Terriers move past Beanpot disappointment with weekend series against Providence

By Arielle Aronson/DFP Staff

With a dissatisfying Beanpot in the rearview mirror, the No. 15 Boston University men’s hockey team is looking forward to more pressing issues – namely securing a home-ice playoff spot by moving as high up in the Hockey East standings as possible.

The road to those Hockey East hopes begins this weekend as the Terriers (14-9-7, 11-5-5 Hockey East) play a home-and-home series against the Providence Friars. BU will play just its third home game in the last 71 days on Friday before traveling down to Providence on Saturday for a 7 p.m. game.

“It’s huge,” senior co-captain Joe Pereira said of the upcoming six game stretch. “It’s going to make it or break it for our year. We set some goals and we didn’t win the Beanpot, but another goal was getting home ice for the playoffs. We can still control our own destiny that way, so [losing the Beanpot] still hurts but we had to get over it, move on and get ready for a big weekend against Providence.”

The Terriers last faced the Friars (7-14-7, 3-12-6 HE) on October 23 at Agganis Arena. Junior goaltender Kieran Millan was eight seconds away from a shutout in BU’s 2-1 victory and sophomore defenseman Ryan Ruikka scored his first collegiate goal that night.

It has been another long season for the Friars, who have not won a college hockey game since December 11 when they beat Quinnipiac 5-2 (They have won three exhibition games since then including taking a pair from New Brunswick and beating the U.S. Under-18 team 5-4). Providence also has the second worst power play in the nation, coming in at 9.3% by converting on just 12 of 129 chances.

But as BU learned on Monday, any team is a threat at any time, and Providence has not been an easy foe for the Terriers in recent history. The Friars have taken three of their last seven games against BU.

“One of the things is that their style of play, the real ‘slow down in their own zone and keeping you outside’ has an effect on us where we play down to that speed,” BU coach Jack Parker said. “They can slow it down and we don’t pick it up. We also talked about how good they are on the forecheck and how it’s going to be real important for us to be able to get the puck out of our zone, especially through center ice, without turning the puck over.”

BU faces a challenge in Providence goaltender Alex Beaudry, who maintains a .902 save percentage despite the struggling team in front of him. The Terriers will counter him with junior goaltender Kieran Millan, who is expected to start both games this weekend. In Millan’s last eight conference games, he holds a 5-2-1 record with a stellar .938 save percentage, but Millan, like many, struggled in the Beanpot consolation game.

“He wasn’t happy with himself at all that night,” Parker said. “He was one of many who wasn’t prepared to play, wasn’t prepared to focus for 60 minutes. I thought he made some big saves too, but that wasn’t the type of game we expected from him.”

On the other end of the ice, BU plans to change its lines around this weekend in order to relieve some of freshman forward Charlie Coyle’s workload and to try to generate more offense. On the top line, Coyle will move over to right wing while freshman forward Sahir Gill will take his place as the top line center. Senior co-captain Chris Connolly will remain as the line’s left wing.

“I think we’re wearing Charlie Coyle out a little bit playing center,” Parker said. “He’s had a great year for us, he’s a real good player and he’s the leading freshman scorer in the league, which is nice, but I don’t think he’s playing the way he can play. If we can get him a little less tired working down low he might be more effective for us at the end of it.”

Senior co-captain Joe Pereira will move down to third line right wing with sophomore forward Wade Megan moving over to left wing and sophomore center Ross Gaudet filling in at center. The Pereira/Gaudet pairing has worked well for the Terriers in the past. The duo spent most of the second half of last season on the same line, and Gaudet scored seven of his ten goals last season with Pereira as his winger.

While the Beanpot memories still sting, the Terriers are trying to use that disappointment to fuel the team and bring everybody together for this stretch run.

“We just said be disappointed and we should be mad about it, but we have to move on as a team,” Pereira said. “It stinks, but we got bigger things ahead of us to worry about right now.”

Game Notes:

The final forward lines are expected to look as follows:
Connolly – Gill – Coyle
Nieto – Trivino – Chiasson
Megan – Gaudet – Pereira
Courtnall – Rosen – Gilroy/Santana

• Junior defenseman David Warsofsky did not look that great on the scoresheet from Monday’s game, but Parker said he did think Warsofsky made some of the improvements that the coaching staff was looking for after benching him for last Friday’s game against UMass-Amherst.

  “If you watch the first period of the Harvard game, he was moving the puck all over the place, sending guys in, making great passes, wasn’t hanging on to it,” Parker said. “I thought when we got the five minute power play he kind of reverted back to holding on to it too much sometimes. In general, he played better and he did the things that we asked him to do, and he did them at a pretty good pace. We want him to play with a little bit more pace and a little bit more intensity defensively.”

• Pereira said he is still suffering from a lateral/high ankle sprain but is expected to play through the injury this weekend. Pereira entered Monday night’s matchup already suffering from an ankle sprain, and then he was hit into the boards at the end of the first period by Harvard’s Daniel Moriarty, who was assessed with a five-minute hitting from behind penalty and given a game misconduct for the hit. Pereira struggled to get up after the hit, but he said the injury he suffered there was just a further exacerbation of the original ankle sprain.