Jack Parker Postgame Transcript

I thought this was probably the best game we’ve been involved in all year. They played very, very well. They really played well on their power play and had us going all over the place. Their special teams were great tonight. I thought they did a good job killing penalties.

I thought Kieran Millan was the star of our game. He made some big saves. He was poised. I think every one of their goals was just on the doorstop, just banging it home. And the last one especially, the one that tied it up was a tough one. Shattenkirk was just going for the puck and was just about to pick it up and somebody made a great play to lift his stick up and Shatty didn’t know he was there, and then it bounced out to somebody else and our goaltender didn’t have a chance.

Obviously, he makes a great save on the breakaway after we turned the puck over and then we had a chance to go into overtime and win it. Brian Kelley told me we have not lost an overtime game in Hockey East since 2003. I have to check to make sure that is correct. That sounds very bizarre to me, but that would be a pretty good statement.

So, we go 3-for-7 on our power plays and they go 2-for-5. Pretty even there, I guess. Colby Cohen gets another overtime goal. I was impressed with the speed of the game by both teams. It was up and down the ice.

On if they have found their identity and are ready to break out:
I thought we had already done that when we came back after break. I thought we were settled in with who we were going to be. We played very well against UMass and got a big win. We played very well against BC at Fenway until the third period when we tried to give them the game and took those penalties. But I thought we played a very thorough game that night.

And then we went down to Providence and although we lost, I thought we played pretty well there, too. We attempted over 70 shots, we were pretty sharp. And then I thought we were going through the motions and tried to give the game away to Merrimack.

I was very, very disappointed and that’s why we had a brutal practice for them on Tuesday skating-wise, and then I got into them pretty good after that as far as showing them what I disliked. And then they got into each other pretty good for the next two days. That, I think, certainly got them focused. You practice the way you have to play, and those practices were pretty intense.

On the history of giving away leads in the third period and how that has changed since break:
I think it’s probably, we’re not casual. When that’s happened to us in the past, it was because we were, eh. UNH, we just gave them two goals when they beat us in our building coming back in the third period. We gave them two goals and one off the faceoff, and a bad goal up there the night before. The RPI game, we were sleepwalking and gave them the game. It wasn’t like they pummeled us. We were just, eh.

[BC] is a good team we played, this team can push it on you and you’re going to have to bend but not break. But we also had chances in the third period as well and obviously won it in overtime. It wasn’t like we were in our end all night hanging on for dear life. I thought one of the differences was they had more pressure on us when we were a man up than we had pressure on them when they were a man up. We got more power play goals than they did, but they had us very uncomfortable on our power plays and we didn’t make them uncomfortable enough on their power plays.

On big players stepping up tonight:
I thought they all did. I thought almost everybody had better games tonight than they had in the last couple. Similar to the last BC game, I thought our guys played well then too, our most important guys. We shortened the bench to 10 players. We benched a couple of freshman forwards. Other than that, Popko kept playing and Megan kept playing. It wasn’t like we were getting legless. You can do that a little easier because of the TV timeouts. If it were a no TV game, it would have been difficult for us. And you don’t know how long the overtime is. It might take a while in the overtime too.

On switching Joe Pereira and Vinny Saponari:
I just wanted to, frankly, reward Joey a little bit for the way he’s been playing, but also send a message to Vinny that, you know, you got to play harder. I wanted to get Vinny back on the power play unit because Joey doesn’t play the power play often so I got him back on there and that made it a little easier to keep him on that line. But the reason why I definitely kept him on that line and will keep him on that line tomorrow is because he played very, very hard tonight.

Did Vinny get the message?
They all got the message tonight. Who knows what will happen tomorrow night. I thought everybody got the message, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll get the right message tomorrow. And I’d like to look at some of the penalties we took and see how stupid we were because that was another message, we have to stay out of the box, and we didn’t do that too well.

On changes for the UNH game:
There will probably be a couple of changes. In general, you’re right. If we continued to play the way we played against Merrimack, it would have been 7-1 tonight the other club and we would have had a whole new everything, as Mickey Rivers once said.

On changing the forecheck style in the third after BC tied it up:
Right then, we decided to change our forecheck and try to get much more aggressive because we were back on our heels a little bit. We did that and we got a little bit more life right off the bat. And there were also a couple of TV timeouts and they made us a little fresher and it gave us a chance to play three lines regularly, and that was when we started to go to three lines and it worked out pretty well.

We were doing a bit of a conservative forecheck. Most of the time we play BC, we play that, but we changed it tonight in the third just to give it a little bit of a different look.

On the feisty practices this week:
Tuesday’s practice was a perfect practice speed-wise and intensity-wise, but Wednesday’s practice was a little antsy. They were getting after each other pretty good. There were two fights, there were a lot of kids bumping each other. The two guys that got in the biggest fight were roommates and buddies. I think that helps a team to get jacked up and it says we’re ready to play, we’ve had enough of that stuff. And I’m not going to let you do that to me, never mind the next couple we’re playing.

On using the word poise to describe Millan:
I think it has [been used] since he’s been back. I thought he’s been very solid since he’s been back and looking like Kieran Millan. I’ve had no problem with him at all. Even down in Providence, I thought he played very, very well. Two goals tipped in by our defensemen, and they got some good opportunities so he had to make some big saves. He had to make over 40 saves tonight, didn’t he?

On Wade Megan:
I don’t know if it was Joe or just that he’s feeling comfortable, he’s feeling more confident. He’s going to be a real good player in this league. One of the things that we had problems with him was how well he was playing down low defensively. He’s much more reliable now, he looks sharp doing that, and if he’s good at that he’s going to be a great college hockey player because he can do a lot of things offensively.

On grade-A chances:
I thought most parts of the game were pretty good except right at the crease. Two of them were power-play goals where they just worked it to the guy and he tipped it in. One of them was a read. We left the guy out front a little bit too early, because the defenseman thought we had him, he could have just left him. The guy in the corner wasn’t going to score a goal and we just left him a little bit too early. There’s still big room for improvement there because we gave them too many opportunities that way.

On blocking shots:
I thought we blocked a lot in the first and second period. I don’t know how many we blocked in the third period, but I know we blocked a lot in the first two. I know that for sure because we were talking about it after the second period.