{"id":30830,"date":"2009-12-03T22:25:55","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T04:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uscho.com\/2009\/12\/03\/this-week-in-ecac-hockey-dec-3-2009\/"},"modified":"2010-08-17T19:57:33","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T00:57:33","slug":"this-week-in-ecac-hockey-dec-3-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/2009\/12\/03\/this-week-in-ecac-hockey-dec-3-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in ECAC Hockey: Dec. 3, 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"
Double-Barreled<\/h4>\n
Pop quiz, hockey nuts: Who is the only ECAC Hockey freshman to currently leading his team in scoring outright? <\/p>\n
St. Lawrence’s Kyle Flanagan? Almost; he’s tied with senior Mike McKenzie atop the Saints’ scoring list. <\/p>\n
Brandon Pirri? Jerry D’Amigo? Nice try, but Chase Polacek has ’em beat by a half-dozen points. Andrew Miller? Well, I’ll give you credit for knowing the under-the-radar Bulldog, but he’s not the answer either.<\/p>\n
Try this name on for size: Chris Zaires. The Brown rookie has three goals and six points in nine games for rebuilding Bruno, and while those aren’t big numbers, they lead the team nonetheless and make him one of only four ECAC frosh who have tallied a point per game. (Flanagan, Miller, and Harvard’s Louis Leblanc are the others.)<\/p>\n
I’ll tell you one thing: While you may not be familiar with the pesky 5-foot-11 native of Aberdeen, N.J., I assure you that your school’s coach is in the loop. With multi-point games against Providence, Yale and Connecticut, Zaires is developing himself as a key playmaking cog in the new-look Bears’ lineup.<\/p>\n
That lineup bellyflopped into the pool this season, but the sting of an 0-7-1 start is beginning to fade in light of consecutive wins against UConn and Harvard.<\/p>\n
“I think some of it’s confidence,” first-year coach Brendan Whittet said of his team’s early-season trials. “You’re talking about a group of guys … that were probably all successful at some point in their junior or prep school or youth hockey careers. It just hasn’t translated in their careers at Brown; there have been a lot of downs, and I think that’s tough to overcome. Even when you are experiencing success during a game, during a shift, when you’re up and having a good period, in some aspects you’re maybe almost expecting — mentally — for the other shoe to drop. When’s something bad going to happen?”<\/p>\n
The shoe dropped in the season opener at Princeton, where a ferocious effort by the Bears fell by the wayside in a 1-0 overtime loss. The shoe dropped at Union a week later, where 2-0 and 3-1 leads evaporated into a 3-3 draw. It dropped again at home against Yale, where Bruno fought back from 4-1 and 5-2 deficits to force overtime; a bad read led to a 3-on-1 for Yale’s top line, which simply doesn’t miss. Yale 6, Brown 5, final. <\/p>\n
Even against Atlantic Hockey opponent Bentley — in Providence — the clog hit the carpeting, as Brown failed to hold a 2-1 lead with 16 minutes to play.<\/p>\n
“The one thing that guys have done pretty much every night is that they’ve competed very hard, each and every period,” Whittet said. “They battle, and that’s what I’ve asked of them, but when you don’t get results, you come out on the short end too many times, it’s hard on the guys. It can wear on them.”<\/p>\n
But then, last Saturday, the Bears finally orchestrated an effort that even the most heartbreakingly wacky of fluke bounces couldn’t have defeated. Five goals and 18 shots in 17:01 chased UConn starter Brad McInnis from the ice, and Mike Clemente made 24 saves on 25 shots as Bruno rolled to its first win of the season, 8-1. The eight goals were the most the program had scored in nearly six years … one day short, actually, of the anniversary of an 8-0 pasting of St. Lawrence, which was also the last time Brown had a winning margin of seven goals or more.<\/p>\n
The Bears then doubled their fun by hog-tying Harvard in a 4-1 victory on Tuesday. The win (which included two empty-net goals in the game’s final minute) signified the third straight for the Providence crew over their Cambridge rivals, dating to last year’s ECAC Hockey first round in which the Bears stunned the Crimson with consecutive shutouts on enemy ice.<\/p>\n
Two wins are great, but Whittet made an unusual remark for a coach in admitting that his team isn’t skillfully equal to its league opposition this year.<\/p>\n
“We have a really really razor-thin line in terms of being successful, or in terms of ultimately not being successful,” assessed the Brown coach and alumnus. “So for us, we need the 20 guys who are playing each individual game to bring their best efforts. Each and every one of them. I can’t have guys that don’t show up; we just won’t have success.”<\/p>\n
Now that his bunch has finally tasted some victory juice, Whittet may muse freely about what has been going right, for once.<\/p>\n
“I think we’ve been more responsible defensively,” he said. “We were really struggling early in the year with individual defensive mistakes, lost battles in our zone, or poor reads defensively. I think guys have stepped up and done a better job along those lines. <\/p>\n
“We’ve got some really good performances out of our offensive guys: Chris Zaires is putting up a point a game, Jordan Pietrus has been tremendous all year — he’s a great leader, and he fires a ton of pucks at the net every night.<\/p>\n
“I think we’re a pretty good team when we’ve got the puck down low. We’ve got some big forwards, we’ve got some strong forwards, and we’ve got some guys who are able to wheel pretty good down there.”<\/p>\n
One predictable storyline that has stuck to Brown Hockey in recent years, however, is going to have to change. So says the coach.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want to give up shots,” he said. “A shot’s a shot, and it’s a scoring opportunity. It’s an opportunity for a second or third rebound chance. I don’t want to give up 43 shots a night like we did against Harvard; I don’t think that will lead to any sustained success. [That said,] I think Mike did a good job, I think he saw a lot of the puck, and I think our defensemen did a pretty good job boxing out. For the most part, [Clemente] will be successful if he can see the puck, as will any goalie … but that’s not a recipe for success in the long haul.”<\/p>\n
Poll Cats<\/h4>\n
Last week, the Bobcats cracked USCHO’s top 10 for the first time in history; this week, they made a little more headway in that department. Quinnipiac is now ranked fourth in the nation, and received seven of 50 first-place votes from our diverse pool of voters. Not only have the ‘Cats never received top votes, nor ever been this high in the poll, but in careful (albeit non-comprehensive) searching, your loyal correspondent was unable to find any other No. 4 with so many No. 1 nominations. (If anyone wants to attempt to prove me wrong, I stopped looking at 2005-06’s polls.<\/a> By all means, start at ’04-05 and continue working back. I won’t be holding my breath, though.)<\/p>\n