The No. 5/6 Boston University men’s hockey team will look to remain undefeated when it takes on the University of Massachusetts-Lowell in a home-and-home series this weekend.
The Terriers are coming off a 2-1 win against Providence College that was anything but pretty. The Friars outshot BU 40-20, including 33-12 over the final two periods. They recorded 14 of those shots on seven power plays.
In addition to penalty trouble, BU coach Jack Parker cited his team’s poor performance on faceoffs as a reason for the lopsided shot totals. The Terriers (4-0-1, 2-0-1 Hockey East) won just 20 of the game’s 54 draws &- a measly 37 percent.
“I’d say they won probably 80 percent of the faceoffs in our zone,” Parker said after Thursday’s practice. “Every time they won a faceoff in our zone, it was like the referee threw it back to the point guy. And they got at least two shots off of that. It was like a jump ball. If you lose a jump ball, they get an extra shot before you get the rebound. And they were getting one or two every time.”
Parker added that if the Terriers had been anywhere near as good on faceoffs as they had been in their first four games &- when they won 52.3 percent &- the shot differential wouldn’t have been nearly as drastic.
“I wasn’t concerned as much with the shot total as I was concerned with how bad we were on the faceoffs,” Parker said. “Sometimes it’s focus and sometimes it’s you’re playing against a guy with a little quicker stick than you. So you’ve gotta stop trying to win them and make sure you don’t lose them so easily. We were so confident in winning them for a while that maybe we took that for granted.
“It’ll be interesting to see how we do this weekend because Lowell’s pretty good on faceoffs.” (Reporter’s note: UML does not keep track of faceoff statistics.)
The River Hawks (1-2-2, 1-2-0) are coming off a 1-1 weekend in which they beat Providence 5-4 in overtime Friday night before falling to Northeastern 3-1 on Saturday despite outshooting the Huskies 40-26.
UML came into the season with one of the biggest turnovers in Hockey East. It lost 11 players to graduation, including six of its top eight scorers and both of its goalies. Despite the turnover, though, Parker said the River Hawks haven’t changed their style too much.
“What we’ve seen is similar types of stuff on the power play, similar types of stuff on the forecheck,” Parker said. “They’re not quite as aggressive trying to get the puck up ice as fast as they used to, but I don’t think their systems have changed much.”
One of the biggest challenges for BU on Friday night will be the location. Lowell’s Tsongas Center features an NHL-sized 200-by-85-foot sheet (which is five feet narrower than Agganis Arena), tight corners that create less space behind the net, and active end-boards. The combination of small corners and lively boards leads to pucks getting to the front of the net much quicker than normal.
“Everything happens fast in that rink,” Parker said. “It presents a major problem in style … and I think Lowell takes good advantage of that in their forechecking scheme. They like to make it difficult for you to get the puck. You can hide it in certain areas in that rink. The rink makes it difficult to start with, and then they compound it.”
Game notes
Parker said junior goalie Kieran Millan will start Friday night and classmate Grant Rollheiser will likely start Saturday. He said the reasons for starting Rollheiser on Saturday are two-fold. First, it prevents Millan from getting overworked. Second, Rollheiser is 1-0 on the season and has been doing well in practice.
Parker said he might make a couple tweaks in the forward lines, but that he anticipates using the same 18 skaters he used last weekend. He said the defense pairings will definitely be the same as last weekend.
Parker said there hasn’t been any update in the status of freshman forward Yasin Cisse since last weekend, when Parker said he’d be “gone for a long time” and might need surgery. The Hockey News reported this week that Cisse would miss the rest of the season, but Parker said no such decision has been made.
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