(Photo: Riley Trujillo/WCSN)
For about 10 minutes Friday night, Arizona State looked like itself. It looked like the team that had either hung with or beaten up just about every powerhouse East Coast program it faced this season. The team that appeared to be on course for an NCAA Tournament bid. The scrappy team its players had described themselves as over the past two weeks.
But it was only for 10 minutes.
After Filip Buncis, a rotating figure among the team’s skaters, set up forward Anthony Croston for a tip-in goal to go up 1-0 against Boston University at Agganis Arena, the wheels fell off. ASU never led again, falling to the Terriers 4-2 in the weekend series opener.
Soon after Croston opened the scoring, sneaking the deflection by BU goalie Jake Oettinger through a cluster of players in front of the net, the Terriers (10-9-3) knotted the game by taking advantage of aggressive play by junior goaltender Joey Daccord, who missed a play on a puck and got dragged out too far to one side of the net, allowing Joel Farabee to score on from the other side after the puck bounced off a skate.
“[Daccord] had a weird night,” coach Greg Powers told reporters postgame. “He had some sloppy bounces in front of him that you really can’t do anything about.”
Moments before the first intermission, BU took the lead after Patrick Curry finished a nice pass on the back post with 37.4 remaining in the opening frame.
The second period was a festive act. The two combined to score three goals, two of them BU’s. Farabee, a first-round NHL Draft pick of the Philadelphia Flyers, tallied his second goal of the night with a quick finish in front to put the Terriers up 3-1. Farabee was set up from behind the net by Bobo Carpenter, who fired a pass in front of Daccord from the left side of the trapezoid right to Farabee’s stick, where he flicked it in past Daccord.
ASU (16-10-1) answered quickly though. Not even two minutes later, defenseman Brinson Paschinuk got crafty with the puck at the blue line and fired a laser into the net to cut the deficit to 3-2.
The Devils couldn’t complete the comeback though. BU’s Chad Krys scored later in the period after his shot ricocheted off an ASU defenseman and past Daccord into the back of the net.
“We put more goals in against ourselves than we did on them,” Powers said. “Against a really good team like BU, that’s never going to win you a game.”
The BU goals didn’t come out of nowhere though. The Terriers had multiple breakaway opportunities early in the game that Daccord stuffed to keep the Sun Devils within striking distance.
Playing catch-up in the third period, ASU had two power-play opportunities and outshot BU 17-6 but couldn’t beat Oettinger, who made 38 saves on the night. Daccord finished with 28 stops.
The loss doesn’t dash ASU’s NCAA Tournament hopes — the Sun Devils entered the weekend ranked No. 11 in PairWise ranking and were a projected 3-seed in the Tournament by USCHO this week — but could need a win in Saturday’s series finale (5 p.m. AZ time) to stay on the right side of the bubble. If the Sun Devils get swept, it would be their fourth loss in a row and narrow their margin for error even more over the season’s final weeks.
“There’s not much we need to change, adjustment-wise,” Powers said. “We just need to score more goals than they do and make sure the goals we do score aren’t on our net.”
