After falling twice to Edmonton last week, the Colorado Mammoth bounced back with a 14 goal performance to take down the slumping New England Black Wolves 14-12.
“I think consistency is one of the things we’ve got work on,” said Black Wolves offensive coordinator Jim Milligan on NLL.com. “At times we have it, at times we let it go. At times our offense matched up very well with their defense, and we had the drive to go to the net. Some nights it’s there, some nights it’s not. We have to have that every night. We’ve got to find it within ourselves.”
New England trailed 5-1 early but came back to trail just 7-5 at the half. They would trail the entire game but at points in the fourth quarter they were down by just one.
The Black Wolves trailed 12-11 and went on a power play with 4:10 left in the game thanks to a Mike Burke slash. However, they allowed a shorthanded breakaway to Joey Cupido who buried what ended up being the game winning goal.
Pat Saunders scored to bring the ‘Wolves within one, but Drew Westervelt scored moments later to seal it.
“A couple of my goals, I was just running up the floor and we had some defensive guys transitioning the ball up the floor,” said Colorado Mammoth forward Adam Jones on NLL.com. “To be honest, I wasn’t even using my stick so I didn’t know where it was going. If I don’t know where it’s going, I don’t think ‘Kirky’ knew where it was going either. A couple of them were pretty lucky, but it was good to get off to a good start, knowing we’ve lost three in a row.”
Jones led the way with seven points for Colorado while Kevin Crowley put up nine for the Black Wolves. Dillon Ward made 49 saves for Colorado and Tye Belanger, who didn’t start but did play the majority of the game, saved 37 against his former team.
New England rookie Mark Cockerton put up four points for a career high and Mike Burke had a career high of three in his first game for the Mammoth.
New England doesn’t play again until they travel to Minnesota on March 14 and Colorado travels to Buffalo next week.
