The Two-Line Pass

(Ed. note: Can you believe neither the AP nor Reuters had a picture of these three from tonight’s game?)

The Lead

It’s entirely likely that none of the three will be in the NHL by the time the puck drops on the real live NHL season. But over the last few days, Brian Burke has gotten a real good look at what could, within a year or two, develop into a very, very good scoring line and, unlike pretty much every line in the entire NHL, could be composed entirely of young players that went the college route.

The trio of Tyler Bozak, Christian Hanson and Viktor Stalberg, all of whom gave up some NCAA eligibility to join the Leafs, have been absolutely magic together, combining for four goals in the three games during which they’ve played as a line. Stalberg, a product of the University of Vermont, got the Leafs on the board tonight with assists from Bozak, who played two years at the University of Denver, and Hanson, who skipped his senior year at Notre Dame to go pro.

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The Lead

Few men try for best ever, and Colin Wilson is one of those.

He is one game, and perhaps one award, from carving his name alongside those of Chris Drury, Mike Eruzione and Jay Pandolfo in the pantheon of Terrier ice hockey’s all-time greats, a heady and lofty class of player indeed. His two goals and an assist tonight in BU’s sure-thing, had-it-all-the-way 5-4 win over Hockey East rival Vermont in the NCAA semifinals will, should the Terriers prevail over Miami on Saturday, become the stuff of legend.

So dominant was his performance, and that of the mighty BU backline, that it rescued the Terriers from the woeful goaltending of Kieran Millan.

The Nashville Predators draft pick, who tomorrow could be given the Hobey Baker award as the nation’s most outstanding college hockey player, and his linemates, Jason Lawrence and Chris Higgins, keyed BU to a sublime first period in which their Terriers outshot Vermont 14-7 despite affording their opponents three power plays, and outscored them 2-0 on goals from Wilson and Lawrence. Coach Jack Parker could not have asked for a better period from his troops.

In the second, though, things began to swing in Vermont’s direction thanks to a pair of ugly goals surrendered by Millan, a freshman whose stats are so good as to nudge a toe to the line of absurdity. He was simply dreadful, allowing soft goal after soft goal as Vermont mounted its sturdy, persistent comeback. He allowed a goal to Wahs Stacey less than four minutes in, then two more in 40 seconds before the 10-minute mark. To be fair, though, the team in front of him did a fairly convincing impression of a Robert Louis Stevenson novella in the middle frame to let Vermont back into the game and, indeed, take the lead.

But the game was dead and buried at 17:06 of the period when Patrick Cullity took an interference penalty to give BU a power play. Something to know about these teams’ respective special teams units: BU’s power play was second in the country coming into this game, running at 22.1 percent, and Vermont’s penalty kill was 42nd in the country, running at 81.1 percent. So when I tell you that the power play goal from Vinny Saponari on a feed from Nick Bonino so picturesque as to make Monet weep was a fait accompli, you will agree.

But Vermont, ever persistent, edged ahead again on another emollient power play goal (the Catamounts were 2 for 7 on the night and neither should have gotten past Millan) before being violently thrust aside by an ardent Terrier onslaught like a butterfly in the blitz. In the critical third period, Vermont may have gotten the first goal, but so overwhelmed were its defensemen that the end result could never have been anything but a crushing defeat.

First came a goal from Chris Higgins, who ended the night with four points, at 13:06. Then just 70 seconds later, BU won a draw to the right of UVM netminder Rob Madore, and Wilson, a huge and impressive physical specimen at 6-foot-2 and 215, leaned in against Dean Strong, who is generously listed at 5-foot-9, 173.

Cometh the moment, cometh the man.

Wilson won the draw back to Higgins, who fired from the top of the circle, and rotated down toward Madore. Higgins’ shot hit the post, and bounced fortuitously to Wilson’s stick. But players like him, the special ones, make their own luck, and, somehow unmarked despite being the most lethal player in college hockey, found himself looking at 24 square feet of wide open net. That was all that stood between Wilson and a chance at immortality.

He didn’t miss. The great ones never do.

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Because I tend to not blog on the weekends, here is a feature that will run through the entire season. It aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact about each team that played. And hell, there’s a ton of other crap for me to blather on about too. And yes, I’m totally ripping off just about every other blogger ever’s weekly column, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own time.

Danger: This post contains language that some people might not like. This will be the only thing on the site that regularly does so.

Ed. note: I wrote this two years ago (and updated it a bit for this posting) after being inspired by the absolute insipid pointlessness of attending another boring Beanpot, which begins anew for the 57th time tomorrow night on NESN and Rogers SportsNet. I like to repost it every year just ahead of the Beanpot because, well, it’s the worst tournament in sports. Enjoy. Or don’t. I couldn’t care less either way.

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Because I tend to not blog on the weekends, here is a feature that will run through the entire season. It aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact about each team that played. And hell, there’s a ton of other crap for me to blather on about too. And yes, I’m totally ripping off just about every other blogger ever’s weekly column, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own time.

Danger: This post contains language that some people might not like. This will be the only thing on the site that regularly does so.

Yeah, yeah, All-Star Weekend, right? Big to-do. What am I gonna say, “Boy that game sure was boring as piss, huh?” Well obviously. Who cares?

The most interesting hockey event of the weekend didn’t happen in the NHL, the AHL or even Major Juniors. Instead, that event is the gutless, appalling attack (there’s no other word for it) by Michigan State’s Andrew Conboy and Corey Tropp on Michigan’s Steve Kampfer late in the dying moments of Saturday night’s game, in which the Wolverines were beating the absolute piss out of the Spartans for two straight games.

Video’s after the jump if you haven’t seen it:

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Because this blog is quickly becoming the clearinghouse for all sick college hockey videos, here is a goal from Denver’s Joe Colborne that was set up by an audacious little pass from Toronto Maple Leafs draft pick Tyler Ruegsegger on Friday against Minnesota State.

That was more than a little disgusting by Mr. Ruegsegger, and if the related videos are to be believed, he does this ALL THE TIME. Somehow he only has 8-4-12 in 19 games this year though.

Last night in a cross-town battle between Buffalo’s two college hockey teams, Niagara and Canisius, Derek Foam took a penalty with his Niagara team up 2-0.

When he got out of the box, Niagara’s lead was a more comfortable 5-0 after his teammates, Sam Goodwin, Egor Mironov and Dan Sullivan had scored three shorthanded goals in 1:09. Said ever-understated Purple Eagles coach Dave Burkholder: “Special teams were the difference tonight.”

Somehow, I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere.

Friday night, Minnesota State played North Dakota in a WCHA matchup and the craziest goddamn thing you will ever see in a hockey game happened.

Zach Harrison scored a natural hat trick consisting of nothing but shorthanded goals.

Midway through the second period, Zach Harrison picked up a loose puck in the neutral zone and broke in one-on-one with a NoDak defender, then wristed a nifty little shot past Sioux goalie Adam Walaski to make it 3-1 to Harrison’s Mavericks.

In the third, he outhustled four Sioux on a power play breakout, got to a loose puck first, took it wide, and beat Walaski to put the Mavs up 4-1. Then, late in the game with two Mavericks in the box and an empty net 185 feet away, Harrison shoveled the puck out of the zone on a backhand and saw it bounce into the goal.

Natural. Shorthanded. Hat trick.

Of all the things I’ve ever seen in spending my life around hockey, nothing has ever compared to how zany this is. Harrison’s stick from that game is on its way to the Hockey Hall of Fame. The HHOF says that this might be the first natural shorthanded hattie in the HISTORY of hockey.

Said Harrison of the feat: “That’s not really something you even dream about.”

Yeah, you might say that.