NCAA Frozen Four: Denver annihilates Notre Dame; sets up all-NCHC final

The scoreline tells the story: Denver outscored its opponents by five.

The shot tally tells the story: Denver outshot its opponents by 25.

The shot chart tells the story: Denver out-attempted its opponents by 39 (77-38).

And because all that happened, it’s no surprise the Pioneers cruised to a jaunty 6-1 win, and advanced to Saturday’s national title game. Pretty much everyone on the roster at least had a good game. A few had very good games. One or two had transcendent performances.

“I think we have to give a lot of credit to our forwards,” Denver captain Will Butcher, provider of one of those transcendent performances, said after the game. “I think our forecheckers dominated and ate them up. Whenever we have a good forecheck going, we seem to get the puck back a lot more. It’s great when we get the puck back because we’re a puck-possession team. When we get that more, we get that early jump.”

So the Pioneers will play conference-mate Minnesota-Duluth, and that’s all fitting. They’ve been the two best teams in the country all year.

And here’s how you know Denver is successful. They’d just scored an inevitable goal to make it 3-0 late in the second period, but got speed-bagged on the next couple of shifts. So coach Jim Montgomery didn’t like what he saw and called a timeout.

Up three. Just to settle the guys down. Just to get ’em refocused on playing Denver Hockey. It worked. They added two more goals in less than two minutes.

Things got off to a bit of a slow start, but the fact that all Notre Dame could do was “play a roughly even game” for six or seven minutes was indicative of the gulf in quality between a clear No. 1 and a pretty-good No. 13 team in the country.

“I think all four lines I have confidence in, and they have confidence in each other,” Montgomery said. “And the support they have and trust they have in the communication on the ice allows all lines to play well. But that depth that we talk about has been really pronounced here in the tournament.”

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At some point, Denver simply pinned the Irish in their own zone for basically three straight shifts. Notre Dame only cleared to center once in that time. Eventually, Emil Romig came out from behind the net got Cal Petersen to over-commit to a sweep check from which he had difficulty recovery. He squeezed a great shot from a low angle between Petersen’s left shoulder and the post.

A little more than six and a half minutes later, Henrik Börgstrom doubled the lead on a too-easy passing play with Will Butcher that gave him a wide open net to shoot at from the top of the crease. Even if Börgstrom weren’t an elite finisher — and boy is he ever — he wasn’t missing from there.

“[This stretch for Denver has] probably been the most dominant,” Montgomery said. “We’re playing well. I mean, you know, there’s no doubt about it. But we’ve had some long stretches of playing well before. So I think it’s just we get in a rhythm and we start to really believe in what we’re about.”

It frankly could have been a lot uglier. Shot attempts in the first period, which didn’t see a penalty called, were 25-6 in Denver’s favor. None of the Irish attempts were inside the faceoff dots. On a few icing calls, it was nice just to be reminded that the puck could indeed come within 20 feet of Tanner Jaillet.

The Irish simply were bereft of answers. There were Pioneers on top of just about every puckhandler in blue and gold before he had the chance to make any sort of cogent decision about what to do with it.

They say elite players slow the game down, but watching Denver was like watching a team play at 1.5-times the normal pace. Butcher in particular was just taking the game over every single shift. The Irish simply failed to gain any traction.

“They matched up their two grind lines, their third and fourth lines, against our two top lines,” said Notre Dame coach Jeff Jackson. “That was a huge factor. Having last change is extremely important. But I thought our youth showed up again, I thought, tonight. It showed up a few weeks back in Boston, especially with some of our young defensemen making some plays coming out of our zone.”

The trend, unfortunately for Jeff Jackson’s charges, continued apace in the second period. While the Pios weren’t getting as much on net but the Irish continued to struggle. Part of the emphasis for the underdogs seemed to be to engage in more physical hockey, and insofar as it may have helped stem the offensive onslaught, one supposes it worked.

But if you need two goals, you need more than a handful of slightly better looks than you got in the first period, which, you’ll recall, was “zero.” And maybe also you can blame score effects. Just spitballing.

And yet, Denver scored again anyway. This time it was defenseman Tariq Hammond jumping up on a 2-on-1 with Evan Janssen to net just his third goal of the year.

“I felt we were turning the corner and then we have a defenseman fall down, and then everything changed,” Jackson said. “So, no, I thought we started getting a little bit more comfortable playing the game at that pace. But that third goal was the back killer. It was very similar to the Minnesota game last week where we got that next goal. And that didn’t happen tonight.”

That bumped Denver’s shot advantage to 20-8. Basically none of them were second-chance looks. And this was more than 34 minutes into the game.

If the rout wasn’t on before, it certainly was now. And just to double-underline the fact, Dylan Gambrell scored 2:27 later. And then 1:51 after that, Evan Ritt took the paper where Gambrell had underlined “the rout is on” and lit it on fire.

Three goals in 3:18. You wouldn’t have even known the Irish were the No. 33 team, let alone the No. 13.

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Not a lot else to say. The first penalty of the game was a too-many-men call early in the third on — who else? — Notre Dame. The Denver power play looked dangerous. Didn’t score. Didn’t matter.

Then Denver picked up an interference minor and Notre Dame’s Cam Morrison scored five seconds later, tipping home a point shot from Jordan Gross. Both the penalty and the goal went into the scorebook at 11:24. Nice to get the one, but no one in the building was deluded into thinking it remotely mattered.

Then just to rub salt into the wound the Pioneers had already ripped open, Gambrell scored again, this time from below the goal line with about three minutes left. Why not?

It was all academic from the beginning. Notre Dame couldn’t get anything going because Denver was doing everything for itself.

“Their defense was their offense, their defense was their puck possession, their puck management, they do a good job with their defensemen making good plays coming out of their zone,” Jackson said. “They do a great job in the O zone where they possess the puck. That’s how you hold teams down in shots. If the other team doesn’t get the puck, they’re not going to have many shots.”

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.