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| BC turns away Northeastern to win Beanpot | 02.11.13 at 10:12 pm ET |
BC's Johnny Gaudreau celebrates the first of his two goals during Monday's 6-3 victory over Northeastern in the Beanpot championship game. (AP)
Northeastern made Boston College work harder than the score implies, but the Eagles skated away with the Beanpot championship with a 6-3 win Monday night at TD Garden. It was BC’s fourth consecutive Beanpot title.
Johnny Gaudreau scored twice, including a finish off a nice pass from Michael Matheson late in the third period to give BC a two-goal lead after NU had fought back from a 4-1 deficit to make it a game.
Northeastern’s Kevin Roy was named tournament MVP after scoring twice against BC to go with his hat trick in last Monday’s semifinal vs. Boston University.
BC coach Jerry York said he’s not surprised to see this senior class graduate with four straight Beanpot wins, but that it’s not the only class that could have pulled it off.
“We’ve had some very, very good teams,” York said, citing the late-1990s squads featuring players like Brian Gionta as an example. “Luck plays a certain amount [of a role] in winning this many Beanpots in a row for sure, and I think our players understand that.”
Johnny Gaudreau (13) will lead BC into the Beanpot final against Northeastern on Monday night. (AP)
No current Northeastern players were born the last time the Huskies won a Beanpot championship, in February 1988. They’ll have a chance to end the school’s drought in the final on Monday, but they’ll have to go through a Boston College team looking to win its fourth straight tournament title, something BC has never done.
Both teams are led by diminutive young forwards: BC by sophomore Johnny Gaudreau, who leads Hockey East with 33 points in 22 games, and Northeastern by Kevin Roy, the highest-scoring freshman in the conference with 30 points in 24 games. Roy, at 5-foot-10, practically towers over the 5-foot-7 Gaudreau, but both have the speed and skill to erase any disadvantages of their size.
Roy outscored Boston University by himself in the semifinal round last Monday, recording a hat trick in Northeastern’s 3-2 win. Northeastern had not beaten BU in the Beanpot since 1988, the last year the Huskies won the tournament, before Roy buried a goal in each period of the semifinal to knock No. 13 BU out of contention.
“I think when the pressure’s higher, I get a better performance, so I was just excited to see what it was like,” Roy said after win.
It’s nothing new for Roy to be the most dominant Husky on the ice. He has 30 points on the season — 10 more than the second-highest Northeastern scorer, Vinny Saponari — and 15 goals, seven more than Cody Ferriero‘s eight.
That lack of balanced scoring might partially account for the fact that Northeastern sits in last place in Hockey East, 4-11-3 in conference play. But the Huskies have beaten BU twice and BC once, playing above their usual threshold when faced with local rivals.
| BC, BU primed for another Beanpot showdown | 02.13.12 at 2:21 pm ET |
BC's Johnny Gaudreau scores during the Eagles' Beanpot semifinal victory over Northeastern that put them into Monday's title game against BU. (AP)
In the grand scheme of a college hockey season, the Beanpot means very little — it doesn’t improve a team’s place in the conference standings and it doesn’t ensure a good seed or even a berth in the NCAA tournament. But good luck trying to tell that to players on the Boston College or Boston University teams, as the game presents another layer of intensity to a rivalry that can seemingly not have much more venom.
The Eagles and Terriers, who combined have won three of the last four national championships, will look to add to the rich history of the Beanpot and their rivalry Monday night as they take the ice at TD Garden in the Beanpot championship. The game will mark the 41st time the schools have faced off in the Beanpot and the 21st time they have met in the Beanpot title game. In those championships matchups, BU holds a 12-8 edge.
While the Terriers have the overwhelming advantage in all-time Beanpot titles with 29, they have not won the four-team exhibition tournament since 2009, their longest drought since 1994. To add insult to injury, the team primarily responsible for BU’s drought has been the Terriers’ most bitter rival. BC beat BU 4-3 in the 2010 championship game and eliminated BU in the 2011 semifinals.
The Terriers, ranked No. 2 in this week’s USCHO.com college hockey poll, know that they cannot be considered a great team unless they can win a tournament sometimes referred to as the “BU Invitational.”
“You judge a team at the end of the year by what they’ve accomplished and by what they’ve won,” BU coach Jack Parker told the school’s student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. “BU teams aren’t real good teams unless they win some championships. You could be No. 1 in the nation or the No. 1 seed in your league. You can get to the Beanpot final.
“You can do all those things that make you look like you’re about to win a championship, but if you don’t win something, it’s just an OK year no matter what the record is. This team will be judged on what happens from now until March and April. We’ll see who is going to get a chance to win championships in March and April. This is the first one that is available.”
As should come to be expected from two schools that have combined to win nine national championships, BU and BC enter the game ranked among the top teams in the country this season, as the Terriers are ranked No. 2 by USCHO and the PairWise rankings, and the Eagles are slotted third by USCHO and are tied for fourth in the PairWise rankings.
