The UMass hockey team is 3-1 and ranked No. 3 behind Denver and Minnesota State in the latest USCHO.com poll. Four games isn’t a great sample size, but it’s enough to know the Minutemen won’t collapse under the weight of losing last year’s top guns: Cale Makar, Jacob Pritchard and Mario Ferraro.
Makar and Ferraro are in the NHL and Pritchard’s playing for the Charlotte Checkers of the AHL. Coach Greg Carvel is filling the void by juggling lines, flip-flopping wings and playing all eight freshmen. He’s put co-captain Niko Hildenbrand between newcomers Cal Kiefiuk and Reed Lebster and tried an all-rookie line of Peyton Reeves, Eric Faith and Jeremy Davidson. On defense he’s paired senior Jake McLaughlin with sophomore Ty Farmer, phenom Zac Jones with sophomore Colin Felix, and is using freshmen Gianfranco Cassaro and Matthew Kessel together until Marc Del Gaizo gets healthy.
“We’ve lived off freshmen and sophomores since I got here,” Carvel told WHMP’s Donnie Moorhouse after the season opener. “I thought we were going to be older, but we’re young again.”
Carvel’s on record saying he’s never worried about his offense. They are fast and shifty and move inside the blue line like electrons spinning around an atom. During Saturday’s dominating 5-0 win against Union, 10 players hit the scoresheet. “We’re starting to figure out how to become the team we need to be,” said Carvel.
Jones leads the team in scoring with two goals and five assists. His first collegiate goal came against RPI when he took a pass from Mitchell Chaffee and rifled a shot under the crossbar. Four nights later, Kessell displayed his hard rocket shot by scoring the team’s only goal in a 2-1 loss at Northeastern.
Lebster and Bobby Trivigno are co-leaders with three goals apiece. Trivigno’s a hot dogger who needs to lay off the mustard when he tweaks the twine, the opposite of Chaffee who touches gloves or briefly raises his stick after he scores.
Veterans George Mika and Jake Gaudet have had limited ice time, and Bobby Kaiser is being nursed back into playing shape after a season-ending shoulder injury last November against UConn.
Other than a home-and-home series against Quinnipiac in late November, the Minutemen won’t face the hot iron of the cold winter schedule until early January when they play twice at Denver and two against Boston College in nine days.
Kudos to Ryan Kennedy of The Hockey News for listing the top 100 players to watch in the NCAA this year. A half dozen of the top 20 play in Hockey East — Trevor Zegras (BU), Jack Dugan (Providence), Spencer Knight (BC), Matthew Boldy (BC), Alex Newhook (BC) and Yan Kuznetsov (UConn).
Four UMass players are included — Zac Jones (23rd), John Leonard (26th), Marc Del Gaizo (52nd) and Filip Lindberg (94th).
GO FIGURE: Two weeks after beating defending national champion Minnesota-Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior, UMass-Lowell returned to Tsongas Arena and lost and tied to previously winless Colgate (0-3). … Boston College endured a 79-minute scoring drought that began against Colgate and ended in their second game against Denver. The Eagles were swept by the top-ranked Pioneers, 3-0 and 6-4, at sold-out Magness Arena in the Mile High City.
BENNETT’S UPBRINGING: Union College hockey coach Rick Bennett was born and raised in Springfield, where his father Don “Cheyenne” Bennett taught him the game. “You think Ricky’s big, (Don) was bigger. He was a roofer. He played a few games for the Mohawks,” said Bob Weiss, referring to the semipro team that played at Collins-Moylan Arena in the 1970s.
“They called him Cheyenne after the TV character Cheyenne Bodie,” said Weiss. “I heard he didn’t like that name, so I called him Donnie because I wanted to stay on his good side.”
CROSS ICE PASSES: Last week’s “Hockey on Campus” program hosted by Bernie Corbett on Sirius-XM reported that the University of Alaska and the University of Alaska-Anchorage might drop hockey because of state budget cuts. Both teams play in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association. … During another segment, Corbett said that 42 scouts watched Boston College beat Wisconsin, 5-3, before 6,172 at Conte Forum on Oct. 11. Both teams are stacked with draft picks, including three first-rounders from BC — Matthew Boldy (12th), Spencer Knight (13th) and Alex Newhook (16th). … Former UMass star TJ Syner has joined Jack Arena’s staff at Amherst College. This is Arena’s 37th season guiding the program. His former director of hockey operations, Eddie Effinger, took the same job at BU. … During Saturday’s broadcast, WHMP analyst Brock Hines wished his wife Laurie a happy anniversary. “It was 29 years ago on a day as beautiful as this,” said Hines, who has waved goodbye to her from their Montague home for the last 27 winters so he can do UMass hockey games. … College Hockey News reported that according to the NCAA, 95.8 percent of all D-1 hockey players go on to graduate, nearly six percent higher than the overall graduation success rate in all NCAA men’s sports.
SCOUTING AIC: UMass hosts AIC on Friday night at the Mullins Center. Last season, coach Eric Lang’s Yellow Jackets won the Atlantic Hockey Conference tournament by beating Army, Robert Morris and Niagara, and then stunned top-seeded St. Cloud State in the NCAA’s West Regional semifinals before losing to Denver, 3-0.
AIC’s campus is on top of a hill in the center of Springfield, on a pot-holed street named State Street that’s a dozen red lights from Wilbraham.
The 44-year-old Lang is a Bronx tale about a New York City kid who played at AIC and was an assistant at Manhattanville and Army before he became the head coach at his alma mater in 2016.
His players are big, strong and mean, but savvy enough to be called for the second-fewest penalties in the conference last season. According to collegehockeynews.com, their average age is 22 years and 10 months, the oldest of any college roster in the country.
Lang doesn’t bother to recruit locally, the closest to home is New Jersey native Austin Albrecht who transferred from UMass two years ago. The rest hail from places called Ostrava, Kungsbacka and Kharkiv from countries in Eastern Europe and Sweden, Canada and nine U.S. states.
The core of AIC’s offense is back for another run at a 23-win season — Blake Christensen of Coral Springs, Fla., Tobias Fladeby of Norway, Martin Mellberg of Stockholm and Kyle Stephan and Joel Kocur of Alberta. All of them are 24 years old except Fladeby, who’s 24th birthday is next spring.
The Yellow Jackets lost to No. 9 Quinnipiac by identical 3-2 scores to open the season before rebounding to beat Sacred Heart, 2-1, on power play goals by Fladeby and Mellberg.
Swedish netminder Zackarias Skog has started all three games this season, has made 175 saves and has a solid .919 save percentage.
“It’s fun to have the Western Mass. rivalry,” said Carvel. “Two good hockey teams in WMass which we haven’t seen in a long time.”