After sophomore goalkeeper Ben Auerbach allowed five goals in two periods on Friday, Temple decided to pull him from the game so he’d be rested for Saturday’s game.
But Auerbach didn’t start on Saturday.
Freshman goaltender Matthew Hollingshead made his second start of the season. He made 44 saves in the Owls’ win against the Rochester Institute of Technology on Oct. 7.
The goaltending change didn’t help the team improve from Friday’s outcome. The Owls (4-4-1) ended their weekend with back-to-back losses to John Carroll University, falling, 7-3, on Saturday at the Flyers Skate Zone in Northeast Philadelphia.
The Owls gave up more than 60 shots for the second night in a row. In their two games against John Carroll, the Owls were outshot 124-52 and outscored 15-5.
“We thought that that was a tough team to play against,” assistant coach Zach Jones said. “The reality is we gotta get ready for league [play], so we felt like it would be good for Ben to get a rest.”
Hollingshead allowed seven goals on 63 shots, but he made some saves off odd-man rushes and on the penalty kill, including a few glove-hand robberies.
“He played great, I thought,” coach Mark Spease said. “You’re gonna face 63 shots, they’re gonna go in the net. Nice young freshman for us.”
Temple freshman forward Brendan Ondick opened the scoring with about five and half minutes left in the first period with a short-handed goal. He took a shot from the right faceoff dot that beat the Blue Streaks goaltender high to the left side and pinged off the crossbar. Ondick added another short-handed tally, his seventh goal of the season, in the third period.
Thirty seconds after Ondick’s first goal, the Blue Streaks answered back with a power-play goal to tie the game at one. The game remained tied until senior forward Joey Powell scored his sixth goal of the season less than four minutes into the second period on a seeing-eye shot from the center of the blue line on the power play.
Temple could not escape the second period with the lead. The Blue Streaks added two goals roughly 40 seconds apart in the period’s last seven minutes to take a 3-2 lead. John Carroll added four more goals in the third period when it outshot the Owls 25-9.
Spease said the Owls need to be more disciplined and generate more shots than it did this weekend. He added that his team needs to improve its physicality and speed.
“They had some fast players but we looked awfully slow on the blue line today,” he said.
“They generated a lot of shots but I thought we did well keeping up with them in the first and second period, Hollingshead said. “But I think we got a little fatigued at the end.”
The Owls have a home-and-home series against Villanova on Friday and Saturday. The first game will be at the Flyers Skate Zone at 9:20 p.m. on Friday, and the Saturday game will be at Hatfield Ice Arena at 7:40 p.m.
Be the first to comment