Nightmarish and unlucky. Rough and “Oh, so close.” Disappointing and, well, disappointing. There are a number of adjectives you can use to describe the men’s hockey team’s home-and-home series against Boston College last weekend. I’ll settle on one: alarming.
It was a tale of two games for BU.
Last Friday at Conte Forum was a humiliating 6-2 beatdown topped off by senior goalie Karson Gillespie being sent to the penalty box with less than 10 minutes left in the contest. Seriously, how often does a goalie get sent to the box? The hilarious part of it was that senior captain Brian McGuirk received an interference call at the same time and had to suffer the injustice of cramming into a penalty box with a goalie. How did they both fit? A better question: How did they get out?
The back end of the series was a much better game and featured a completely different Terrier team. It’s safe to say BU played exceptionally well for 57 of the game’s 60 minutes. The remaining three? That’s the alarming part. Nathan Gerbe, the diminutive but active BC junior forward (also a known BU killer) scored a shorthanded goal 2:06 into the game.
For those of us counting, that was three shorthanded goals in two games for one Nathan Gerbe. Giving up three shorthanded goals in two games to one team — let alone one player — is an embarrassment. It ended up being the difference in a great game played by the Terriers.
BU played its most inspired game of the season Saturday night, but there were noticeable absences. BU coach Jack Parker benched senior forward Ryan Weston, sophomore defenseman Eric Gryba and senior captain Brian McGuirk.
After the 6-2 loss to BU’s biggest rival, Parker benched the emotional leader of his team in McGuirk. Anyone think Parker wanted to send a message? He said he wasn’t thinking about McGuirk’s status as captain when he decided on the line shakeup, and that he could have picked five to 10 other guys to sit.
Well, he could have picked other guys. Then again, he didn’t. He chose to sit McGuirk to essentially tell the team, “I don’t care who you are. Show up every night or don’t play.”
It’s alarming that Parker — after 14 games — had to bench his captain to get the team to show up the way it did Saturday. Any player who puts on a Terrier hockey uniform should be honored to play for Parker and BU. There should never be any question about whether this team will bring maximum effort to the rink every night.
Am I saying the Terriers aren’t giving maximum effort? No. They are. Junior defenseman Matt Gilroy had an interesting answer when asked about BU’s weekend after Saturday’s game.
“We took the night off [Friday] night against BC, which was embarrassing,” Gilroy said. “We probably could have won both if we played like [we did Saturday] all weekend.”
I agree, so I ask again: Why haven’t they played like that all season? Where was that effort against Robert Morris University? University of Massachusetts-Amherst? Why hasn’t BU been able to string together consecutive solid performances? The Terriers have won two in a row once this season, but have already had three different losing streaks of more than two games.
Gilroy directly questioned the team’s effort Saturday night, saying, “Yeah, I think we take off games and there’s no excuse for that. The only ones to blame are us, and I can almost guarantee it’s going to stop. We hate losing.”
Fans hate losing too, but it’s a lot easier to swallow when their team plays like BU did Saturday night.
It’s easy to speculate that Parker benched McGuirk because he wasn’t providing the leadership required from a captain. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case because, really, there is only so much McGuirk can do. If the team is losing its focus in practice and in games, McGuirk and other seniors can only yell so much. At some point, other guys on the team have to show up to play. If anything, McGuirk, Weston and Gryba were sacrificial lambs to jolt the rest of the locker room.
Junior Brandon Yip doesn’t think the struggles are a result of poor leadership, either.
“We’ve got good leadership from the seniors,” Yip said Saturday night. “There’s not much to do as far as cheerleading. It’s really night and day between the games we play hard in and the games we take off. ”
This team is talented enough to win some games on sheer talent. But BU isn’t talented enough to coast to a Hockey East championship. I’m sure Parker knows that too. If the Terriers continue their lethargic play, soon it will be too late to turn the season around.