The Hockey East tournament means way more for BU this season than it ever has under fourth-year head coach Jay Pandolfo. The Terriers are playing for their lives.
With the regular season in the rearview mirror, BU sits at 16-16-2 and 24th in the NPI — well below the cutline for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. Starting with a first-round matchup against Vermont, BU must win Hockey East to qualify for NCAAs. BU’s season is over if it doesn’t win four games in a row from here on out. It’s a dire thought for anyone on the team.
“Nobody wants the season to end,” Cole Eiserman said after practice on Tuesday.
Winning four in a row is a feat the Terriers have yet to accomplish through 34 games. BU had a chance to do so Saturday at UMass Lowell to end the regular season on a high note but faltered, falling 4-3. Pandolfo said his team played “losing hockey,” but in preparation for the postseason, that’s the last thing BU is thinking about.
“The first thing we want to do is just move past what happened on Saturday,” Pandolfo said in his media call Tuesday. “We can’t dwell on it anymore.”
Entering the Hockey East tournament as the sixth-seed, BU will duke it out with No. 11 Vermont on Wednesday at Agganis Arena, with puck drop scheduled for 6:30 p.m.
Yes, the Catamounts finished as the worst team in Hockey East with a cumulative record of 13-20-1, but as Mike McMahon, publisher of the College Hockey Insider newsletter, pointed out, Vermont is the best last-place team in the history of the conference, as it finished with eight conference victories.
The Terriers hosted the Catamounts for a pair of games back on Dec. 6-7, when the two sides split the series. BU won a tight 2-1 contest on Friday and lost 3-2 on Saturday.
Vermont closed out its regular season at home against Maine on Saturday and came away with an impressive 5-3 victory. When the Catamounts are rolling, Pandolfo acknowledges their core strengths.
“They’re really good in their breakouts, they break the puck out very well, and they’re really good in the neutral zone turning pucks over,” he said. “That’s something that we have to be mindful of, is making sure we’re managing the puck.”
The focus in practice for the Terriers has been on what they need to do to be successful, starting with their play in the neutral zone and limiting turnovers.
BU wants to play fast and enter the offensive zone as quickly as possible, and they also have to have a “forecheck mindset,” as Pandolfo puts it, if time and space don’t materialize.
“They play a 1-1-3 neutral zone forecheck, and they have three guys across the line a lot — there’s not a lot of space at times,” Pandolfo said of Vermont. “You have to be willing to go forecheck.”
The Terriers’ game plan may start with neutral zone play and limiting turnovers, but it subsides with BU’s inability to sustain its play shift after shift, an issue that’s plagued the Terriers all season.
Why? How can they find it with the season on the line? No one seems to know.
“We get there and we get away from it. What it’s from, really — we’re trying to figure it out, but we’re trying to get out of our shells a little bit, try to talk to each other more, and let out frustration,” Eiserman said.
Communicating more on the bench in games is something that’s been happening “more and more,” said Pandolfo. Early in the season, because the team was so young, the bench was quiet — but that’s not the case now. Asked who some of the more vocal players are, Pandolfo said Gavin McCarthy, Jack Harvey, Nick Roukounakis and Mick Frechette. Increased communication is a good thing, but he acknowledged that there is a caveat.
“At the end of the day, you can say the right things, but if you’re not going out and doing the right things, it doesn’t really matter,” Pandolfo said.
He continued, “There was a little bit of that, actually, on Saturday, where guys are trying to give certain messages, but we just weren’t going out and executing and doing what we’re supposed to do. It’s not like the guys don’t care, it’s just for whatever reason that night, we just couldn’t find a way to get our game going.”
That can’t happen again, because if it does, BU is onto next season.