Jack Parker Postgame Transcripts

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that was an exciting college hockey game. I thought after we played in a box for the first 10 or 12 minutes of the first period, I thought from then on, we really played really well. We played real hard and most of the stuff we wanted to do, we did pretty well. When you can outshoot a Cornell team like we did tonight after being down like we did, it’s pretty rare for our guys not to stay down. I thought the best part about the game was our stick-to-it-ness, our perseverance. We certainly had some legs –– we were too excited, I think. We were really pulled out of position on the breakaway goal. I’m sure Rollie would like to have the power-play goal back. Did Whitney get the first goal? [Yes] At least a former Terrier’s brother got the goal against us, you know? . . . We really started taking it to them in the second half of the first period. That’s a good sign for us, I think, to get ourselves going. Getting the shorthanded goal by Warsofsky was a great play, and we give one up again right as the power play’s going –– we almost had it killed off. That could’ve been a back-breaker, but once again, we kept working. So in general, I’d say character, what we wanted to do, we certainly deserve a tie. From that point of view, I was extremely pleased with my guys. From a speed and smarts point of view, after the first half of the first period, we gathered a little bit more smarts and still kept our speed.”

On the last time he had practiced or played with a 6-on-3:

“The 12th. The 12th of never.”

On why they practiced it this week:

“Because we wanted to do it. Why did I decide to do it after 30-some-odd years of coaching? Because my former assistant coach, Ben Smith, has been hawking me to do it. He says, ‘You gotta try this.’ He took a team, he was coaching a team over in Europe, in one of those USA hockey games over in Europe, and in those games, in the second period they did it. The other team was 5-on-3, they brought the other guy out, and Ben told me his three guys never touched the puck, and both times, they scored easily. I don’t know if that was a good idea. I thought it was a very good practice, and I was talking to guys –– we’d practiced it once this week, and we practiced it from behind the net, and we put it behind the net once and we got a great chance, and then the next five times we had it we never put it behind the net again, which, there’s no sense of doing a 6-on-3 if you’re just getting an umbrella like you do 5-on-3, because the same people would be covering the same areas.”

On his penalty kill going 2-for-5, but only allowing four shots on goal:

“I thought the first one was a bad breakdown by the two forwards not recognizing who should play the point man, and the second one was, oh excuse me, that was the second one. They bumped into each other, and all of a sudden we had two forwards on the same side of the ice. Gryba was caught between a rock and a hard place and he didn’t know whether to play the guy at the top of the far circle or at our net, and they found the guy at our net just as the penalty was expiring. I thought the first power play they had, we were pathetic on, we were running all over the place. Then we settled down, and then they got a bad goal –– I’m sure Rollie would like to have that one back. It was a way off the angle wrist shot, and Rollie was way in his cage. In general, we had problems with them on their initial rush, they were getting in the zone too easily and then they’d move it around. They’ve got a 31 percent power play going right now, so we just added to that percentage tonight, that’s all.”

On the challenges of facing the Cornell power play, especially Gallagher and Greening:

“I don’t think it’s the guys –– everybody has their power-play guys. They play the exact same power play that Harvard plays, what I call the umbrella, where each side can pop up and be backdoor. When your forwards are fine, you can stop it fairly easily. Once your forwards get out of position, then you got problems. We got forwards out of position both times. One of them was not the power play . . . we blocked the shot, it went back to him, he took the puck and took the shot from below the hash mark. The other one, we moved the puck pretty well and we got caught with our forwards bumping into each other.”

On whether the recent comebacks are reminiscent of last year’s team down the stretch:

“No, not at all. The end of last year, we won something like 18 of the last 20 games. We’re under .500 if I recall our record right now. This doesn’t feel like last year at all. This week was a real good, competitive week. We talk all the time about, ‘Attitude is everything,’ and we had great attitude this week against Harvard and in this one. We still have a long way to go to prove who we’re supposed to be. Although we’re going to be who we’re supposed to be, we got a long way to show that.”

On Bonino getting his second goal of the season:

“He’s making plays for us that people are scoring goals on. I think in our last three goals against Harvard, he figured in on the other night. He figured on a pretty big one tonight. He’s the guy we depend on. We’ve got to get Trivino’s line going a little bit more –– they had some great chances tonight. I thought on the power play especially, [Zach] Cohen made a couple of fabulous passes across the crease wide open to Saponari, who just didn’t quite get a stick on it, but we gotta get that line going. But I thought, in general, Bonino’s playing like Bonino.

On bumping Chiasson to the top line in the second period:

“I was fooling with lines the entire second period because of penalties and power plays. I wasn’t sure who I had available to us, I had so many combinations going on. As it turned out, if Chiasson was playing well, I would like him to play with Bonino an Connolly. But if he’s struggling –– you know he’s just coming off the injury and he’s not in great shape yet –– but I thought he played great tonight. I thought it was one of his best games. So it was easy for me to move him back up, and Joey is a little bit better defensively playing with our third line and giving those guys a little more help defensively.”