Maine D Brett Clark looks like a shoo-in for the Hockey East All-Rookie Team, but in the midst of a rough season for Merrimack, one of the bright spots has been the unexpectedly superb play of freshman defenseman Darrel Scoville. Scoville's 19 points (4-15--19) are, officially, the most by a rookie Merrimack D since Bryan Miller had 2-19--21 in 1989-90. That is, the most since the team joined HE and has played fulltime DivI. Scoville will likely break Miller's record, as 7 games remain in the regular season. Most of his points have come in HE play, too (3-8--11). Mark Cornforth has easily been the best Merrimack D since 1989, but Scoville seems to be playing even better than Cornforth did in his rookie season of 1991-92, when he had 1-9--10 in 23 games (injury-shortened thanks to Scott Pellerin :-)). Cornforth was known for his one-man rushes up ice that sparked the offense and helped lead them to big wins like last season's upset at BU. Scoville has come on after a slow start to the point where he looks like a clone of Cornforth, and this bodes very well for the upcoming years. The team needs a quarterback from the point now that Cornforth is gone, and Scoville has gradually become the leader in that area. Apparently NESN thinks highly of him too, since they chose him for the first intermission interview tonight and Bob Norton put him in a class with Clark and Marty Reasoner as HE's best rookies. Scoville talked about how the fact that he has received a lot of ice time has given him confidence, and from what I have seen, he has certainly played like a veteran confidence-wise. The question is, what other HE freshman defensemen might also deserve mention as All-Rookie? There aren't many other freshman Ds in the league this year, but besides that, few Ds in general are playing as well as Scoville has played. Clark picked up an assist tonight and has 4-24--28. Would Scoville fare as well as Clark pointwise on a team like Maine that is much better than Merrimack offensively? One interesting factor is that both players are getting a lot of ice time as rookies and both have similar +/- ratings (entering tonight, +2 overall for Clark, even for Scoville). I don't normally put a large weight on +/-, but it is bound to be something that the coaches consider when voting. Clark probably has the edge on Scoville defensively, but Scoville has still been one of Merrimack's better defensemen at both ends. At any rate, you'll forgive me for trying to find the silver lining in this cloud, I'm sure. :-) --- --- Mike Machnik [log in to unmask] *HMM* 11/13/93 >> Co-owner of the College Hockey Lists at University of Maine System << ***** Unofficial Merrimack Hockey home page located at: ***** ***** http://www.tiac.net/users/machnik/MChockey/MChockey.html ***** HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.