Okay, I’ve been getting shit for not writing more, and between suddenly having more viewers (even if most of you are BU fans) and how jacked up I am about the Pats game, I feel like giving a quick post about tomorrow’s Yale game.

Unfortunately, due to training for my recent promotion, I won’t be able to attend, but Matt will apparently be making the trip down to the only hockey arena in the country that is literally shaped like a whale. There, he will watch UMass play the current #15 team in the country and #8 in the Pairwise, a game that will pretty much make or break their already-slim chances of playing their way back into the at-large picture. Getting swept by Colgate dropped them out of the Teams Under Consideration bubble, but remember, after Yale, they also have one against one of the two New Hampshire schools, who are currently 2nd and 3rd in the rankings. If UMass continues its up-and-down rollercoaster ride back in the right direction, a couple wins to close out 2012 would get them back into the mix at least; of course by that logic they’ll probably somehow lose to Bemidji State in between.

Mark will probably have a more hockey-intensive preview tomorrow, but the Bulldogs come off a winless home weekend of their own, getting smoked 6-1 by RPI and then tying Union 2-2. They’re led by senior Antoine Laganiere and junior Kenny Agostino, who have combined for 14 of their 33 goals on the season. Senior Jeff Malcolm has played a majority of the minutes in net, with a 2.45 GAA in 9 games (remember, the Ivy League teams start later in the season because they’re ever so much smarter than you or I.)

Honestly, we have next to no material for this game, because it’s fucking Yale and really, other than the aforementioned rink shaped like a Yale, we don’t know what we can do to make fun of them.

Really, there’s no good material to work with here. They’re in Connecticut, but it’s Yale, nobody thinks of Yale when they think about things they hate about Connecticut, not with that dump a little up the road in Storrs. Plus, New Haven’s not the worst place ever, despite the numerous warnings Matt is getting from those who know better than us. (He already lives in Springfield. Please.) I even tried Googling “Yale hockey sucks” to see what other ECAC schools’ fans were saying about Yale, but then I remembered Cornell is the only Ivy League hockey school with fans, and they apparently couldn’t care less. And how can you hate on Yale when you find out they were responsible for this?

I even tried looking at their list of notable alumni (which, as you might have guessed, is rather lengthy). But for every George W. Bush who went there, there’s a Bill “Greatest Man of All Time, Non-Kublin Division” Clinton. Clarence Thomas went there, but so did Sonia Sotomayor. My high school sophomore English teacher who drew triangles under everything she wrote on the board to emphasize points and said “umm” and “like” every other sentence went there, but so did the eloquent Silver Fox himself, Anderson Cooper. It’s a wash.

Here’s hoping Matt finds some hilarity to tweet about during the game, because we may have to resort to making our own fun. And when we do that, this tends to happen.

Lol but seriously, a win would be swell. Not only can we not fall back on toothpaste jokes after another loss – we really got nothin’ at all to work with. Thanks, Yale. (Assholes.)

– Max

Ah, the end of a season, the time of year where we start questioning whether Derek Kellogg really knows what he’s doing, or why we even waste our time on a football program headed by the worst coach in the history of the sport, or…huh? What’s that you say? Optimism, huh?

Let’s get the bad out of the way first: the state of our fine ice hockey team is, as Darrelle Revis might put it, “in total disarray.” Well, maybe not that bad (nothing is), but it’s certainly got us, as drunk Max might put it, “a slightly bit concerned.” We don’t know what will happen with Toot – is this his final season? Does the school have a backup plan if it is? Will he decide he wants to stick around and will the school want him around if so? Are we possibly sort of fucked no matter what?

Look, we love Toot around these parts. His commitment to the Pioneer Valley and the school, his willingness to call out Hockey East’s corrupt officials and his own players alike, his CVS composition notebooks and ridiculous voice, the whole she-bang. But we’re equally torn about whether he’s ever going to be able to bring this program to the “next level.” He’s certainly had a few shining moments in his tenure, those moments being 2004 and 2007, but we’ve now seen three straight one-and-done seasons at the hands of BC. In Toot’s defense, the last of these exits followed a two-game series where UMass thoroughly outplayed the Eagles for two straight games and lost two consecutive snakebitten heartbreakers, with no help from some questionable officiating (although the Minutemen did get away with some things in both games after the damage was already done – proof that make-up calls and non-calls don’t necessarily work out for the team getting them).

A full season post-mortem isn’t really our thing, and we can’t pretend we’d do a better job of it than the three-sided one already did. (Besides, I’m a couple weeks late on that. Deal with it.) But you have to see this year as an improvement. The team won roughly twice as many games, managed not to embarrass itself against the “big three” of BC, BU and Maine, actually won the regular-season series against the Eagles, and did all of this despite virtually zero collegiate goaltending experience coming into the year. What do they lose going into the next year? Two top-liners, Hobbs and Syner, and Mike Marcou, whose single-year evolution from “worst defenseman in the conference” to “actually pretty good most of the time” had to account for at least a couple of wins. Syner is a dynamic player whose absence will be missed, and Hobbs is another Chase Langeraap – a solid player and good scorer who unfortunately never really met his potential due to injuries.

Next year’s team, provided nobody leaves early (note: PLEASE NOBODY LEAVE EARLY) will return that massive sophomore (now junior) class. That means dynamic scorers like Conor Sheary and Mike Pereira, scrappers like Troy Power and Pat Kiley (both of whom played very well down the stretch), and a solid defensive corps that figures to be that much better with another year under their belts. It’s also nice that juniors like Rocco Carzo and Darren Panda-Rowe-nium (aka Darren Rowe-vell) finished the season strong, as this team will need contributions from the seniors and freshmen/sophomores to support that big junior class. It would be great if this KJ Tiefenwerth fellow could step in and provide another scoring option to help fill the void Syner is leaving; I think Hobbs’s gap will be adequately filled by the improvements of the remaining players. And I think Kevin Boyle finally stepped up and earned the starting job by the end of the year. A big problem this year was the lack of a true #1 and the overall inconsistency that resulted among the goalie corps. I’d rather see Boyle be the starter and let Tegs and Mastalerz, if both stick around, compete for the #2 spot.

This will be a big test for the Toot Cahoon era. On paper, this team should be better than 8th place. This team, with two years of mostly close losses under its belt, an exciting freshman scorer coming in, and some actual experience in goal, should have what it takes to compete for a home ice spot. Toot’s due for a year where things get back on track. Both Hockey East and the UMass athletics program itself are at crossroads next year, with football upgrading, basketball finally back, lacrosse competing for a national title, and Notre Dame and (ugh) probably UConn joining Hockey East. The last train might be departing Cahoonaville if this team can’t manage a winning record next year.

End of Season Awards:

Most valuable player: TJ Syner

Barely edged out Mikey Franchise here. TJ will be missed. His speed and tenacity embodied the scrappy mentality of the team in its biggest wins of the season, and of course he led the team in points as well.

Most improved player: Mike Marcou

What can I say? We ate crow like crazy over this guy. Granted, anything would have been an improvement over last year, but it became pretty clear that his struggles last year were injury-related and, healthy this year, he was solid and consistent all year long. Irreplaceable? Eh, I wouldn’t go that far. But good enough that we’ll actually miss him, which was unthinkable a year ago. Big ups to him for proving the haters, i.e. us, wrong. (I will point out that he was my sleeper pick for most improved player earlier this year. So suck it.)

Doug Kublin Memorial Award for Kubitude: Conor Sheary

We’re a bit biased, since Derek is also from Melrose and we’ve befriended Conor’s dad, who Derek used to work with and who is a fantastic man. But Conor was absolutely an everyman for this team, taking faceoffs (and doing a damn good job of it), scoring goals both pretty and gritty, and showing that TJ isn’t the only guy on this team who can absolutely fly at times. So he wins our now yearly award for embodying the Kublin spirit, even if he didn’t exactly fly under the radar with those of us who’re paying attention. We hear he’s a humble kid, too, and we hope that he takes it upon himself to improve his game even further – he and Pereira have “devastating combo” written all over them for next season.

All Hockey East Team:

F: Spencer Abbott, Maine

F: Chris Kreider, BC

F: Brian Flynn, Maine

D: Brian Dumoulin, BC

D: Chad Ruhwedel, Lowell

G: Doug Carr, Lowell

League MVP: Spencer Abbott, Maine

Rookie of the Year: Scott Wilson, Lowell

Coach of the Year: Norm Bazin, Lowell

————————-

I’ll go ahead and break this into two parts, BS Report style. Stay tuned for my basketball wrap-up and overall thoughts, probably later on tonight.

– Max

This.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Breaking Bad lately. (Okay, definitely. I just caught up on four seasons in the last 3 weeks or so.) But the last two weeks of UMass hockey has me feeling like Walter White, down in the crawlspace, alternately screaming and laughing maniacally as it all falls apart. (I won’t spoil anything else here for those who haven’t seen it, but here’s the scene I’m referring to. It’s one of the greatest 2 1/2 minute scenes in TV history.)

Of course UMass would find a way to stick around in back-to-back huge games at Northeastern and Merrimack. And of course they’d find a way to lose both games, one just moments into overtime and the other in the waning seconds, in a scene so reminiscent of opening night (at Northeastern, coincidentally) and so painfully predictable that all you can do is laugh.

And of fucking COURSE! they would go out the next weekend, clinging to their playoff lives, and get their first road win of the season, and first-ever win on the road against a top-ranked team, in a venue that has been a house of horrors ever since it opens its shiny-but-overpriced doors, only to come out the next night, with the same goalie and same lineup, and sleep through the first ten minutes of the game. Oh, and just as a bonus teaser, they rallied down 4-1 and 5-3 to pull within a goal with a few minutes left, and even got a gift power play, and proceeded to fail to take advantage of it.

Four games. Two points, with six more left on the table thanks to continued poor play at the beginning and end of games. UMass could’ve been in a position to leapfrog Maine with a sweep next weekend. But alas, here we go again, six games to go, dogfighting for eighth in a ten-team league for the fifth year in a row. Wait, wait, don’t tell me – they’re gonna win juuust enough, and catch enough lucky breaks, to sneak in as a “dangerous” #8, where they’ll proceed to lose a pair of heartbreakers at Conte Forum again. Pretty sure that episode is a rerun.

You know what’s more heartbreaking? This team, charmed as they’ve been to catch those breaks and sneak in as eighth, might have been better off missing the playoffs in those years. We’ve been tirelessly optimistic that Cahoon and his staff have been on the brink of figuring it out the last few years. It’s getting so very, very hard to keep that attitude. UMass is a snag with the coaching situation now, almost surely without the funds to make a coaching change thanks to the disgusting amount of money Kevin Morris will be getting from the state in order to protect our football team from having to be run any further into the ground by him. Playoffs or no playoffs, there’s no way Toot’s not coaching his final year of his contract unless he retires.

Look, I’ll say it again: Don Cahoon is, by all accounts, a fine human being, a great hockey mind, and a man the community is lucky to have. But it’s time to face the obvious – any other school in this conference would have already fired him by now. Look around the league at the schools that have made coaching changes this year. Hell, Lowell’s in first place. Lowell. And Providence has taken strides since shedding a longtime anchor as well. Northeastern’s had their struggles under Madigan, but they also lost the most talent on the ice in that group. Changing coaches isn’t some kind of magic bullet that’s guaranteed to improve things, but honestly, at this point, what choice do we have? BU head coach/evil Disney villain Jack Parker, who would certainly know about these sorts of things, was bewildered in interviews before and after the game by UMass’s lack of success this season. He thinks they’re too talented to struggle like this. Too fast, too skilled. If that’s not an indictment of our current coaching staff, I don’t know what is.

Next season we lose a guy who’s become an improbable anchor of the blue line in Marcou, and two of our most talented forwards in Syner and Hobbs. Certainly, production that is replaceable. But the vaunted Blaise MacDonald recruiting line has yet to land anyone who looks as program-changing as a Scott Wilson or a Chad Ruhwedel. Certainly, the nucleus that returns – talented forwards like Guzzo, Sheary and Pereira, a much-improved blue line, and three goalies with some playing time under their belts – shows a lot of promise.

But I’ve been saying that for far too long. Beyond next year, how this program positions itself in its recruitment of both players and Toot’s replacement (assuming next year is, indeed, his last) will go a long, long way to determining how soon this program escapes this perennial Groundhog Day-esque spring purgatory.

– Max

P.S. That’s enough negativity for one post. I know I’ve been slacking on articles, but I’ll have my slightly-more-optimistic basketball catch-up article up this week. Keep in mind that it’s a lot more fun to write these after a win.