COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — After being swept by No. 15 Colorado College, Mike Eaves spoke with his team for a few minutes in the locker room and emerged with a look of disappointment on his face, a sense of frustration in his presence … and a few markers in his ink-smudged hand.
Regarding the markers and the smudges, one could only wonder just how many times the Badgers' head coach had written the word "consistency" on the locker room whiteboard.
Eaves and his players, when asked what went wrong in a two-game series that looked promising to begin with, stressed their inability to consistently play at a high level against their WCHA opponents of late, most recently Colorado College at the World Arena.
"We have the abilities to beat the No. 1 team in the country, and yet we have the capabilities of not looking like a very good college team at all," Eaves said. "The thing that this group has to find, and find quickly, is the ability to be consistent."
Conceivably, the Badgers deserved better this weekend. In the series opener, a first-period goal by Ben Street gave UW a 1-0 lead that held up until less than seven minutes remaining in the game. It appeared goaltender Brian Elliott and his Wisconsin mates were going to skate out a victory despite scoring just one goal.
But it all unraveled after that. A pair of strange, perhaps fluke goals — one with 6:54 left in regulation, and the game-winner 2:09 into the overtime period — turned two hard-earned UW points into bitter defeat. The following night, a four-goal surge by the Tigers in the first 23:13 of play — including an opening score just 21 seconds after the initial puck drop — was too much for the Badgers to overcome.
"We had certain parts of the game where I thought we dominated," senior forward Jake Dowell said Saturday. "But there's other parts where we had letdowns and we weren't getting pucks out of our zone, so in a sense, some of that was the inconsistency."
The Badgers snapped a 0-for-18 skid on the power play in Friday's game and passed the puck well with the man advantage in the early parts of both contests. But when the power play began to look disorganized in the third periods, Eaves pointed right to the "C" word.
"The power play looked pretty good in the second period," Eaves said. "All of a sudden, we try to do too much and we look like a dysfunctional group again. So we just have to continue to grow and find that consistency here and find it pretty quickly."
Members of the defending champs are struggling for answers as to how they have struggled so mightily this season; all they know is they have beaten one of the top teams in college hockey (2-1 over then-No. 1 Minnesota Jan. 12), but have been too inconsistent to put together a significant string of wins against the weaker competition.
"We have times when we're awesome," Dowell said. "When we play our game, we can compete with any team in the country and beat any team in the country; but when we're off, we're off."
Sophomore defenseman Davis Drewiske called it "heart consistency," implying if Wisconsin is able to play hard in the final month of conference play and start playing tough on a regular basis, the Badgers could make some noise late in the season.
"I'm very excited to go down the backstretch here," Drewiske said. "We just need to get that consistency, and we'll be a tough team to beat."
Eaves admitted how tough it is to get a group of young hockey players to reach that high level of consistency, as opposed to working with group of professional hockey players.
"When you talk about pro athletes, the highest compliment you can give a pro athlete is his consistency, game in and game out," Eaves said. "We're trying to get 18- [to] 22-year-olds to figure that out."
Dowell added, "We've been talking all year how we have such a young team, but at this point in the year, we're not so young. We talked about it in the locker room after the game, consistency night in and night out.
"That's been our biggest problem."
