The ride from Brown University’s Meehan Auditorium to Providence College’s Schneider Arena isn’t a very long trip across Providence.
It only takes two or three miles to head down College Hill, and the drive largely avoids the busy downtown area around Federal Hill and the Providence Place Mall. It stays on the periphery, and with green lights and no traffic, it might only take 10 minutes to go across I-95 with a quick stop at a local Dunkin.’
It’s actually a shorter road trip than any of Hockey East’s Boston-based rivalries, but on last Saturday night, Brown head coach Brendan Whittet wished the trip would have taken a little bit longer after his team claimed its first Mayor’s Cup in six years with a 3-2 over the then-No. 8 Friars.
“It’s a ride you want to extend a little bit longer, but it was nice to end that drought,” said Brown coach Brendan Whittet. “We had been doing pretty good (winning two of four titles in the mid-2010s), but there was nothing better than beating Providence at Schneider and coming away with a trophy. Being able to bring it back to Meehan is a huge accomplishment, and it’s well-earned.”
The win embodied a shift for a Brown team that lost three straight one-goal games earlier in the year, and it broke through a previously-constructed barrier around weekend wins. An unkind November sent the Bears up to Harvard and Dartmouth after the year began with a weekend split against travel partner Yale, and consecutive series against Quinnipiac and Princeton, and Cornell and Colgate forced them into a corner with an early, uphill battle defined by missed opportunities borne from some inconsistencies.
Those results were perfect indicators of both Brown’s successes and struggles as the season ramped up. Against Colgate, Matthieu Caron made 42 saves, but the team surrendered a third period goal to force overtime, where it lost 3-2 after a second period rally turned a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 advantage. One week earlier, Brown went toe-to-toe with Quinnipiac but gave up two power play goals as part of a 4-3 loss. The next night, the flashes shown against a top-ranked team disappeared in a 1-0 loss to Princeton.
“The guys had been playing some good hockey, but it was just a little inconsistent,” Whittet said. “It was a period or a shift, but it wasn’t a complete game, and it was a little self-inflicted where we’d been in the box too much. We’d seen glimpses, and I think it infused our locker room with a belief that if we continued to play physically, with pace, and with fast transitions, we could be really good.”
The breakthrough came this last weekend when the Bears fought past a physical Holy Cross team before banging home the win over Providence. They largely avoided the penalty box against the Crusaders and scored twice in the third period to earn a 3-0 shutout, and they avoided the letdown associated with a third period goal the next night after the second period staked them to a 3-1 lead over the Friars. Brown again avoided costly penalties and used its ability to score in bunches to pile momentum in the second period.
The offense clicked, and two goals by Ryan Bottrill offered a glimpse at which players might step into the offensive void left by the volume of scoring that departed in the off-season. He added an assist against Boston College on Tuesday, an added consistency after having two assists against Quinnipiac earlier this year.
He bolstered the shared responsibility of an attack with seven players with multiple goals in the first seven games and helped address an area of need. The defense, meanwhile, has only allowed about a half of a goal per game more than the offense scored, and Caron’s steady presence placed him among the 15 best goalies’ save percentage in the early goings.
“The two wins were great, but we really played right for six periods,” Whittet said. “When I say the right way, I mean our right way. We have to be really good defensively because we want the puck more. We need to have possession to generate offense and honestly, against some of these teams that we played that are elite teams, we want to be an elite team. It’s a process, but we made strides over the weekend.
“I know there are going to be ups and downs, but it gives us faith and belief that we can compete at a high level.”
Brown returns to action this weekend with a pair of games at LIU before heading to Clarkson and St. Lawrence to wrap up its first half. That the wins were in non-conference play are a footnote because they won’t impact the race for playoff seeding, but finding wins was key for a team that’s historically won the first game of a postseason, three-game series.
Putting the Bears into a situation where that one game advances them to the second round is a threat hanging over the second half of the season, especially given the parity under the four top teams, and the potential for opening a door on a high seed can only widen if they find their ability now rather than in deep March.
“It’s a maturation and growth process,” Whittet said. “We’re still dealing with COVID because our season was shut down, and it affected how much the seniors played. We lost three games by a goal, but it’s about tweaking it and finding the right combination of who works well together. We’re much further along this year in creating some offense and sustaining some things to play a certain style I want to play.”
