Men’s hockey readies for UMass game before Beanpot final

There was a lot to like about the No. 9 Boston University men’s hockey team’s win over Northeastern University during Monday’s Beanpot semifinal, BU head coach David Quinn said.

The Terriers (15-7-4, 8-4-3 Hockey East) played one of their “most thorough and responsible” games of the year and did a good job not getting in their own way to advance to the tournament final scheduled for next Monday. While the championship game against No. 4 Boston College is looming, there’s an important two points on the line for BU Friday night at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Almost exactly a month after the teams last met, the Terriers and the Minutemen (7-16-4, 2-11-4 Hockey East) are set to finish up their regular season series Friday night at Mullins Center.

On Jan. 9 at Agganis Arena, BU turned what initially looked like it would be a close game into one that, well, wasn’t. UMass struck first just 2:50 into the first period when senior Shane Walsh, one of the team’s leading goal-scorers, potted his 14th of the year to put his team ahead 1-0. Fifteen minutes later, the Terriers tied things up with a goal from freshman center Jakob Forsbacka Karlsson.

Freshman forward Bobo Carpenter added another goal 12:09 into the second period, but the Minutemen knotted the score at 2-2 exactly a minute later with a tally from captain Steven Iacobellis. From then on, though, things started to get away from UMass.

Senior captain Matt Grzelcyk regained a BU lead for his team 20 seconds later, and from there the Terriers scored four more unanswered goals, including another pair from Grzelcyk to get him a natural hat trick and secure a 7-2 victory.

Since then, the teams have veered in completely different directions over the past six games.

BU has posted a 4-1-1 record and is riding a four-game winning streak, while the Minutemen have yet to record a victory. They have losses in each of their contests since facing the Terriers and are now in the midst of an eight-game losing streak.

During that skid, which includes BU’s 7-2 rout, UMass has been outscored 43-15 and shut out twice. It has not allowed fewer than four goals since the first loss of the streak Jan. 5 when it fell to No. 11 Yale University in overtime, 3-2.

As of now, the Minutemen are scoring just 2.48 goals a game, a bottom-third ranked clip for team offense, while opponents average 3.96 against them, which sits as the third-worst team defense in the entire country.

While none of UMass’ three goalies have a save percentage up over .897, the defense isn’t making things any easier on the trio, allowing opponents to test the Minutemen backstops an average of 35.4 times per game.

Most recently, UMass dropped a pair of Hockey East games to The University of Maine at home last weekend and has now fallen to dead last in the conference standings.

“Obviously they’re struggling, but we always realize that we’ve got a target on our back,” Quinn said. “And they’ve got skill. They’ve got a lot of talent up front, and we’re going to have to manage the game. We’re going to have to do a good job making sure that we manage the puck and not beat ourselves.”

The Beanpot has the potential to provide a distraction heading into Friday night, but Quinn said the tightness of the conference standings makes the contest against the Minutemen all the more important. He said the team has done a pretty good job of taking things one game at a time so far this season, and expects Friday won’t be different.

“We still think we can win the league,” Quinn said. “We’re certainly going to do everything we can to do that, and these points are valuable. We’ve got to make sure that we’re taking care of business — this is huge. This game’s enormous in the league. You can’t be giving points away because we all know, looking at the standings, one point’s going to separate second from fifth or two points, second from fifth, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re taking care of that.”