Hockey: Hartman, Haverford find way to beat GV’s Craig, advance to Central semis

ASTON — There are worse ways to lose a hockey stick than the one Vladimir Hartman found Monday night.

If you’ve got to see the blade fly off the composite shaft and straight toward the garbage bin, it might as well be after you’ve picked off a pass at your own blue line, stickhandled through two defensemen in the neutral zone and ripped home a shot over a goalie’s blocker.

“You can’t really plan for that,” the Haverford forward said, “but a goal’s a goal.”

With the way that Haverford defends, a goal can seem worth more than just a goal. So it was Monday night in the first round of the Central League playoffs, a 2-1 win for the Fords over Garnet Valley in an anything but conventional 1-vs.-8 game at IceWorks.

The Fords took a 2-0 lead in the third period, finally getting a second past Andrew Craig’s stellar goaltending courtesy of Owen Rabadam, then had to stand tough late when Kevin Walton halved the deficit with a 5-on-3 goal and had nearly two full minutes of power-play time left to chase an equalizer.

But the Fords played a controlled game from start to finish. Andrew Henderson made 18 saves but rarely was forced to produce the spectacular stop to bail out his defense.

Instead, the Fords spent most of the even-strength portions of the third period methodically getting the puck deep, tightening the game up – the last two periods featured a total of 14 shots each.

The Fords got bodies into shooting lanes time and again, with Patrick Cunningham in particular sacrificing the body to help cut down on the rubber flying at his goalie.

“Props to him,” Hartman said. “If he didn’t block all those shots, it would’ve been a way different game. Everybody’s blocking the shots, and that’s how you win games. And that’s how you want to play. You win games by blocking shots and playing good defense.”

Both of the Fords’ goals were magnificent. They needed to be to beat Craig, who made 28 saves. That included getting into a full split to deny Hartman late in the second, when Hartman jumped off the bench to replace a man coming out of the box and was in all alone. Hartman faked to the backhand and tried to stuff the forehand around a sliding Craig, but the goalie gave him no window and covered the loose puck on the doorstep.

“He always holds us in games,” Walton said. “He’s such a good goalie. He keeps us in a lot of games, but we need to score more goals and help him out more.”

Craig denied several rushes in the third by Haverford’s top line before Owen Rabadam and Ryan McGlade got one to go. Ramadam outskated his man to create a brief 2-1, a give-and go with McGlade, who slid it back for Rabadam to punch it home.

Garnet Valley broke through on a 99-second 5-on-3 with 2:23 left. Walton ran the man advantage from the point, directing traffic to make sure Henderson was sufficiently screened and wiring a shot high to the glove side.

“I was on the half-wall, but they wanted me up top,” Walton said. “The goal was to get it on the half-wall and move it up to me, I change angles a little bit and just shoot.”

The tightness of the game fit the craziness that has been the Central League this season. Any inkling that Haverford might take an eighth-seeded team lightly was ameliorated by them having lost to Garnet Valley already this season, a 5-3 decision back in November. The Fords had won the first meeting, 5-1, on Halloween.

That any-given-day rhetoric can be worn so thin as to be meaningless. But Haverford, in taking it to heart, was better off for it.

“It added fuel to the fire,” Hartman said. “We just had to get them back and it did.”