Men's Hockey unable to finish as Beavers pull away to 6-1 win

Bemidji State ruled the third period Saturday night as it used four goals to blow open a tight game with St. Thomas and claim a 6-1 CCHA Men's Hockey victory in Mendota Heights.

BSU (10-6 overall, 8-2 CCHA) swept the weekend series as it allowed only three goals. It improved to 8-2 in road games and made it 10 wins in its last 13 contests.

Kyler Grundy scored for the Tommies 4:49 into the game for a 1-0 lead, assisted by Matthew Jennings and Christiano Versich. That was the Tommies' eighth consecutive goal contributed by eight different players dating back to the Arizona trip.

BSU tied it midway through period one, they went ahead to stay early in period two with a second goal. The game was still 2-1 early in period three before the Beavers used three goals in a 4:27 span of take a 5-1 lead. They added one more in the final 3:00 of the game to push the lead to five.

Peter Thome had 28 saves for St. Thomas (1-17, 1-11). BSU outshot the Toms 34-22.

St. Thomas coach Rico Blasi liked a lot of what his team produced over the first 40 minutes and said they need to find a way to play a complete 60-minute game.

"I thought we played fairly well in the first two periods," Blasi said. "Obviously good teams have a way of capitalizing on mistakes, and we made a few mistakes in the third period and they capitalized.

"We have to play within ourselves. We don't have the experience that some of these teams have. You have to stay within yourself and make sure you are focused and playing the same way for three periods. We are not able to sustain that right now.

"I think our guys are trying to win the game instead of trying to win their shift or win one segment. I'm going to take full blame on that because obviously they are not listening to me talk about the process and making sure everyone is focused on their shift. They are focused on outcomes, and that's part of the media, that's part of fans. It's probably part of the parents and everybody involved in their families. They want to win, right? That's human nature to come out and thinking that you have to win a game, and obviously it's the wrong approach. Good teams don't do that. Good teams play every shift.

"We are going to go back to work and make sure we get that across to our players. Because that's going to be part of our culture going forward. Right now as inexperienced as we are, we have to learn lessons the tough way.

"The first two periods tonight were an indication of our (getting closer). We went shot for shot with them, maybe they had a couple better scoring chances than we did. But when you have nine seniors on their team and seven guys that have played over 100 games, we don't come close to that. We have to focus on what we can do. If we are able to do that, we will be in a lot of games."

St. Thomas closes its 2021 portion of its schedule with two road games next Friday and Saturday at Michigan Tech.

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Team Stats

Kyler Grundy

Matthew Jennings

Christiano Versich

Trevor LeDonne

Players Mentioned

Kyler Grundy

Matthew Jennings

Peter Thome

Christiano Versich