In tying New Hampshire Sunday, the men’s hockey team showed just the extent of the Huskies’ rut of mediocrity over the past decade: They scored their fifth point at UNH’s Whittemore Center since its establishment in 1995.
Nope, that’s not the fifth win, it’s the fifth point. In fact, since the 2000-01 season, the Huskies have a 0-10-2 record in the Granite State. Statistics like that just might be the reason former head coach Bruce Crowder is an assistant coach for the Portland Pirates now. Just a guess.
I’m not dumb enough to be blindly excited by a tie, but I’ll let my interest pique at this development.
Yes, the hockey team is still just 1-8-2 on the season. And yes, the Wildcats aren’t the top 25 team they have been in years past. But as annoying as it is when the term “rebuilding year” is thrown about, Northeastern is no doubt undergoing one now, and that UNH team is still 6-2-1 in Hockey East play.
About two thirds of the team’s offense comes from freshmen, as evidenced by the goals from forwards Ryan Ginand and Dennis McCauley in Sunday’s tie. It almost reached 75 percent, but a Joe Vitale shot that found the back of the net was waved off because of a high sticking call.
This season, Vitale, Matti Uusivirta (he’s from Finland) and Ginand rank second through fourth on the team in points, respectively. The offensive leader is another underclassman, sophomore forward Jimmy Russo. Those four players make up a decent core for the future to keep things interesting and put points on the board.
Many may look at the team’s current record and how it has fared over the last few years and think there isn’t much hope to revamp the struggling program. But let’s not forget what Crowder did in his first couple seasons at the Husky helm.
When he first took over for the 1996-97 season, his team went through a miserable 8-25-3 campaign. Just one year later, though, Crowder took Dog Pound fans on a 20-13-3 ride, winning nearly 60 percent of the time and projecting hope for the future which, unfortunately for those fans, never came to fruition.
With Cronin and his new style of play in place, the Huskies could, at the least, put together another strong season in the near future. Cronin is lucky enough to have about 40 percent of the team’s roster made up of freshmen so he can mold the team to his preferences early. And although it means suffering through a tough 2005-06, throwing a lot of those freshmen into the fire against strong Hockey East opponents and in Beanpot action in February will go a long way toward building experience and team chemistry.
The glaring problem right now is one Cronin already knows he needs to work on: Discipline. His team commits far too many penalties. The Huskies have already committed 120 of them for 300 minutes to their opponents’ mark of 86 for 207. And that opponents’ mark is probably a little inflated as well, because penalties will often draw more penalties from the other team.
Cronin needs to get NU to cut down on its penalty minutes – a big step toward giving the team more chances to win. If the Huskies can play a cleaner, more streamlined game, recruit a strong successor to goalie Adam Geragosian and keep extending those recruiting efforts to land more Finnish players (maybe kill two birds in one stone? Either way, Northeastern needs more town names like Espoo, Finland on its roster sheets), it would certainly be feasible to look up around this time next year and see a couple more wins than losses.
Who knows? Maybe a Beanpot is finally in order.
– Tim Coughlin can be reached at [email protected].
