Chance to close gap in PWHL playoff race eludes Ottawa Charge in loss to Boston Fleet

Article content

Fleet 5, Charge 2

The assumption — for those who didn’t witness the Ottawa Charge’s “missed opportunity” against the Boston Fleet on Saturday afternoon at a sold-out TD Place — would be natural.

After giving up five goals for just the second time this season, you’d think Ottawa’s chances of rallying from behind to grab a playoff spot are next to nil without top goalie Emerance Maschmeyer, who had been placed on long-term injury reserve the day before with a lower-body issue that could keep her out for the rest of the season.

That’s not necessarily the case.

For one thing, backup Gwyneth Philips was not the reason the Charge lost 5-2 to the Fleet.

The only goal Philips might have stopped was by Theresa Schafzahl at 2:42 of the third period, but even that appeared to be a deflected puck over her shoulder.

The timing was unfortunate, however, as it broke a 1-1 tie when Ottawa should have been carrying all the momentum into the final 20 minutes after tying the game on a goal by Tereza Vanisova with .02 seconds left in the second period.

From that, Ottawa could never recover.

Hilary Knight, who took over the league scoring lead with three points, scored her 12th goal of the season on a breakaway and the Fleet added two victory-sealing empty-netters — one was the first of the season for former Ottawa forward Lexie Adzija — with Philips on the bench and replaced by an extra attacker.

“She’s a heckuva good goalie,” Charge defender Ronja Savolainen said of Philips. “She is showing it every game she plays. I feel confident when I play and she’s there.”

No, the Charge lost because they couldn’t get enough pucks past Boston’s Aerin Frankel, which is a common problem for five teams in the PWHL.

“I get the same question every single game,” Fleet coach Courtney Birchard-Kessel said when asked about Frankel’s performance. “She’s the best goalie in the world.”

She also provided added incentive for Philips, although none was needed.

Teammates on the U.S. national squad, the Philips-Frankel relationship goes back to their days together in Boston, when Philips was Frankel’s backup at Northeastern University for three seasons before taking over the No. 1 role for the final two years of her collegiate career.

The only error made by Frankel was on Vanisova’s goal.

It looked like Fleet would take a 1-0 lead into the third period when Ottawa defender Ronja Savolainen moved the puck up through the neutral zone into space between her streaking teammate and Frankel, who made the mistake of thinking she could win the race to it with Vanisova.

When she didn’t, Vanisova pulled the puck around the Boston goalie and guided the puck into the wide-open net just before the buzzer.

Ottawa’s other goal, Natalie Snodgrass’ first of the season and second of her career, came with just 30 seconds left to cut a final margin of defeat from four goals to three.

What happened in front of 8,096 fans hopeful of a different outcome aside, the Charge is only in a slightly worse position than it was when the day began.

With seven games left, Ottawa trails Minnesota by five points in the race for the final playoff spot, but now only has one game in hand on the Frost.

The Charge did blow a chance to keep Boston, which had been tied with Minnesota before Saturday’s three-point win, closer within reach.

“It was a missed opportunity on our part,” said Charge coach Carla MacLeod, whose team was outshot 29-28 by the Fleet. “But there’s still opportunity in front of us.”

The final dash Boston made to get into the playoffs last season, just to get into the playoffs, should serve as an example.

The Fleet ended up losing to Minnesota in the fifth and final game of the Walter Cup championship.

“We don’t have to look outside of us to know how this league works,” MacLeod said. “So it’s not like we need to have the storyline of any other franchise … I think there’s a storyline for every franchise. At the end of the day, there isn’t anyone in our group that doesn’t realize every game is a potential to start a run. And, obviously, that’s what we got to strive to do here. We’ve got to start stringing points together consecutively.”

Next up for the Charge are back-to-back games with the last-place New York Sirens, starting with next Saturday’s matinee at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., then the following Tuesday at TD Place.

The Charge then play two games in Boston on March 29 and April 2 before a three-week break for the women’s world championship and then winding up the schedule with home games against Montreal and Minnesota and the regular-season finale in Toronto.

“We’ve got to flip a switch here to get going and execute at the level that we know we can and need to,” MacLeod said. “There’s so much positive within the game. It’s just those finer details, those finer moments of just executing at the key times, and we’re not. We’ve had great displays of it. We’ve had moments of it, in this game as well. We just got to be more consistent at it and make sure everyone is taking pride in that.”