VANCOUVER - After narrowly escaping with a win on Friday, the Alberta Golden Bears men's hockey team returned guns ablazing Saturday evening at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre in Vancouver, by scoring three first-period goals to clinch a 5-2 victory over the UBC Thunderbirds.
BOX SCORE
This marks Alberta's fourth win over UBC during the 2013-2014 season.
With assists from James Dobrowolski and Colin Joe, Alberta's Levko Koper took advantage of a slight kerfuffle in front of the net to sneak one past
Matt Hewitt for the first Bears' goal of the evening at 2:14 in the first period.
Â
Brett Ferguson followed suit at 13:52, shoving the puck in from the middle of the ice after receiving crisp passes from Jamie Crooks and Jordan Rowley. Rowley then carried this momentum forward, firing the puck past Hewitt at 16:31 to mark the third and final Bears' goal of the first period.
Â
UBC's offence finally responded at 17:32 when
Cole Wilson shot down the ice and evaded the Alberta defence to put a slapshot past Alberta's Luke Siemens and tally the first Thunderbird goal. UBC went into the first intermission down 3-1.
Â
Brad Hoban closed the gap to just one at 16:40 of the second;
Anthony Bardaro and
Cole Wilson provided Hoban with precise passes down the ice to overcome the Bears' defence and mark the second and final Thunderbird goal.
At 4:33 of the third, Johnny Lazo tore down the ice on a breakaway and converted the opportunity to make it 4-2. Lazo would record an assist on Torrie Dyck's goal at 17:07 that rounded out the scoring.
Â
Matt Hewitt, seeing his first conference ice time since the November 23 game against Manitoba, took the loss in net for UBC, despite making 28 saves, while Alberta's Luke Siemens made 24 for the victory.
Â
Reflecting on the weekend, head coach Milan Dragicevic feels that the team's potential has yet to be reached: "I thought at times [this weekend] that we controlled the play. I thought we handled both third periods pretty well. We had a lot of chances. We battled back; we were down three nothing and we came back and battled. Our power play had some good chances but we didn't execute, and that's what it was. We made bad mistakes and you can't make mistakes against one of the best teams in Canada because they will bury those chances."
With the victory, Alberta improves to 17-3 while UBC falls to 7-12-1.
The 'Birds will host first-place Calgary next weekend while the Golden Bears will take on the Mount Royal Cougars in Calgary.
In regard to preparation for next weekend's games against Calgary, Coach Dragicevic explained that "We can't give up nine goals again and expect to win. They are number one in Canada. We have a good rivalry with them. First things first, we need to score some power play goals and that's one of the key things at this point in the season. Specialty teams are the most important factor and that's something we are going to work on….these are the most important games of the season coming up. Every game is a playoff game for us now, so we have to treat every weekend like it's do or die because it is."
