The Two-Line Pass

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for Peter Mayer. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

Hi! I’m writing these posts to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

I’ve been watching college hockey for a very long time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as singularly impressive as what Jon Gillies did for Providence College this season.

There have been players that turned around programs or even professional teams almost by themselves: Chris Pronger, Wayne Gretzky, Alex Ovechkin, and so forth have all done so. Gillies is among them. Last season, Providence finished 14-20-4 under new coach Nate Leaman, and was plagued by bad goaltending (Alex Beaudry and Justin Gates, both seniors, posted a team GAA of 3.16, and save percentage of .891). This year, with both those guys gone, Leaman turned to Gillies, a freshman and Calgary Flames third-rounder, to man the crease, and it was the best decision he ever made in his professional life.

The Friars improved three spots in the standings with Gillies, rising all the way to fourth after finishing seventh the year before, winners of 15 games, losers of just 12, tie-ers of seven. They also entered the final day of the season tied for first place with eventual champions UMass Lowell. But that seemingly modest jump from seventh to fourth is notable because it guaranteed the team a home ice spot in a brutally competitive conference for the first time since 2003.

All of it runs through Gillies. His stats shine at 2.06 and .932, and all those wins and all the team’s being competitive for a league title, which they’d have secured if they won on Saturday, comes despite the Friars scoring fewer than three goals per game and having just three players with more than 20 points in the team’s 34 games. How much did Providence rely on him? He played every second of every game for which he was on the same continent as his team — he missed three games, none of which Providence won, because he was a backup to John Gibson at World Juniors in Ufa — amassing a 1867:07 between the pipes.

There’s been some discussion among the Hockey East media as to whether he, fellow Flames pick Johnny Gaudreau, or Steven Whitney should be the league’s MVP and as far as I can tell anyone not picking Gillies is a complete lunatic. Not only was he the best player, putting up those stats behind a not-very-good-team while Gaudreau and Whitney play for reigning national champions Boston College, but even if you’re defining these players through the narrow prism of who is most valuable rather than best, then I say again that Gillies had those stats behind a team that was considerably sub-.500 just a year ago.

His highlights routinely featured him bailing out everyone on the ice, and were also surprisingly frequent. Just last week, one of his saves (which completely changed the complexion of that particular game, on the road at BC) made SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays, and you know how hard it is for even the best hockey highlights to edge out the most mediocre NCAA basketball dunks.

Gillies is currently the best goaltender in the conference, and did it all as a freshman. This was the most impressive rookie season I’ve seen in Hockey East, and I’ve seen a lot of them. If he doesn’t win all the awards for which he’s eligible this year (and one or two for which he’s not), the system is broken.

Don’t forget to donate to 826 Boston. Thanks again.

(Ed. note: This is a sponsored post for an Dana McIvor. If you want me to write about any old thing in hockey, all you have to do is donate $50 below. It’s easy and fun. Bye.)

Hi! I’m writing these posts to benefit 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for area kids at which I volunteer. If you want to make a donation, you can click right here. Thanks!

It is no secret, I think, that I am perhaps the world’s biggest fan of college hockey ever. I like it a whole lot. Back when I was in school, I would drive to Providence on a Tuesday night to see them play Northeastern just because it was a college game and that seemed like a rational and fun thing to do. And so when donor Dana McIvor said to me “Hey buddy here’s $50 for 826 Boston please write about how great college hockey is, and specifically how great College Hockey Inc. is,” I was pretty happy to do so. At least it wasn’t another dumbass request about how Canada is good.

So let’s talk about college hockey. I went to a game last night, in fact. Hopped on the B Line and took it as far as it’ll go, to Conte Forum for a game between Lowell (my dear alma mater) at Boston College, inarguably the best program in the nation over the past decade or so. Lowell won. It was cool. I also went with a friend of mine who had never been to a college hockey game, didn’t know what a power play was, and only nodded along when I tried to explain how icing works because that’s how it stereotypically goes with people who don’t really watch hockey.

But the consensus after the game was that it was pretty awesome. The hockey was of high-quality, as you might expect between two of the four teams currently tied for first in Hockey East, perhaps the nation’s best top-to-bottom conference. In addition, despite the fact that a non-sold-out game at Conte Forum can usually have all the atmosphere of a mausoleum, the crowd was more or less into the game, in part because it was close, but also because Lowell very rarely got called for penalties despite a number of perceived infractions (a couple of which, yes, probably should have been called). There was also the BC band, one of the better ones in the conference, playing a number of recent hits including Call Me Maybe, and that seemed to keep people interested as well.

But overall, yeah, college hockey is just great, and thanks to the work of College Hockey Inc. — an independent company funded by a lot of different organizations which have a general interest in promoting the NCAA game, including USA Hockey — it will only continue to get better. In recent years, there have been a lot of instances of kids who could theoretically play in the NCAA instead opting to go to Canadian major junior leagues, and the purpose of College Hockey Inc. is to not necessarily dissuade those kids from doing so, per se, but rather to educate them about their options.

The problem is that if a kid goes to college and finds it doesn’t suit him, he can then go to major junior. This is a path many have taken in recent years, perhaps most notably Charlie Coyle, formerly of Boston University and then the St. John Sea Dogs, and now of the Minnesota Wild. On the other hand, if a kid goes to major junior and washes out, or doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have NCAA opportunities on which to fall back, because the NCAA classifies the CHL as a professional league given that some players playing in it are on professional contracts. Whether that’s fair is, I suppose, up for debate, but it’s an issue that’s been raging in NCAA circles for a while now, and little in the way of resolution seems to be on the horizon.

Over the summer I went to a College Hockey Inc. event at which a number of my area’s better 15- and 16-year-old players played in a few scrimmages attended by college and junior A coaches, then got to hear speeches and ask questions of a few of those coaches about the opportunities NCAA hockey might provide them. It was all very informative, even if the coaches there were probably talking directly to only a handful of kids in that room who would have a legitimate choice between the CHL and NCAA.

The issue, I guess, is that there are a lot of misconceptions about college hockey that still need to be cleared up in the minds of kids who might one day play it, as well as their parents. With more information, players can make better-informed decisions about their prospects for playing at a level beyond junior A (or whatever) and in doing so, it seems likely that the NCAA will be the beneficiary.

Which in turn means I get to watch better-quality college hockey at my local rinks and on TV a couple times a week. I’m pretty much all for that.

Don’t forget to donate to 826 Boston. Thanks again.

(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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.