"It Was Pathetic"

Matt Nieto had a goal and one
assist in the loss.
(photo by Matt Dresens)

The words of Jack Parker following BU's embarrassing 5-4 loss to the College of the Holy Cross.

HC went up 1-0 early in period one, before BU took a 2-1 lead on goals from Sahir Gill and Alex Chiasson. Holy Cross would go on to score the next four goals before Chiasson picked up a shorthanded goal and Matt Nieto hit one with about six minutes left.

I'm not going to recap the game any further, but I am going to point out things BU needs to change... Fast.

It seems ever since the '09 National Championship season BU can not "get up" to play teams lesser than themselves. Lets all face it, Holy Cross is a team that will be lucky to win 15 games this season. If BU can't wake up and take every team seriously that they play, its going to be another really frustrating year, similar to last season. They're called"easy wins" if you play the way you're supposed to. Letting Holy Cross come into Agganis and score four straight goals is not getting the job done.

Good teams take care of teams that are supposedly inferior. BU has to stop "playing down to the other teams level" if they want to go anywhere this season.

Fine. If BU can't "get up" to play teams that are supposedly lesser opponents, then don't schedule them. BU played Denver like it was the National Championship game, and they came out with a W. Granted, DU came back to make things very interesting, but all in all BU played a very solid game. Since BU has to fill out a non-confrence schedule why not play some of the top teams in the nation. It works out better in the long run. If BU wins, it scores major points in the PairWise and if they lose it dosen't effect they're PWR rank as greatly as it would to lose to a team like Holy Cross. I know its way to early to put any weight at all into the PairWise, but the Terriers started the night in 8th and dropped all the way out of the rankings following this loss. If they had won, it would have been relatively irrelevant as HC (prior to last nights game) was not ranked at all in the PWR. With the win over BU, HC has jumped all the way to something like 15th. See, HC's win helped them far more then it would have if BU won.

Bring Back the '90's 
Yes, the days when Nirvana dominated the radio and the Cowboy's were "America's Team", BU was dominating college hokey. BU took no prisoners against teams that were weaker than themselves. Example; The Terriers played Princeton in the Badger Shootout in Madison Wisconsin over the holiday break in 1996. BU won the game 10-2. Granted it was a tournament game so its a little easier to be excited about playing, but the point is BU knew they were the better team and they sure as hell showed it. Oh, and if its so easy to "get up" for a tournament game, someone explain to me how BU lost 6-2 to to Brown last year in the Shillelagh tourney out in Chicago.

It still makes zero sense to me how BU lost last night. Unlike the Providence loss where the team arrived at the rink late and players did not even have time to tape their sticks, BU was at home with no game to look ahead to the following night. Nope, I guess this is just a case of  bad coaching. How can BU not be prepared to play Holy Cross. IT MAKES NO SENSE.

Ok, yes, Teams have "off nights", but for three years, BU has been having these "off nights" on a regular basis. A team with a slue of high round draft picks should not have 2,3,4 bad games in a month. The '09 team had one bad stretch where they lost 2 out of 3. Two to Vermont and one to UMass with a win over Northeastern in-between. But really, how bad a stretch was that, as Vermont made the Frozen Four and both games were 4-3 losses. What I'm trying to say is that every team ever created, good or bad, will find themselves down in a game and will lose once in awhile. Having several bad games over a season is not a recipe for a championship team, something a number of people said was posable from this BU squad.

I leave you with a Bill Belichick quote from the resent "A Football Life" documentary on NFL Network. "I Just Cant get get this team to play the way we need to play. Its so f*cking frustrating." Yes Bill, its frustrating as hell to watch BU play the way they do sometimes.