LOWELL, Mass. — Taken at his word, Jay Pandolfo didn’t give a flying you-know-what about the Hockey East first-round bye.
All BU’s fourth-year head coach wanted was a good performance. Whether or not Saturday’s results, both at Lowell and elsewhere, left the Terriers hosting Vermont in the opening round of the conference tournament or skipping the round entirely was of little concern. Pandolfo, starved of it for so much of this infuriating season, was just looking for good hockey.
He did not get it. And the performance he did get offered a pretty good reminder as to why Pandolfo might not have cared all that much about the bye in the first place.
Because if BU plays like that again? Forget where, when or who the Terriers are playing.
“Losing hockey,” a disgruntled Pandolfo described it, which is hardly what BU needed in its final non-elimination game of the year.
Had the Terriers played winning hockey, they would’ve indeed skipped that first round after Vermont gave BU the help it needed with a 5-3 victory over Maine. The Terriers would’ve faced Boston College at Conte Forum in the quarterfinal on Saturday, exactly two weeks after they defeated their bitter rivals, 5-1, in that very barn. But BU let a game it led 1-0 after 10 minutes and one that was tied after two periods snowball into a 4-3 defeat. Starting with Wednesday’s first-round bout at Agganis Arena against the Catamounts, Pandolfo’s team will need to win four games in a row — a feat it didn’t accomplish during the regular season — to win Hockey East and save its season.
And yet, any consideration of three games or four games feels pretty pointless. Pandolfo has no idea what kind of team he’ll get from game to game, let alone a four-game stretch. BU went from sweeping BC and ruining the No. 11 Eagles’ season a week ago to getting thoroughly outworked by a 13-21-0 Lowell team.
Because BU is the No. 6 seed and Vermont is the 11th, Playoffstatus.com gives the Terriers a 78-percent chance to beat the Cats. But the Terriers, who finished an even 16-16-2 and 12-12-0 in HE, are an entirely unpredictable team. Any hope that BU was peaking at the perfect time, that it had finally found a formula for consistency after it won three in a row headed into Saturday, was extinguished at the Tsongas Center.
“We had way too many passengers tonight. Passengers,” Pandolfo said, repeating his takeaway from BU’s 4-3 overtime loss to Lowell all the way back on Jan. 16.
He said the Terriers weren’t willing to play physical and finish their checks, instead trying to jab pucks around players instead of engaging in puck battles. Pandolfo called it “poke-and-go hockey,” a sophisticated way to say BU was just soft.
“That’s just will. That’s just playing the game the right way,” he said. “We didn’t want to play a hard game, we didn’t want to get our hands dirty.”
Pandolfo said he’s seen BU do that before this season. Nearly all of the Terriers’ problems have recurred, and after 34 games, no one in suits or in Scarlet and White has figured out how to shake the bug. Pandolfo’s latest plan was to study more positive video clips with his team, in order to put greater emphasis on the reasons BU was playing well instead of the reasons it wasn’t. It appeared to be working.
Then Saturday happened, and Pandolfo once again cut a mystified figure in the press room.
“You hear it from the guys on the bench. They see [the things we’re doing wrong],” Pandolfo said. “So I don’t know.”
If Pandolfo is to be believed, BU is suffering from problems of discipline, not capability. That at least provides some hope that — if they’re interested in doing so — the Terriers could go on a run in Hockey East. But BU hasn’t been an urgent or willing team all season. Pandolfo has often bemoaned that the Terriers aren’t able to sustain their effort, even when they see that their high effort leads to positive results. If an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament and a Beanpot title weren’t enough to get BU committed to its game, why would the Hockey East tournament be any different?
“You know when you’re going into the playoffs that you want to have the right habits and details going in,” Pandolfo said. “And to see that tonight? It’s disappointing.”
If he sees it again, it’ll be season-ending.