Sunday, March 4, 2012

BU,NU split home and home- BU moves on, NU goes home

BU and Northeastern each took their home game during their 2 game series this weekend to conclude both team's regular season schedule. However, BU will continue to play as they locked up a 3 seed in the conference and will face 6 seed UNH beginning Friday in the Hockey East Quarter Final Series at Agganis Arena. Northeastern was in a fight for the final QF spot with UMass heading into the weekend but was eliminated with their loss Friday night at Agganis coupled with a UMass win over Merrimack and a BC win over Vermont.


BU went down less than a minute into the game Friday night but recovered to score 4 second period goals by 4 different players. Matt Nieto, Wade Megan, Garrett Noonan, and Ryan Santana all scored on Chris Rawlings who was pulled in favor of Clay Witt for the 3rd period. BU won 5-2. Vinny Saponari's first game back at Agganis Arena since being dismissed by coach Jack Parker went quietly for the junior besides being part of a Pat MacGregor hit that shattered a pain of glass.

Saturday night, Northeastern had nothing to play for but still pulled out a 5-4 OT win in front of a very pro-BU crowd. The game went back and forth as backups Clay Witt and Grant Rollheiser both had less than stellar nights in goal for each side. Chris Connolly was a part of all 4 BU goals but it was not enough as former Terrier finally got his revenge on his former team with the winning OT goal and then an always classy celebration with his NU teammates. Unfortunately for Vinny and Co, their season is now over while BU moves toward an NCAA berth. Vinny also sealed the classy night by refusing to shake BU coach Jack Parker's hand after the game. I honestly don't care if he shakes Parker's hand or not. It just reinforces the image that he has no class and still refuses to acknowledge his own mistakes.

BU finishes the regular season 6t in the Pairwise rankings and 3rd in Hockey East. With their 21-12-1 record, the Terriers have a 99% chance of making the NCAA tournament. They obviously need to focus on UNH first and allow the rest of the games to take care of themselves. The other HE QF series include 8 UMass @ 1 BC, 7 PC @ 2 Lowell and 5 Merrimack @ 4 Maine.

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