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| (above) DU will have a chance to get its "Mojo" back on Friday night against Wisconsin in a nationally televised tilt on NBC Sports Network |
by Joe Yerdon
Things were going so well for Denver University this season until they invited a pair of teams from New England to town this past weekend. The Pioneers were 9-0-1 and the No. 2 team in the country heading into action against Yale and New Hampshire. But once things were over with on Saturday night, they’d lost 2-1 in overtime to the Bulldogs and blew a 4-1 second period lead to UNH before losing 6-4.
On their overtime loss to Yale, coach George Gwozdecky told Mike Chambers of The Denver Post, “Fortunately, we saw this coming. It was not a good week of practice. … Some of the plays we couldn’t make, whether it was the 5-on-3 power play or the other four power plays. It was awful. No other way to put it. If I had been sitting anywhere else, I would have been booing.”
And that was after their first loss of the season. If there’s a potential cure for Denver it comes in the form of this weekend’s visitors from the University of Wisconsin as the Badgers are just 1-7-2 to start the year and swept last weekend by Minnesota State.
While Denver will surely slip when polls come out later today, the question here for Gwozdecky’s team is if this is just a hiccup or a sign of problems on the way. With talent like Nick Shore (Los Angeles), Joey LaLeggia (Edmonton), Chris Knowlton, and David Makowski there’s plenty of balance in their attack.
The Pioneers’ loss to New Hampshire was almost single-handedly because of junior Kevin Goumas. While he assisted on the first two of teammate Grayson Downing’s three goals, he helped ice Denver scoring a natural hat trick of his own in the five point effort.
