Agganis Arena was a scary sight Friday, and it wasn’t the Halloween costumes that filled the stands.
It was the struggle of the Boston University men’s hockey team against an unseasoned UMass-Lowell team, who outskated, outfought and simply outplayed its opponent, handing the No. 4 Terriers their first loss of the season, 2-1.
With 11 freshmen in the lineup, the young River Hawks (2-2-1, 1-0-0 Hockey East) squared off against a listless BU team, taking full advantage of their opportunity to knock the nationally ranked squad down a few notches.
“I thought Lowell played great and they didn’t get much competition,” said BU coach Jack Parker. “We stood around and we got beat to every loose puck. In their end and our end, they had the puck all the time. We’d go get the puck and the minute we got it, they’d take it away from us.”
But the loss wasn’t the biggest problem Friday night, it was the way the Terriers (2-1-1, 2-1-0) lost-and it wasn’t a subject Parker was shy about.
“We act like we’re gonna get a goal any minute, so why worry about it?” he said. “We weren’t worried about anything. We played like we were winning 5-1.
“The difference between their quickness and tenacity, their will and ours was night and day,” Parker continued. “It was beyond what I could have imagined it could be so poor. I can imagine that Lowell would play that hard and play that well, but I can’t imagine we would wilt under their pressure. It was a total inept effort on our part, except for our goalie who I thought played terrific. Other than that, I didn’t have one guy that played anywhere near the level that Lowell was playing at.”
But despite how strong John Curry looked between the pipes-he finished the game with 22 saves, fending off an onslaught of shots-he couldn’t keep the River Hawks off the board.
On a BU line change just 1:28 into the second frame, a pair of Lowell rookies caught Curry without protection. Right wing Paul Worthington connected across the crease with linemate Kory Falite, and with no one to challenge him the freshman ripped a shot from close range. Curry sprawled out across the crease, rejecting the two-on-none attempt.
A barrage of shots continued to pepper the net before senior captain Sean Sullivan emerged with the puck and cleared the zone with a long pass to freshman Zach Cohen.
Though rookie netminder Carter Hutton turned away Cohen’s shot, BU continued to attack and nearly notched the game’s first goal with 15:33 left in the period. Faking his defender into sliding down to block the shot, Dan McGoff slid the puck to the right and sent a slapshot careening off the crossbar.
But when the puck popped up and fired around the boards to Worthington, he sent the long pass across the ice, again to Falite. Falite flew down the ice with Tom Morrow in pursuit, taking a shot top-shelf to light the lamp for the River Hawks.
“I missed the 2-on-0 right before that, and we were getting fast breaks,” Falite said. “Coach is always talking about transitions, and it was good to capitalize on a good transition of play. It shows that that’s how you win games.”
But even with a 1-0 deficit, the Terriers came out in the third seemingly without any sense of urgency.
“We are so full of ourselves, because we think we’re something that we’re not,” Parker said. “We weren’t ready to play and we couldn’t possibly handle how hard they were ready to play.”
And while the Terriers couldn’t break a gritty River Hawk defense that kept any sustained offensive drives at bay, the River Hawks figured BU out once more just 1:09 into the final frame. Coming down the left side, senior captain Jason Tejchma let loose a high shot. Curry turned the puck away to the opposite side, but not wide enough to avoid the follow-up from Mark Roebothan, who slid into the net in a tangle with BU’s Chris Higgins and registered Lowell’s second score of the night.
“I probably would have had the rebound any other shot,” Curry said. “He shot it up toward my neck. It took a bounce right over there and right on the guy’s skate. I haven’t seen a replay as far as him kicking it in-his stick was certainly nowhere near the puck, but it could have been our man too. Regardless, it doesn’t even come close to explaining why we didn’t win.”
“[Lowell’s defense] pretty much kept us in check the whole game,” Sullivan said. “Our bread-and-butter is driving down the wall and throwing it to the net and then just grinding it out, and we just didn’t do that. Whether we just didn’t want to or they didn’t let us, we have to break through them somehow. There’s gonna be better [defenses] than Lowell out there, and we have to figure them out. We didn’t do that tonight.”
And while the Terriers managed to sneak a power play goal by Hutton with 5:42 remaining-a pass attempt by freshman defender Brian Strait that deflected off the skate of Lowell’s Ben Holmstrom and into the left-side netting-it was far too little, far too late. And still, desperation didn’t quite set in for the Terriers until the final minutes.
“It’s a team problem, not a couple of guys’ problem,” Parker said. “It’s a feeling of entitlement almost. [They have] a feeling of, ‘Do you know who we are?'”
“It definitely starts off in practice,” Sullivan said. “We gotta go a lot harder. We gotta get in each other’s faces. Right now we’re a little too passive and we think people are gonna lay down and let us take the puck from them. We have to change our whole attitude.”
The Terriers will get another crack at the River Hawks Friday before taking on top-ranked Maine Saturday, a weekend that could get messy if BU hasn’t learned its lesson by then.
“My team looks at RPI and thinks it’s gonna be easy. They look at Merrimack and think it’s gonna be easy, they look at Northeastern and think it’s gonna be easy,” Parker said. “It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. They hope it’s gonna be easy, they want it to be easy.
“We aren’t good enough to play at the pace we’re playing at, or to play with the lack of intensity we’re playing with,” he added. “We will have a lot of work to do this week to get back to at least trying to be a competitive team.