This is the second of a two-part series recapping the 2002-03 BU hockey season.
If the Boston University hockey team sought to start the second semester of the season playing games they deserved to win, they were certainly successful.
But the Terriers didn’t get what they deserved.
Rather, they came back to class and crashed with a thud, playing well enough to continue the six-game winning streak they’d assembled against out-of-conference teams and Hockey East doormat Northeastern University, but instead dropping four of five games and falling to a mediocre mark of 14-10-2.
‘If you look at those four games, we only won one of them,’ said BU coach Jack Parker of his team’s two losses to Boston College and a split against the University of New Hampshire that followed an early January overtime loss to Providence College. ‘But in three of them, we played pretty well against real good teams, so I was confident that things were getting a little bit better.’
Things would get better, but not before one especially anxious moment that left a pit deep in the stomach of Terrier Nation, spending a night in the lower left corner of Conte Forum. Somehow, some way, BU goalie Sean Fields let a bouncing puck by him from 180 feet away to tie the game and propel BC to a 3-2 win.
‘I didn’t think it would have any negative effect on him,’ Parker said. ‘He’s not the type of guy to let things bother him. The way he’d been playing, it wasn’t like, ‘I let my team down again.’ He’d been stealing points for us, so it wasn’t like it was going to have any negative effect on him long-term or short-term, but I was a little bit worried about him trying to do too much just to prove that that one was a fluke.’
Fields was never the same goalie the rest of the season and that was a good thing. He immediately brought the number of bad goals allowed to a bare minimum and kept his team competitive in every game, which was important with BU scheduled to play only Hockey East or tournament games the rest of the way.
UNH was his first try at redemption, and Fields made 19 stops for the victory.
The Icedogs pounded the Wildcats, 5-2, in what may have been Walter Brown Arena’s loudest game of the season. The momentum of three third-period goals carried over to the rematch at Durham, N.H. two nights later, but BU couldn’t sustain it.
‘Then we play as good of a game as we’re ever going to play for the first period-and-a-half against UNH – we’re outshooting them 27-7 – until [Brian] McConnell takes a penalty, puts us two men down and they score,’ Parker said. ‘That just changed the complexion of the game.’
It was the second time McConnell committed an infraction so egregious it cost him playing time in the next game. In this case, his after-the-whistle hit on Nathan Martz cost him two games, while the Wildcats capitalized on the two-man advantage and took a 1-0 lead they’d never give up.
BU finally got a win for its work the next week, pasting Merrimack College, 5-0, before heading into the Beanpot opener against Harvard University. Led by beautiful goals from blue line partners Bryan Miller and Freddy Meyer, the Icedogs did what is expected of a BU team and advanced to Boston’s title game a week later.
Before then, however, the Terriers had to take care of some unfinished business in Amherst. Embarrassed by surrendering a three-goal lead in December, Parker’s team went to the University of Massachusetts on Feb. 7 and silenced the Mullins Center’s biggest-ever hockey crowd, taking home a 2-0 win.
‘I think that was one of the turning points of the season,’ said the coach. ‘They were a real good team, we played real solid, they had the biggest crowd they’ve ever had up there and it was nice to get a big road win against a team that was playing real well.
‘I think that was a huge win for us in a lot of ways, but psychologically it was immense.’
Its head straightened out after early season difficulties dealing with high expectations, BU was rolling along in search of its 26th Beanpot title. Justin Maiser’s quick wrister and a dandy goal from David VanderGulik gave BU a 2-0 lead, and after he laid a vicious open-ice torpedo on unsuspecting freshman Chris Collins, McConnell returned from a two-game benching and ‘shot like a man’ to give the Icedogs a 3-0 lead. They would hold on to win 3-2.
‘We were just getting better and better and better and better,’ Parker said. ‘We probably arrived as a team during that stretch there.’
A home-and-home sweep of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was the end of the winning streak, which came to an end a week later with a 5-4 overtime loss to Providence. The teams tied the following night, leaving them tied for fourth place in Hockey East, and needing to win three of four points at the University of Maine in order to host the Friars in the conference quarterfinals. They won game one, but fell a night later to earn a trip down I-95 for the best-of-three series.
‘But as it turned out, home-ice was a disadvantage for Providence,’ Parker said.
Backed by a big contingent of the BU faithful, the Terriers beat the Friars, 5-4, in overtime, bolstered by a Kenny Magowan hat trick and Miller’s winner. The sweep was complete the next night when BU scored five times in the final frame to win, 7-1, even without injured captain Meyer.
‘That series was huge for us as far as re-establishing ourselves,’ Parker said. ‘We can win on the road, too. Two at Providence, one at Maine: those are three pretty tough places to win. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves at that time.’
And the busload of fans played a part.
‘I don’t think there’s any question that that was a huge part of us feeling comfortable and feeling like, ‘Whose home game is this?’ Parker said. ‘They got home ice, but it’s really not their home ice. We had as many fans as them.
‘Having that type of support helps you win hockey games.’
Parker didn’t need the fans to get his players pumped for their next game. Anytime BU plays BC it means something extra, but in the playoffs it means even more.
Trailing 5-4 with 3:22 to play in regulation, Maiser lit the lamp to force overtime, before the Terriers entrusted things to Fields, who answered the call with 15 saves in the first OT and 46 for the night.
Fields was single-handedly the reason why BU forced a second extra session, and Maiser made sure Fields’s effort didn’t go to waste. Planting a 10-foot slapper just inside the post, Maiser completed a hat trick and gave BU a 6-5 win.
Averaging six goals through three playoff games, BU’s offense had finally awoken, as it earned a chance to face UNH for the league title.
‘To get five and then seven on [Providence’s Nolan] Schaefer, and then get six against BC, then turn around and get another six against Harvard [in the NCAAs] those are pretty good teams that haven’t given up anywhere near those numbers of opportunities all year long,’ Parker said. ‘We were doing pretty well. I can accept the UNH game as being part of the BC problem, too, coming off such a high win, double overtime, all that stuff. You could see us walk in to a wall halfway through the second period and that was the end of it for us. We played on guts and Fieldsy after that.’
Fields’s 40 stops got BU into overtime and earned him tournament MVP honors, but it wasn’t enough to prevent New Hampshire from winning its second straight league tourney title. The only goal he allowed came halfway into the first overtime, when Tyson Teplitsky’s cross-crease pass caromed off Ryan Whitney and into the net.
‘[The fan support] was just the opposite [of the Providence series] when we played New Hampshire in the Hockey East final,’ Parker said. ‘I was shocked at the amount of New Hampshire people that were there and the lack of BU people that were there. The same thing held true a little bit out in Worcester [in the NCAA tourney], but I was shocked at the FleetCenter. That’s supposed to be our home ice. That was real disappointing.’
BU still secured a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, drawing a first-round game against Harvard at the Worcester Centrum. The game was tied at three early in the third when the Terriers scored three times in three minutes to win, 6-4, and continue their torrid scoring streak against teams other than UNH.
But unfortunately, that’s who was next.
‘We played six playoff games, and in four of those six playoff games we averaged six goals a game,’ Parker said. ‘In the other two, we couldn’t get one puck by [UNH’s Mike] Ayers.’
With an MVP performance by Ayers, the Wildcats went on to beat the Icedogs, 3-0, and advanced to the Frozen Four two weeks later.
Parker went too, albeit as a spectator, while his team went back to Boston with one eye toward the future and the other looking back.
In the past are six seniors who each had a distinct role on the team. Ryan Priem was a banger, filling the role of a prototypical fourth-line forward.
‘The fourth line is a line you want to go out and give you energy, bang some people around and make sure they don’t get scored on. Priem gave us the energy and [sophomore Matt Radoslovich] made sure we didn’t get scored on.’
John Sabo was a leader and a gritty forward who carried BU offensively through the first half of the season. Brian Collins had another slow start in his senior year, but turned it around to finish just one point shy of 100 for his career.
‘Looking back, I should’ve started Brian Collins in July and told him it was his 30th game in October,’ Parker said. ‘It’s amazing how he had just absolutely solid, and sometimes great, second halves each year.’
BU will be most depleted on the blue line, with the graduation of first-team All-American Freddy Meyer, as well as Mike Bussoli and John Cronin.
‘When you graduate three defensemen that got that much ice time and one defenseman that is so dominant out there, you’re going to have holes to fill there,’ Parker said. ‘But fortunately if we don’t lose Whitney to a pro signing, we’re in pretty good shape and we’ve got four real good defensemen coming back that have played a lot for us and that are very talented. Then we’ll bring in three defensemen that are pretty good, too.’
Parker said there is ‘no question’ that the defense will include at least two freshmen next season, replacing two players Parker was pleasantly surprised to see stick in the lineup for most of the year.
‘Cronin and Bussoli gave us very steady years,’ the coach said. ‘They gave us a lot of experience. I frankly thought one of those two guys wouldn’t be in the lineup this year. I thought they’d get beaten out by the two freshmen. Instead, they kept their jobs because they were always steady, always there. Cronin faltered a little bit there at the end [sitting the NCAAs], Bussoli faltered a little bit at times, but I thought in general they both had great senior years and they’ll be sorely missed. Both of them contributed in a lot of ways.’
What the future holds is uncertain, but it could include continued production from junior wing Frantisek Skladany (14-21-35), who averaged a point per game for the season’s final 24 games.
One aspect of the future that is a near certainty is Fields, who started the season’s final 29 games, and after the horrific goal he allowed against BC, saw his goals against average drop nearly a quarter-goal per game. His save percentage also climbed as high as .915.
Most of the roster returns in front of Fields, with only certain spots up for grabs. At the beginning of the season it seemed unfathomable that Gregg Johnson and David Klema, key contributors the year before, would be pressing to crack next year’s lineup, but as of now it is unknown how they’ll respond to sitting 18 and 14 games, respectively.
‘I think they’ll have a real good opportunity to,’ Parker said. ‘The question is whether they’ll play the way we want them to play.
‘Both of them have more skills than some of the guys that played ahead of them in terms of offensive capabilities,’ Parker said. ‘But they didn’t get a chance to use their offensive capabilities too much because things weren’t going too well through the other two zones.
‘There’s no question in my mind that both of them could be important players for us if they want to change.’
Another unknown is the status of Whitney. The fifth pick in the 2002 NHL Draft, he has said he is sticking around for his junior season, and it’s a wise decision according to his coach.
‘Our rule of thumb is that you want to leave here when you’re ready for the NHL. You don’t want to play in the minor leagues. And he’s not ready to step into the NHL next year, so my advice would be, ‘You’re crazy to leave here,” Parker said.
‘He knows he had a disappointing year and he knows Pittsburgh’s not dying to sign him because of that. He’s not ready to play in the NHL.’
‘I do think he’s on the verge,’ Parker said later. ‘What happened to him this year is going to pay huge dividends for him next year.’
Next year, Hockey East is shaping up to be ‘BC and everybody else,’ Parker said, even if Whitney returns alongside three fellow defensemen and 12 forwards who have seen significant playing time in the past.
‘Maybe BC – then BU – then everybody else. I think we’re going to have a real solid team, but I think BC is going to be the team with a target on their back. They’ve got almost everybody back … I think they’re going to be the team to beat in our league and nationally.’
But those are merely expectations, and BU will tell you how tough those can be.