The University of Vermont men's basketball team played its last non-conference game of the season last night against a familiar foe, and with a familiar result.
UVM beat Dartmouth 91-78 in Hanover last night, making it ten consecutive wins over the Big Green. Trae-Bell Haynes led all scorers with 27 points and Payton Henson added 20 for UVM's twelfth win of the season against five losses. Dartmouth shot well as a team, with four players reaching double digits and a team-high 17 from Taylor Johnson, but Dartmouth couldn't find an answer on defense as UVM pulled away in the last five minutes of the game following a Big Green run that brought them within five points.
Dartmouth drops to 4-9 with the loss and UVM gets ready for competition against America East conference foes with a tilt against Stony Brook on Saturday.
In the NHL Craig Anderson had a rough night in between the pipes in his previous start for the Ottawa Senators when they were routed by the Chicago Blackhawks, but Ottawa coach Guy Boucher went right back to his number one netminder in last night's game against the Maple Leafs in Toronto, and Anderson did not disappoint, making 44 saves in Ottawa's 4-3 victory over Toronto.
Tom Pyatt got the game winner, breaking a 3-3 tie with just three minutes to go in the game after Toronto defenseman Morgan Rielly got caught pinching in too far down the wall in the Ottawa zone and a break-out the other way resulted in a three on one that ended with Matt Duchene finding Pyatt for a wrister that beat Frederik Andersen (no releation to Craig, and in fact Craig spells his last name with an "o" in the "son" whereas Frederik ends Andersen with an s-"e"-n, but I digress). Rielly did have a goal for Toronto along with Andreas Borgman and James van Riemsdyk, and both teams now get to rest for five days with their league-mandated bye week, and that's good news for the Boston Bruins, who end their bye week this Saturday with a game against the Montreal Canadiens and a chance to vault over Toronto for second place in the Atlantic division, while the Leafs sit idle.
And in one of the coldest hot stove baseball seasons in recent memory, save for the NY Yankees putting down a deposit on their 2018 World Series trophy by stealing Giancarlo Stanton from the Miami Marlins in a heist pulled off in broad daylight, there has been another deal made, this one by that other New York team, the Mets, who are bringing outfielder Jay Bruce back to Queens on a three-year, $39 Million deal.
Bruce is a power bat, having hit 69 home runs over the past two seasons, but he's suspect defensively and doesn't have a lot of speed on the base paths. He'd make a nice DH for an American league team and I did think the Red Sox could have used his middle of the order RBI production last season, but GM Dave Dombrowski seems determined now to play a game of salary chicken with sports agent Scott Boras, whose reason for being is to garner contracts for his clients, such as the still unsigned free agent J.D. Martinez, that could buy you a small country.
