The Canadian universities continued to give a superb account of themselves
around Hockey East, as Boston University held on to defeat the University of
New Brunswick Reds, 7-6, in an exhibition tonight.  I am sure BU folks will
have more to say, but here are some thoughts after I watched the game on tv.
 
GAME COMMENTS
First, a quick wrapup: BU scored the first four goals and led 4-0 at
13:17 of the first, then UNB went on to score 6 of the next 9 goals.
Joubert had the first two for BU, followed by O'Sullivan, Prendergast,
Pierce, Thornton, and Lachance.
 
Line score:
UNB   2    2    2  -  6
BU    4    1    2  -  7
 
For UNB, Luke Naylor scored 4 goals including the first two which got
his team back in it.  He was given the Player of the Game by WABU-68.
If his last name sounds familiar to Hockey East followers, it is because
his older brother Cooper played the last four years for Merrimack.
Luke and his twin brother Ted now play for UNB.  I remember hearing
several years ago that there was a good possibility that the Naylor twins
were headed to Merrimack to follow in Cooper's footsteps.  Knowing of
Merrimack's scoring difficulties lately and seeing Luke score 4 times
against the top-rated team in the country in their own building, it should
be no surprise to anyone that I was crying in my beverage of choice this
evening...
 
BTW, Luke scored twice against Derek Herlofsky in the first period and
twice against Tom Noble in the third.  Parker played each goalie for a
period, with Shawn Ferullo taking the second.  Each goalie allowed two
goals.
 
UNB looked pretty darn good.  They may have been intimidated early on by
BU and the enthusiastic no-admission crowd (my estimate: about 1,500), but
they impressed me by regrouping and staying even with BU the rest of the
way.  They looked a LOT better than the Concordia team we saw at Merrimack
this afternoon.
 
For BU, Jay Pandolfo appeared to have aggravated his groin injury late
in the first.  He left the ice and didn't return.  He will have a couple
of weeks to recover, however, before BU plays its first real game on
Oct 28 at RPI.
 
BU's power play was clicking on all cylinders, scoring the first three
goals of the game as UNB took some unnecessary penalties.  But as good
as the PP looked, BU's penalty killing needs just as much work; this is
a weakness that seems to be carrying over from last season.  Naylor
scored his two in the first on identical plays, as he was able to set up
in front and wait for Cormier to feed him so he could bang it in.  Tough
to blame Herlofsky on those.
 
Inexperience on D plagued BU tonight.  Kealty and Kelleher have a ways
to go, but there's really no other way to get them experience, and the
game didn't count after all.  O'Sullivan might have helped on D, but boy,
did he look good on the wing.  Still, I would not be surprised to see
Parker re-evaluate his decision to play O'Sullivan at wing if the
freshmen (and some other underclassmen) come along more slowly than
expected.
 
TV COMMENTS
I was very impressed with WABU-68's first televised contest.  The picture
was as clear as NESN or Prime, and replays were usually pretty good
and on the mark.  Dale Arnold did a superb job on play-by-play, and Mike
Eruzione's color work was enjoyable.  Whenever a school does its own
games, it's not unusual to have the telecast be ridiculously one-sided
and the announcers biased (see: Lowell, WNDS-50; UNH, WMUR-9).  But
these guys called it like it was.  Arnold was clearly prepared as he
liberally used the names of the opposing players (and even had bits of
trivia on several), as opposed to WNDS-50 where this was typical last
year: "Murray to Henry, shot - save, a great chance for UMass-Lowell...
and it comes to UNH...now UNH brings it up...and there's a shot by UNH,
but Roloson makes another great save for UMass-Lowell."
 
I was especially interested to see how Eruzione would handle his job since
he is also now a BU assistant.  Yet he was very objective and didn't
hesitate to praise UNB or criticize the BU players, either for bad
penalties or bad plays.  Early on when UNB had a goal disallowed after it
appeared the player had kicked it in, Eruzione noted that the key was
whether it was intentionally kicked (it definitely went off the skate) and
that it was a tough call to make.  When Lachance complained to the referee
about a call, Eruzione interjected that he was wrong and that the call
was a good one.  Things like this make it more believable to the viewers
(many of whom won't be BU fans) when Eruzione makes a point in BU's favor.
 
About the only thing I could complain about is that by tuning into this
game, I thought I could get away from the tiresome Ted Kennedy-Mitt Romney
muckraking currently going on in Massachusetts (the Senate race).  But
every commercial break included one or more attacks by one of these two
boneheads on the other.  I suppose that if their advertising dollars help
bring us college hockey, we can put up with it until November. :-)  I just
hope WABU can find someone else to advertise in their place once one of
them wins and they are finished making a joke of the political process. :-)
 
UNB plays an afternoon exhibition at BC Sunday to round out the slate of
HE exhibitions against Canadian schools.  BU has its Alumni Game next
weekend (Sat 10/22, 7 pm) while the rest of HE begins its regular season
schedule.  It sounds like many current NHLers from BU will be playing if
the strike/lockout continues, so it might be a fun evening for fans who
can't get to the area's "real" game that night, Mass Amherst at Mass Lowell.
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                                            [log in to unmask]
Cabletron Systems, Inc.                                    *HMM* 11/13/93
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