The No. 4 seeded NC State men’s club hockey team suffered its first loss of the season after a 7-2 defeat at the hands of the No. 1 seeded Massachusettes-Amherst Minutemen in the first game of the ACHA D2 National Tournament round-robin Friday evening in Plano, Texas.
The Minutemen (1-0-0) are the top-ranked seed in Pool A of the tournament and qualified for nationals with an auto-bid as the No. 1 ranked team in the ACHA Northeast region.
The Wolfpack (0-1-0) qualified for the tournament by winning a spot through the ACHA Southeast regionals and is the lowest ranked seed of Pool A.
The Minutemen are the strongest competition the Pack has faced this year and it didn’t take long for UMass to show its strength.
Within the first five minutes, NC State found itself staring up from a three-goal deficit that continued to grow as the game went on. After one period, the Pack found itself down 4-0.
Things didn’t improve in the second for the Wolfpack as the Minutemen scored two more goals including a shorthanded goal to extend its lead to six after two periods of play.
NC State broke the shutout in the third as senior Tyler Alfonzetti scored on a shorthanded breakaway. The penalty kill was one upside for the Pack, which killed off all five of the penalties assessed to the team and going plus-one in that span.
UMass scored again late in the third, but NC State got the final goal as sophomore Nikita Anistratov went top-shelf in the waning minutes of the game as the Pack fell 7-2.
While the penalty kill looked good for the Wolfpack, the other half of special teams struggled as the power play went essentially negative-one for six. NC State needs its power play units to step up in this high-leveled tournament if it hopes to compete for placement in the later stages.
NC State looked better in the third period and it seems it may have shaken off its initial tournament nerves, which will hopefully bode well for the Pack moving forward in the tournament.
The Wolfpack plays again Saturday at 11:30 a.m. against No. 2 seeded Northern Colorado.
