It may have lost four of five, been recently swept by its arch-rival and suffered its first shutout since early January of last year, but believe it or not, the Boston University hockey team is in prime position to make a postseason push.
On the strength of last Thursday’s 5-2 win over the University of New Hampshire and despite a 3-0 setback in the Saturday rematch in Durham, N.H., BU vaulted four spots to No. 9 in the latest calculation of the PairWise Rankings and held steady at No. 14 in the U.S. College Hockey Online Division 1 poll.
That means the Terriers, with a relatively gentle February schedule as far as the Hockey East heavyweights are concerned, could be looking at a top-half spot among the newly expanded 16-team NCAA Tournament field when it is announced in March.
Within the league, BU (14-10-2, 8-8-0 Hockey East) finds itself sharing fourth place with the University of Massachusetts (14-11-1, 8-9-0) in the race to determine the final host team in the Hockey East playoffs. Having split their first two meetings, the Feb. 7 showdown in Amherst should give one team a tie-breaker advantage, and the possibility of a four-point swing could go a long way in ultimately determining who’s spared a road trip in mid-March.
BU begins the stretch drive Thursday, facing off with seventh-place Merrimack College at Walter Brown Arena, exactly one year to the day after a Terrier team on a two-game skid went up to North Andover and escaped as 4-1 winners. That game spurred a torrid, nine-win stretch for BU, which didn’t lose a game for more than a month.
This year’s schedule is similar. After Merrimack, BU enters the Beanpot tournament for a first-round game against Harvard University, a 12-6-1 team in the top-heavy ECAC, but one the Icedogs have been able to handle over the past two seasons.
Then head coach Jack Parker’s team takes the ice in the critical contest at Massachusetts, followed by the Beanpot final, against either Boston College or Northeastern University, and then two home-and-home series with Massachusetts-Lowell and Providence College before finishing the regular season in Orono, at the University of Maine.
The two teams tied atop the Hockey East standings with Maine BC and New Hampshire also stayed stationary in both the polls and the PairWise. The Wildcats’ split with the Terriers didn’t impact its fifth-position in either ranking, while the Eagles remained No. 6 in the poll and No. 8 in the PairWise after a win and a loss against the Friars.
This weekend, though, things figure to change. BC hosts Massachusetts, which came to Conte Forum and won earlier this month. But the highlight of the Hockey East weekend will be Maine’s visit to New Hampshire for two games in the Granite State to start a trying month sure to test the Black Bears’ status at the top.
Before closing with BU on March 1, Maine must face BC once, and New Hampshire, giant-killer Massachusetts, and Providence the only league team to beat the Black Bears this year twice. The Wildcats’ month includes four games with their two conference co-leaders, while the Eagles battle the Black Bears and Wildcats a total of three times.
That is where BU’s scheduling advantage could be a factor in rising through the polls, with seven or eight of the 10 remaining games coming teams rated lower in the PairWise.
Around the rest of Hockey East, Massachusetts and Providence received votes, but finished Nos. 17 and 18, respectively, in the USCHO.com poll. In the PairWise, the teams also share the spot squarely on the tournament bubble, tied for 16th.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
