When a team has an entire week to prepare for one game, it would seem that the team should come out well-prepared and ready to play.
That was not the case on Saturday night, when the No. 7/8 Boston University men’s hockey team fell to College of the Holy Cross 5-4 at Agganis Arena.
The Terriers (2-2, 1-1 Hockey East) were a mess from puck-drop on, and BU head coach Jack Parker was scrambling to find any players on his team that had a good night.
“I thought that [sophomore forward] Matt Nieto had a good night,” Parker said. “I thought that [freshman forward Evan] Rodrigues played really well. I thought that was his best game. I thought [senior forward] Corey Trivino played well again tonight.
“Other than that, we didn’t have a forward that played well or played hard enough or played smart enough. And we’d be hard-pressed to find a defenseman that gave us what they were supposed to give us. I guess you could say that I thought that [sophomore defenseman Patrick] MacGregor gave us a pretty good night.”
As a team, BU failed to possess the puck through the early parts of the game and struggled mightily on the forecheck, as the Crusaders (2-1) easily stole pucks right off the sticks of the Terriers whenever a BU player happened to grab a loose puck.
It was no surprise, then, that Holy Cross jumped out to a 1-0 lead just 6:26 into the first period. Senior goaltender Kieran Millan came out to the top of his crease to make a stop on defenseman Mike Daly’s shot, but forward Erik Vos was camped out to Millan’s left, and he banged the rebound into a virtually empty net.
“[It was] a very, very disappointing effort and so many guys disappeared that it was frustrating,” Parker said. “Guys you’re depending on couldn’t give you an effort, couldn’t get free, couldn’t go forecheck, couldn’t hang on to a puck.”
To their credit, the Terriers responded quickly to Holy Cross’s first goal. A little more than a minute after Holy Cross scored, the Terriers answered when senior forward Corey Trivino dropped a pass back to sophomore defenseman Adam Clendening, who fed the puck across the zone to sophomore forward Sahir Gill. With Crusader goaltender Matt Ginn on the other side of the crease to defend against Clendening, Gill simply tucked the puck into an empty net to tie the game at 1-1.
BU took a 2-1 lead 40 seconds later when sophomore forward Charlie Coyle sent a puck across the zone to Nieto, who found Chiasson down low. Chiasson beat Ginn easily for the score.
But the Crusaders, sparked by penalties from the Terriers, took control for the rest of the period. Just over halfway into the period, MacGregor was sent to the box for hooking. Sean Escobedo joined him 44 seconds later on a clear slash and the Crusaders took advantage. Just 15 seconds into the two-man advantage, forward Adam Schmidt slipped a shot through a scrambling Garrett Noonan and Millan to tie the game.
“We get two quick goals on two very pretty plays to make it 2-1 and if you watch the way my team played after that it was pathetic,” Parker said. “It was, ‘Oh, we’re all set now, we’ll make some pretty plays, we’ll dance around. We got beat to every loose puck, we got outmuscled in front of our own net, we were pathetic killing penalties and as bad as we were they were good at all that stuff.”
The Crusaders regained the lead with just 2:23 left in the period. Millan stopped the initial shot from Andrew Cox, but left the puck lying in the crease. Schmidt put it away for the 3-2 advantage.
In the second period, Holy Cross doubled its lead to 4-2 with a little help from junior defenseman Max Nicastro, who inadvertently redirected an Andrew Cox rebound behind Millan.
With 12:53 remaining in the third period, junior forward Wade Megan laid a nasty hit on forward Shayne Stockton. The Crusader was down on the ice for several minutes and Megan was ejected from the game. Holy Cross cashed in 10 seconds into the man-advantage when defenseman Brendan Baker blasted a shot from the blue line past Millan.
“I thought we left [Millan] out to dry,” Parker said. “Four of their five goals were goal-mouth goals. Just bang it home and nobody covering anybody . . . Kieran probably would have liked to have the fifth one back, but the game was already gone by then.”
But the Terriers did attempt a comeback. Chiasson tightened the game to 5-3 at 9:31 when he scored right off a faceoff win by Trivino, who led both teams with 13 faceoff wins on the night.
The Terriers killed off a 5-on-3 situation a little more than halfway through the period and seemed to gain momentum when, with 7:15 left in the game, Nieto caught a pass from Coyle, circled in front of the net and backhanded a shot past Ginn, putting the Terriers back in the game at 5-4.
But the comeback was too late, as the Terriers had wasted too much of the game giving a minimal effort to win it in the last moments.
“It’s obviously disappointing how we came out and it was the only game of the week so you would think that we would get ready as a team and try to do our best,” Chiasson said. “But we’re going through tough times right now and the only thing we have to do is stick together. Everyone’s got to be on the same boat. That’s the only thing we have to worry about.”
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.
