No. 2 North Dakota ended any hope Miami had of escaping Grand Forks with any league points late in the first period.
The Fighting Hawks scored four first-period goals, including three in the final five-plus minutes, en route to a 5-1 win over the RedHawks in the series finale at Engelstad Arena on Saturday.
Miami is winless in its last seven after starting the season 4-1 and has lost six straight — all conference games.
STATS: P.J. Fletcher scored for the lone RedHawks goal, finding the net for the second straight game. He now has five goals, equaling his 2022-23 total.
The lone assist went to Max Dukovac, his first since Game 3.
ANALYSIS: Sorry for skipping the formalities, but this was an incredibly busy weekend for us and I just finished watching the game, so this will be brief.
The marker that started the outbreak was an unlucky own-goal off the stick of stud John Waldron, then a defensive lapses resulted in a tallies with 86 and four seconds left in the opening period.
Miami was outplayed/outclassed in the first period and held its own the final 40 minutes, congruent with the final score.
The RedHawks are also dealing with several injuries to key players and inexplicably have just 27 players on their roster, their fewest in the Cady Arena era.
LINEUP CHANGES: Dylan Moulton returned on defense, and forward Teddy Lagerback sat.
Defenseman Zane Demsey shifted to left wing, as all nine rostered blueliners dressed again.
FINAL THOUGHTS: This is no way excusing Miami’s 11-5 aggregate scoring this weekend or overlooking its 29-9 clip a quarter of the way through league play, but this was a much-better team playing a not-as-good-and-hurt team, and the numbers aren’t out of line with expectations.
11-5 for the series? Yeah, that seems pretty fair, and for context, this was against the second-ranked Division I team in one of the most hostile road environments in Division I.
It’s an unforgiving league, and while we’ve seen a good effort from the 2023-24 version of the RedHawks almost every period this season, that has resulted in exactly zero NCHC points through a quarter of the league schedule.
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