At 2:44 PM -0500 2/17/97, Rick McAdoo wrote:
> Friday night was a frustrating one for BC as they outshot Merrimack 38-19
> but could not score goals. The Eagles hit 2 posts and had a tying goal
> disallowed in the 2nd period, and MC goalie Martin Legault played well in
> net, especially during heavy BC pressure in the third period. Merrimack
> was able to opportunistically score on poor BC defensive efforts, ranging
> from bad positioning to an inability to cover one-on-one to a failure to
> cover a man with the puck behind the BC net to the goalie sending a
> clearing pass right to a Merrimack player for a shot into the open net.
Ironically, Merrimack coach Ron Anderson had said before the weekend that
his team would not get any "easy goals". Was this as bad as BC's defense
has looked all year? I expected Merrimack to get chances, but BC allowed
too many of what you'd call bad goals - either because of the defense or
because Taylor had such a tough weekend in net.
> Saturday night's game was certainly unexpected. BC has traditionally
> played well at Merrimack, and with the motivation of wanting to recover
> from Friday's loss we expected a good game from the Eagles. Instead, they
> continued to play poor defense and Merrimack took advantage to score a
> record number of goals. The game was tight until late in the first period,
> when Darrel Scoville finished off a first-period hat trick on a shorthanded
> goal to give the Warriors a 4-2 lead at the end of one.
Scoville's three goals in the first period tied the HE record for goals in
a game by a D, but he nearly had four in that first period - one shot off
the post was scored on by Reggie Stringer.
> The second period
> was all Merrimack, as BC was unable to get any momentum going. Coach York
> tried pulling Greg Taylor after the 5th MC goal to try to reverse his
> fortunes ...
Initially I felt Taylor had played better in the first period than he had
played the night before, but looking back, he was beaten on two shots he
saw all the way by Scoville (one off the pipe that I mentioned Stringer
scoring on, the other a goal by Scoville), and the other two were Scoville
breakaways he did not stop. Taylor has seemed to be pretty good on
breakaways in the past, and with the way his team gives up chances, he has
to stop them.
> Merrimack's Martin Legault now holds the all-time MC career saves mark
> with 3005 saves.
Legault broke the record of Jim Hrivnak (2,994), who holds most of the
goaltending records at Merrimack and played in the late 80s, including on
the 1988 squad that made a strong run in the NCAA DivI tourney. So this
was a good honor for Legault, who has played extremely well this semester
and been a key factor in the team's success.
> The BC Season:
> The BC faithful, who had high hopes that this season would start the team's
> rise toward respectability again, have seen a tremendous collapse of the
> defense hurt the team. They have scored more goals this year and been
> better offensively, but the poor penalty killing, poor transition play,
> number of breakaways and shorthanded goals, and poor goalkeeping have
> undermined the season. The Eagles have played well against rival BU,
> showing their potential, but have been unable to elevate their play against
> anyone else.
That definitely seems to be true. I've been wondering how much of this is
simply the mark of a team in transition and which is very young. BC's
better players, offensively and defensively, seem to be the younger ones,
and they demand a lot of the ice time because they are so good. But they
will also make mistakes. Mottau, for example, is going to be the best D BC
has, and is already one of their best, but several times he was beaten by
older and more experienced players.
And a young team will have ups and downs, such as playing so well against
BU last Monday and then not playing well against Merrimack last weekend.
I think in a year or two, we will look back and be amazed at the outcome of
this series, because they will have progressed to the point that an 11-5
loss will be quite unexpected. Which it even was this time.
MERRIMACK
I've not said all that much about how Merrimack has been doing, but IMO, it
is one of the bigger stories in Eastern hockey this year - certainly this
semester. Merrimack's 7-3-0 HE record in calendar year 1997 is second best
in the league to only Maine's 10-2-0 - and both of Maine's losses came
against Merrimack.
Merrimack is 6-1 in its last 7 and 9-4 overall in 1997, and if not for a
terrible 3-11-1 start, they could be looking at a solid chance at a berth
in the NCAA tourney. As it is, they would need to win the HE tourney for
that to happen, but with the way they have been playing and with the
confidence they seem to have acquired, they think they can do anything. It
is very reminiscent of the way teams like PC have made a stretch run at the
end of the season lately (and PC seems to be doing it again).
There is this quality that some teams have, in that they seem to think they
will find a way to win a game and usually they do it. I saw it in Cornell
when Merrimack lost to Cornell in the final of the Syracuse Invitational.
It is the mark of a team that "knows how to win." Merrimack has had
stretches here and there of a few wins in a row over the last eight years,
but never before has there been this type of confidence. It's the subtle
difference between going into every game thinking you have a chance to win,
and thinking you *will* win.
And it does not hurt that at the same time, everything seems to have come
together. Players who struggled early on are scoring on a pace with the
league leaders lately. Rob Beck has 6 goals and 10 assists in his last 6
games. Reggie Stringer has 7 goals in 5 games. Kris Porter has 3 goals
and 5 assists in 5 games. Casey Kesselring has a point or more in each of
his last 13 games (8-10-18), longest such streak in HE this year. After
scoring less than three goals/game the first half of the year, Merrimack
has averaged an astounding 5.86 goals/game over their last 7 - doubling
their output. And other than the loss to PC during that 7-game stretch,
they've allowed only 3.00 goals/game. The power play, which started the
season under 10%, is still near the bottom of HE for the season but has
skyrocketed up to almost 25% in 1997.
It is hard to put a finger on one or two things or one or two players who
have been the difference. The truth is that every area of the game and
virtually every player has had a dramatic improvement, to the point that
this is a completely different team from the one that started the season or
even from December. They are legitimately playing like one of the best
teams in the league right now and one of the best teams in the East.
Who knows what will happen the rest of the way. But perhaps more
indicative of the mindset Merrimack has right now is that they are playing
it one game at a time, one period at a time, and one shift at a time. They
don't want to talk about what might happen in the playoffs or even next
week - only today. After Friday's win at BC, Beck (captain) gathered the
players around the coaches in the locker room and told them to enjoy the
win for the next 15-20 minutes but that there was a job to do tomorrow
night (Sat.), and that's been their approach to each game. As I said, I
don't know what will happen, but this is the kind of approach I have seen
in the past from teams that have gone places. And the results are there.
In the amazing stat department: Merrimack has won or tied 21 of its last 23
periods, stretching over 7+ games. When you only lose two of 23 periods,
you are playing some pretty consistently good hockey. And this is the
right time of the year to do it.
--- ---
Mike Machnik [log in to unmask] *HMM* 11/13/93
***** (Part-Time) Color Voice of Merrimack Hockey WCAP 980 AM *****
***** Unofficial Merrimack Hockey home page located at: *****
***** http://www.tiac.net/users/machnik/MChockey/MChockey.html *****
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