After a frustrating loss on Friday against No. 18 Cornell, Quinnipiac men’s ice hockey head coach Rand Pecknold stressed that his team had to better in all aspects of the game.
One night later, Pecknold echoed a similar sentiment as his team fell to the Colgate Raiders 4-1 at the newly named Frank Perrotti Jr. Arena at the TD Bank Sports Center.
“It was not our best effort tonight. We need to be better,” Pecknold said. “There weren’t a lot of positives. We struggled mentally with details, a lot of little things.”
Colgate opened the scoring in the first periord when Adam Dauda notched his second goal of the season off a feed from Bobby McMann. Riding its own wave of confidence, Colgate struck again just over a minute later.
John Snodgrass capitalized on a poor fore check from Quinnipiac to find open space on the attack and bury a second goal for the Raiders. Adam Dauda and Ken Citron both picked up their second assists on the season with the Snodgrass tally.
Despite being down 2-0 after one, Quinnipiac looked to have regained its mojo early in the second period.
Karlis Cukste fired a wrist shot from a tight angle along the half-wall to beat Colton Point and bring the deficit to one.
However this was all the offensive success that the Bobcats could muster.
With 0.3 seconds left in the second period, Colgate’s Mike Panowyk seemingly put the game out of reach when he deked left and beat Quinnipiac goaltender Andrew Shortridge to stretch his team’s lead back to two.
A Quinnipiac turnover in its offensive zone sent the Raiders captain off to the races as time winded down on the middle frame.
Panowyk skated into the high slot with approximately two seconds on the clock and a quick head fake and hard shot between the blocker and the right pad of Shortridge was enough to find the back of the net before the clock struck zero.
“That was the back-breaker,” Pecknold said. “We run that play all the time, and we’re supposed to have a defensemen back. It was a mental mistake and they made us pay.”
Panowyk again made no mistake on his second breakaway of the night in the third period. He took advantage of yet another defensive breakdown from the Bobcats.
Number 27 finished with ease for his second goal of the night, giving the Raiders a 4-1 lead with under four minutes to play.
The Bobcats have dropped their first two conference games for the first time since joining the ECAC in 2005.
Quinnipiac will look to earn its first conference win next weekend as it travels to New York to take on RPI and Union.
