Daniel McGowan (Sports Editor) & Marcus Antonelli (Staff Writer)
This past weekend the Merrimack Men’s Hockey team had their series against the Northeastern Huskies. This series was a big one, as whoever finished this series with 2 wins would be holding the #1 spot in the Hockey East Standings. A highly anticipated showdown between two incredibly talented rosters. The Merrimack Warriors were unfortunately given the bad end of the stick, as they fell to a 5-1 defeat on Friday at Lawler and a 1-0 at Matthews Arena. The first game saw little to no success in any aspect for Merrimack. As they went 0/5 on the power play. The Boys tallied 34 shots where only one of them got by Northeastern’s Goalie Devon Levi. Along with that, Merrimack had a hard time holding possession of the puck especially in the neutral zone, where Northeastern exploited a hard forecheck that caused many turnovers.
Then, the boys took the trek down to Boston to try and get back at the Huskies. This game saw an entire lineup switch around from Coach Scott Borek. And the stats will tell you this was an insanely competitive game that went down to the wire. But despite 37 shots tallied from multiple odd man rushes by MC, nothing got by Devon Levi. The Warriors would concede a perfectly placed top corner shot from the Huskies Aidan McDonough at the 2 minute warning in the 3rd period. Which sucked the life out of the Warriors. This, of course, is a big bump in the road for the Warriors, as they have a 2-5-1 record since the start of 2023. Merrimack dropped to 4th in Hockey East standings and are now 18th in the pairwise rankings in the country.
Merrimack students are often disappointed with the turnout of the most recent performance to the 2023 Spring semester. But there seems to be a sense of adjusting that is in the works for this hard fighting team.
