger power-play units. Against Wisconsin, Harvard killed seven of eight and gave up only eight shots.

Nevertheless, the numbers do not tell the whole story for a team looking to solidify its defense in order to become a better team.

“We made some bad decisions on our man-down,” Stone said. “It became a little more of a power kill than a penalty kill.”

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.