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BOSTON – No. 2 Boston University started off its season with two very satisfying wins against ranked teams, most notably a stirring overtime win on the road against Quinnipiac.
Less than a week later, the Terriers got swept by Minnesota State at home. Last night, the Terriers were quite literally manhandled by the significantly older Mavericks in a decisive 6-3 loss. Tonight, BU got skunked in front of 4,203 at Agganis Arena, as junior Jason Pawloski made 26 saves to lead Minnesota State to the 3-0 shutout.
Both Maverick goals were simply a matter of winning battles near the BU net. On the first one, Nicolas Rivera knocked in a rebound with the hockey equivalent of a goal-line plunge on a power-play rebound. On the second goal, right wing Zeb Knutson was well marked by a Terrier defender outside the crease, but he managed to fight him off long enough to get a stick on Marc Michaelis’s crossing pass, and this time C.J. Suess knocked in the rebound.
“Obviously, it was a disappointing weekend,” BU coach David Quinn said. “But tonight was a different kind of disappointing. Last night I was very disappointed with how we played; tonight I was more just disappointed that we lost because I thought we did a lot of things tonight that we didn’t do last night. We competed; I thought we were physical.”
Indeed, the Terriers traded some big hits with the Mavericks, and Jordan Greenway in particular knocked some bodies around. Still, when BU gave up that first goal on the heels of a costly too many penalty in the second period, the Terriers had more of a hangdog look.
“One thing right now when we face adversity in the middle of a game, we tend to feel sorry for ourselves. That’s what was going on tonight with the body language and the sagging of the shoulders and dropping the head.”
The Terriers have oodles of talent, but with eight or nine freshmen in the lineup on a given night, the team is obviously very much on a learning curve right now—particularly as their freshmen are not only first-year players but generally very young as well in comparison to many of their opponents.
“I’m encouraged by our work ethic and how hard we played against a team that is incredibly well coached,” Quinn said. “We just played against a team that plays a man’s game. They’re physical, and they’re fast. And I don’t say this critically, but they don’t have a 20-year-old in their lineup. I’m not making excuses, but we go to battle people and we lose the battles. Hopefully in the next few months we’ll win more of those battles and create more scoring chances for ourselves.”
There’s a long way to go, and you can bet that the talented Terriers will learn a thing or two from a weekend like this in the early going.
“We definitely have to play as an older team,” junior center Bobo Carpenter said. “We can’t make silly mistakes, making soft plays in the middle of the ice. We have to bear down and really take care of the puck. When we’ve done that in first couple of games, we really played well, and you could see that the pace of play was something special that we created. I think we got away from that this weekend.”
