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 <<<<< Color Voice of the Merrimack Warriors (station TBA for 94-95) >>>>>