Dan Bradshaw was on the receiving end of two flawlessly executed headman passes from his defensemen, each of which set him up perfectly for critical breakaway goals that contributed to the St. Joseph High School ice hockey team’s impressive 6-2 victory over South Brunswick for the Greater Middlesex Conference championship at the Woodbridge Community Center on Friday night.
“That’s something we work on all the time and it finally worked out to perfection,” said Bradshaw, whose goals Dean Rocco and Norman Matyi each created, putting the puck right on the tape of his stick blade just outside the blue line.
“I’ve been trying to do it all year. It just worked out today. If it’s on the defenseman’s stick, and I see there’s room to go, I just stretch. I’m trying to score. I have a goal-scoring mindset.”
The two plays, both of which came in the second period, epitomized just how well the top-seeded Falcons (13-8-1) have been playing in the weeks leading up to the league tournament final.
A brutal early-season stretch, during which St. Joseph went 1-5-1 in seven games, six against teams that are currently ranked among the Top 15 in the state, prepared the perennial power to win its seventh Kolodney Cup in the past eight years.
“When you are playing that competition night after night, you just know the kids are getting better,” St. Joseph head coach Ryan Carter said of his team, which defeated eighth-ranked St. Peter’s Prep and skated to a 3-3 tie with 11th-ranked St. Joseph of Montvale during that span. “I think what that stretch showed is we can compete with the best teams. We may not get the results we wanted, but our boys were competing the entire time. That really sprung us to what we have been after December, and it’s been really tremendous. We peaked at the right time.”
St. Joseph entered the league tournament final having won nine of its last 11 games and having outscored six conference opponents by a combined 43-4 margin.
South Brunswick gave the Falcons their toughest conference challenge in a 4-2 loss two weeks ago. Just as they did in that regular-season meeting, the Vikings took a 1-0 lead on Friday night when Brody Burmester hammered home a rebound at the 2:25 mark of the first period.
The Vikings won a faceoff inside the blue line. Matt Kean unleashed a laser from the left point off the draw. Goaltender Eddie Kaiven made a nice kick save with his left pad, but the rebound caromed directly to Burmester, who one-timed the puck into the back of the net.
St. Joseph limited the Vikings to perimeter shots for much of the game, giving Kaiven, who finished with 15 saves including a couple of dazzling stops in the third period, good looks at the puck for most of the night. His counterpart, Clayton Romanak, who faced 42 shots, was even more impressive, keeping his team in the game.
“We know that when the puck gets to the front of the net and there’s those scrambles, those are always dangerous plays,” Carter said of his team’s defensive strategy to force the Vikings wide. “We knew if we could keep the puck to the outside, our goalie can stop those no problem. We don’t worry about them. When it starts to get physical in front of the net and that traffic is there, it becomes much more difficult for any team to stop that. We knew we wanted, with good back pressure through the middle, to force them to the outside and force them to have weakside shots our guy could stop.”
South Brunswick’s lead was short lived. Freshman sensation Ivan Borisov, who moved to the United States from Russia, netted the equalizer 11 seconds later and scored a go-ahead goal three minutes and six seconds after that as St. Joseph took a 2-1 lead it would not relinquish. Borisov embraced Carter’s mantra of next play, which has real-meaning in sport, but which the coach also wants to serve as a euphemism for handling life should it ever get his players down.
“You’re losing 1-0 and you need to show your team that you can do something,” said Borisov, who finished with a hat trick to become the first St. Joseph freshman to score 20 goals in a season since Sean Rappleyea, a 2014 graduate who is now playing Division I hockey for the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
“I just went right to the net (on the first goal). You already know it’s tied up but you want to do more for your team, so I tried to get one more.”
Borisov sandwiched his third tally between Bradshaw’s breakaway goals. He was not the only Russian in the rink.
South Brunswick coach Sergei Starikov was a star defenseman with the famed Soviet Red Army team who was also a member of the Soviet Olympic team that fell to the United States in the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” game in Lake Placid. Starikov has done a tremendous job rebuilding the Vikings (11-6-3), who last won the Kolodney Cup nine years ago.
“South Brunswick is a very good skating team,” Carter said. “We knew we had to catch them in transition. We knew our transition from defense to offense had to be quick. On a lot of the goals we scored tonight, we were springing our wingers and our defensemen were just hitting them with perfect passes. We knew the transition game was going to win this game for us.”
The Falcons, who rolled four lines, also wore South Brunswick down with their depth. The top line of Mark Borek, Connor Kaczmarek and Borisov accounted for three of St. Joseph’s first four goals. The forecheck from all four lines was phenomenal. Carter had confidence in each.
“As a coach, I feel we selected these players, we’ve got to play them,” Carter said. “There’s times you can play them and times you have to shorten things up. In the beginning of the year, we weren’t rolling four lines. When the guys started believing in each other, we found a very good comfort zone. Guys found their niche and it just shows. We had our fourth line sometimes against (South Brunswick’s) top line, and their line is darn good.”
South Brunswick centerman Justin Guelph, who entered the game with 29 goals, was kept off the scoreboard, but did assist on his team’s second goal to record his 100th career point. The tally from Ronit Thummaluru closed the gap to 5-2 at the 9:08 mark of the second period.
The Vikings had an excellent chance to cut the deficit to two goals but were unable to take advantage of a 5-on-3 opportunity as shorthanded St. Joseph killed off two penalties for a minute and 35 seconds with a rotating triangle. Those were the only infractions of the entire game for either team.
St. Joseph assistant coach Pete Kolodney, who founded the high school’s ice hockey program 33 years ago and after who the championship cup is named, said the speed quotient factored significantly into the victory, meaning the Falcons not only skated well, but moved the puck with quick and crisp passes.
“The forwards were moving real fast today, the fastest I’ve seen all season,” observed senior defenseman and team captain Ty Carter, whose father is St. Joseph’s head coach. “Everybody was giving it everything they had because everybody wanted this.”
Gavin Tanji closed out the scoring and iced the victory with a goal at the 8:18 mark of the third period. He wristed a shot from the slot into the upper right corner, beating Romanak to his glove side.
“We were real bummed out that we lost the (championship) streak last year,” Bradshaw said, “but it’s good to have (the cup) back.”
St. Joseph had its string of consecutive championships snapped at six last season in a semifinal loss to Monroe, which went on to win the title.
This year’s victory had added meaning for the Carters, for it comes during the final year of Ty’s career. His father, a 1991 graduate of the high school, is its fourth all-time leading scorer. Ty has been wearing the exact same captain’s C on his sweater that Ryan wore as a scholastic player.
“As a parent, there’s a lot of pressure on him,” Ryan said about Ty being the son of a head coach. “To be on this team, to wear a letter and then to win, it’s tough. You start to feel that emotion as a parent, so I’m happy for him.”
The elder Carter stood on the bench, his eyes welling up with tears, as he watched his son celebrate the conference championship with teammates.
“It’s real emotional,” Ty said, “because I’m never going to be coached by my father again. “It’s really great to wear his C. I’m glad I got to play for him these four years.”
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