The Boston Pride put on a clinic Saturday night at Warrior Ice Arena against the defending Isobel Cup Champions, with veteran defenseman Alyssa Gagliardi scoring the first two goals of her NWHL career and leading her team to a much-needed win.
The first period started with the Pride offense coming out strong, with the team watering at the mouth to avenge their loss against the defending Isobel Cup champions three weeks ago. The Pride’s best chance of the first period came near the halfway mark when Dana Trivigno made a cross-ice pass to a streaking Jillian Dempsey, who most certainly would have buried her shot if it was not for the sprawling left pad of Beauts’ netminder Amanda Leveille. Shortly afterwards, Alyssa Gagliardi was sent to the box for cross-checking, sending the Beauts on their first powerplay of the game. The Beauts, currently have the second-highest powerplay conversion rate in the league (17.4%) were quick to capitalize. At 14:44, rookie Rebecca Vint pounced on a juicy rebound given up by Boston netminder Brittany Ott to score the first goal of her NWHL career.
The Pride were not prepared to go away and continued to pepper the Buffalo net with shots from the start of the second period, hoping that Leveille would crack at some point. This moment eventually came at 4:31, with Gagliardi cashing in on a rebound opportunity made possible by Janine Weber to score the first NWHL goal of her career.
The skilled defenseman wasn’t finished yet, either. At 6:24, with the Pride on the powerplay, Gagliardi deftly fed Jordan Smelker in the low slot, who fired a laser past Leveille to score her first goal of the season and put the Pride ahead 2-1. One minute later, Gagliardi struck again, blasting a shot from the high slot to extend the Pride’s lead to 2 goals.
At 9:59 of the second period, Sarah Edney put a dent into the Pride lead, beating Brittany Ott from the high slot to cut Boston’s lead in half. Despite a valiant effort by the Beauts to stage a comeback, the Pride were able to hold onto the one-goal margin and secure their first win of the season.
Gagliardi, who was quite pleased with the team’s overall performance, provided her perspectives after the contest. “I think we just stuck with what we were doing,” said Gagliardi. “I thought we had a good game in Connecticut two weeks ago and I think we did a lot of things well there […] We just tried to build on that momentum and play a team game and be a tough team to play against, and we did that tonight.”
