Tonight, the second-place No. 16 Boston University men’s hockey team will play the eighth-place University of Massachusetts-Amherst in the first leg of a home-and-home series.
In an ever-tumultuous college hockey season that saw the Terriers go unranked Oct. 22 through Feb. 25, as unbelievable as it may seem, that is where things stand with just four games left in the regular season.
After then-No. 20 UMass stormed into Agganis Arena Nov. 9 in the middle of a six-game unbeaten streak and skated away with a 5-3 come-from-behind win, there likely isn’t anyone who predicted this was the way things would fall on the second-to-last weekend of the season – least of all, BU coach Jack Parker.
“No,” Parker said when asked if he foresaw the Minutemen’s struggles. “If you watch their games, and I’ve watched three or four of their last games that they’ve lost, you would say, ‘How did they lose that game?’ The way they played Sunday afternoon against Maine was scary. They played so hard and yet they wound up losing in overtime.
“They’ve been snake-bitten. They’re very much a solid team. If they wind up in eighth place or seventh place or out of the playoffs in our league, there’s the team you point to and say that’s why we have the best league in college hockey. That’s how good they are.”
While the Terriers (14-14-4, 12-8-3 Hockey East) are in the midst of an exceptional streak, reviving themselves to climb from the depths of the conference standings, the Minutemen (11-13-6, 6-12-5) have been doing exactly the opposite.
Ranked as high as No. 5 in the nation in January, the Minutemen have taken a catastrophic tumble during the second half of the season. Since winter break, they’ve gone an appalling 4-10-1 and an even worse 2-10-1 in Hockey East. Now, instead of fighting for a top seed in the NCAA Tournament, UMass is in danger of missing the Hockey East playoffs altogether.
It is certainly a reversal of the most dramatic magnitude. The Terriers have never been hotter, making their first appearance in the national rankings this week since mid-October and taking a nation-best six-game winning streak into the weekend.
But there is still work to be done for BU. No. 16 is by no means a guaranteed shot at the NCAA Tournament, and if the season ended today, the Terriers would not be in the field according to the PairWise Rankings.
“We’re trying to keep everybody focused on winning the next game because there’s stuff to be done here,” Parker said. “If we win [tonight] we can guarantee ourselves we’ll still be in second place when we wake up on Saturday morning.
“We’re not in the PairWise selection. You’ve got to be in the Top 14 to get selected – and it’s something where you don’t want to be 14. You want to be 10 to 12 because that’ll give you a little more cushion. All of that is ahead of us if we can take care of our own business, but that’s going to be quite a chore against this club.”
The biggest factor for the Terriers will be focus – and having enough to combat a feeling of complacency when looking back at their meteoric rise. Instead of being content with their own accomplishments, the Terriers will need to build on them.
“We’ve had a tendency to feel good about ourselves after a good game and not play as well the next game,” Parker said. “But we’ve won five straight games at home, we’re 9-2-2 in our last 13 in the league and we have the longest winning streak in the nation. So there are a lot of things going for us that we’d really like to continue. But it won’t continue if we come in here [tonight] thinking, ‘Well, UMass will just lay down and die for us because we’ve won six in a row.”
News ‘ Notes: Forward Bryan Ewing was named the CCM/RBK Hockey East Co-Player of the Week Monday along with University of New Hampshire goaltender Kevin Regan. The senior winger turned in a three-goal, two-assist performance last weekend. . . . The Terriers will honor former BU player and head coach Jack Kelley prior to tonight’s game at Agganis Arena. Kelley, who coached the Terriers for 10 seasons, led BU to back-to-back national championships in 1971 and 1972 and holds a .714 career winning percentage. Kelley will be honored with the unveiling of a bust of himself in a victorious pose after winning the 1966 Beanpot championship.
