University of Maine hockey coach Ben Barr said his team “bottomed out culturally” in the second period of Saturday night’s 3-2 loss to New Hampshire at Alfond Arena, which gave UNH its first sweep of the Black Bears in Orono since 2008.
“At least, that’s what I hope,” said Barr, whose Black Bears allowed a pair of second-period goals to fall behind 3-1 before mounting a third-period rally that fell short.
“We don’t know how to talk to each other as human beings and that’s on me at times, too, because I’m yelling,” the fifth-year head coach said. “That’s what they know and then they’re yelling at each other and it snowballs.”
Barr said one way to fix it is by “doing what we did tonight,” which is by benching players.
Junior defenseman assistant captain Frank Djurasevic, freshman center Jaden Lipinski and sophomore center Oskar Komarov were all healthy scratches.
“Guys play or they don’t play. It doesn’t matter if you’re a draft pick or not a draft pick. You play the guys that are working. That’s what we’ve always done,” Barr said. “I got away from that a little bit this year. That’s why a lot of things haven’t changed. That’s not on [the players].
“That’s on me and the staff to meld that culture piece, and we haven’t done a great job of it yet,” Barr said.
He said they have to be “better in every area” and he liked how his team played in the third period as they outshot UNH 13-3 and got a goal from senior defenseman and co-captain Brandon Holt early in the period to pull within 3-2.
But they couldn’t get the equalizer even with a tremendous flurry late in the game.
He felt three forwards who were inserted into the lineup and had played in a total of just seven games between them this season, Brock James, Anthony Calafiore and Nick Peluso, “gave us great energy.”
He added that there were some positives “as far as how we treated each other and spoke to each other as human beings on the bench in the third period, as basic as that sounds.”
He said he has some young kids on the team, some immaturity and some personalities “and we have to manage it.”
Barr said there is a lot of disappointment when you get swept at home in front of the vociferous and passionate crowd that was trying to will the team to a third-period rally.
“It was crazy in there. So I feel really bad and I’m sure the guys feel just as bad about it,” Barr said. “We have all this nice stuff.
“But nobody is feeling sorry for us. You get back to work and you go,” said Barr, whose Black Bears will play UMass Lowell at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday. “That’s all we can do.”
Holt said the team struggles sometimes when “things don’t go our way. We don’t stick to what gives us success.”
“You saw it in the second period,” he said. “We got away from our game and then they scored. We’re deflated as a team. It takes all the juice out of us instead of ‘Hey, they scored, let’s get back to our game.’”
By the time the team got back on track in the third period and played with more urgency, it was too late, Holt said.
“We had so much success, but we couldn’t find another goal,” he added.
He said the disharmony on the bench during the second period is “not acceptable.”
“We have a whole other team we’re fighting against every single night. We can’t be fighting amongst ourselves. It’s hard to win when that stuff is going on,” said Holt, who also had an assist in the game
“We’ve all been working toward the same goal for months now, so there’s really no point fighting amongst each other,” he added. “The whole reason we play the game is for each other so if you can just remember that, there’s never a reason to be doing stuff like that during a game.”
