The Puck Drop: Quinnipiac
October 03, 2025 | Men's Hockey, #ForBoston Files
The 2025-2026 season gets underway on Friday night in Chestnut Hill.
The Boston College men's hockey program isn't accustomed to starting its season from an underdog position. Each of the past two seasons began with the Eagles operating from a place of power after being slotted near or at the top of Hockey East's prognostications, so a fifth place predicted finish isn't a normal spot for a team that's claimed each of the last two regular season championships. Indeed, prior understanding and resume would have overlooked some of BC's offseason losses, especially after the Eagles claimed the No. 1 overall spot in the postseason's mathematical rankings before calendars turned past Valentine's Day.
Yet here we are.
Nobody likely cares about the preseason - Air Force head coach Frank Serratore once joked that he looked forward to canceling the season after the preseason coaches poll once put his Falcons into Atlantic Hockey's top spot - but the perception of BC's finishing spot illustrates the overall difficulty facing the Eagles as the 2025-2026 season gets underway. The Hockey East gauntlet, after all, is exactly as hard as it sounds, and any type of misstep or backwards slip is enough to surrender the top spot a team that's hungry to unseat them early and often for a pace to the NCAA Tournament.
"I think we'll learn a lot about ourselves early in the season," said head coach Greg Brown, "and it's great to see, early, that the level of college hockey is at a high level. I think that the learning curve will be fast when you have a touch schedule out of the gate, and I also think that the intensity and the excitement of training camp has been able to stay high because they guys know what's ahead of them."
Friday night's game against Quinnipiac is, in a way, the start of that gauntlet. The Bobcats have been the class of ECAC for the better part of an eight-year run atop the conference regular season standings, and their ability to remain relevant nationally stems from their own hot streaks at both the start of years past and through midseason runs within their league. They've yet to win more than a single conference tournament because of the overall difficulty associated with winning single game playoff games at the end of a long year, but their hunger to remain on the right side of a statistical bubble is formed from a well-balanced understanding that Friday's game at BC contributes to that level.
Both teams are well-versed in the language surrounding the national tournament selection and how early season games impact future aspirations, so while Friday is loaded with questions and conversations, it's a key step for both teams.
Onto this week's single game matchup against the Bobcats:
****
Game Storylines (Wall Street Edition)
Lou Mannheim: Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.
Greg Brown isn't blind to what his team lost in the aftermath of BC's run to last year's national tournament. The nature of hockey's modern era and the tendency of National Hockey League programs to sign their draft picks in time for their end-of-season and postseason stretches make it difficult to project line charts beyond the current season. At BC, the sheer number and volume of NHL draft picks swings a looming scythe over any year's line chart, so every team is individualized into their own microorganism or microcosm-type of run.
Embracing that undercurrent is a big reason allowed Brown to fully project his team's overall depth chart from a recruiting circuit grown exponentially by the arrival of the CHL's quasi-professional prospects. Unlike Quinnipiac, which arrives with a number of players from the three Canadian major junior leagues, the Eagles chose to grow strictly from the United States development circuit for another season while adding former New Hampshire forward Ryan Conmy from the transfer portal.
"I'm sure there will be some success stories," said Brown about the modern era. "Canada has a wealth of great players, so there will be some great success stories. Teams will be deeper than they've ever been, but I'm sure there will be some stories where kids that are maybe great junior players, just like in the USHL, aren't quite ready for college. Everyone will be watching how these first couple of months go. When you add that many hockey players to the pool, in general, the depth is just going to get better and better."
Highlighting the new rule ahead of Friday's game is a necessity because the Bobcats are loaded with older talent from the Canadian circuit. Before this year, players from one of the CHL leagues - the ones historically featured in the EA Sports' NHL video game franchise - were considered professional by NCAA rules, so players signed to a major junior franchise were ineligible to enroll on a college program. As such, the only cross-section between NCAA and CHL skaters occurred during the World Junior Hockey Championships.
That changed with the advent of the name, image and likeness - or NIL - era in college sports. Because players are now eligible for compensation, the wall between the CHL and NCAA programs effectively fell, and the NCAA deemed that the only true professional league was now the NHL. As a result, players from CHL teams - those that are part of the Ontario Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and the Western Hockey League - could now come to college, and players who saw time in the ECHL likewise joined them in the player pool.
Gordon Gekko: Read Sun-tsu, 'The Art of War.' Every battle is on won *before* it's ever fought.
Quinnipiac built its roster over the past couple of seasons by adding pieces through the transfer portal, so the whole new subsegment of athletes eligible for college competition opened wider doors for the Bobcats than several of their ECAC brethren. Its group of first-year skaters are loaded with players like Antonin Verreault, a 100-point scorer for Quebec's Rouyn-Noranda Huskies, and Graham Sward, a defenseman who played approximately 50 games for the ECHL's Norfolk Admirals.
By comparison, BC averages a bigger skater, but the Bobcats are roughly one year older than the Eagles. Even if the players aren't accustomed to college hockey, their physical attributes leave them open for a quick start on talent alone if they're able to gel within the historically defensive style operated by head coach Rand Pecknold.
"Certain guys are familiar with areas of the country or with leagues," said Brown about roster building, "but where we all had a firm grasp on the USHL, we now have to expand that to the three CHL leagues as well. You're making a lot of phone calls because you can't be everywhere at once, so you're trying to gather as much as information as you can, so that when you go on the road, you're going with a purpose. You're not just going out, hoping to see players, but it'll be evolving for a while, at least a year or two, and as everyone gets more comfortable with the new landscape, we can have more defined roles."
Gordon Gekko: The most valuable commodity I know of, is information.
That leaves this matchup in a key spot to the early part of the season. It's the opening game, but evolving roster construction left both teams with pieces to fill through their own machinations. For both teams, though, the need to get out to a fast start with a win is key to the national power polls governing the NCAA Power Index and the postseason mathematical algorithm that selects the postseason tournament field.
Everything is graded on a curve, but Quinnipiac needs this game based on last year's performance and an ECAC that placed an added premium on non-conference wins. The league that produced four tournament teams for the 16-team bracket in 2024 backslid last year to one at-large bid, and it took a Bobcat loss in the conference semifinals to guarantee a second bid to the league's automatic qualifier.Â
This year's Quinnipiac team plays two additional games against Maine but otherwise doesn't see many tournament teams in its non-conference schedule. It'll attend the Ice Breaker Tournament at Arizona State but is only guaranteed one game against either the Sun Devils or Notre Dame because of a first round matchup against Alaska-Fairbanks, which later comes to Connecticut in early November. Road games against Merrimack and New Hampshire are also on the docket, but neither the Warriors nor Wildcats factored into last year's postseason race. A loss at Holy Cross or multiple losses in the CT Ice Tournament could prove disastrous if UConn isn't involved (Quinnipiac plays Sacred Heart to start the tournament in New Haven), so wins like BC or BU are quintessential to getting the Bobcats back into the tournament race.
Not a bad way to start the season, right?
*****
Question Box
Who gets first call in net?
Jacob Fowler's departure for the National Hockey League leaves Jan Korec and Louka Cloutier as the likely top options for BC's new backstop. Of those two, Korec is the incumbent after playing three games for last year's team, and his 22-save shutout over UMass-Lowell and 3-2 win at Providence from November helped the Eagles gain five points towards the Hockey East regular season championship. The year before, his 2-0 record helped BC bludgeon past Harvard and Merrimack with 37 combined saves.
Comparing him to Cloutier is a bit unfair, but the rookie freshman import from Quebec is, in contrast, a high-ceiling netminder akin to former unheralded draft picks like Scott Clemmensen where Fowler was a third round pick more comparable to Thatcher Demko. Of his 65 starts across two years in the USHL, Cloutier played 3,700 minutes and won 22 games while making 1,900 saves. A fifth round pick in last year's draft, he's also much younger at 19 than the 21-year old Korec.
How do the lines drop players into new roles?
Ryan Leonard and Gabe Perreault departed the BC program with the kind of numbers capable of earning spots in the Hobey Baker Award conversation. They each posted near 50 points with 30 goals and 30 assists, individually and respectfully, while displaying an undeniable chemistry on a near-nightly basis, so it almost didn't matter who was playing with them because their skill and vision made that entire top line an elite unit.
BC is usually at its best when the players mix and match within that free-flowing system, so stepping James Hagens or Teddy Stiga into a top line spot obviously offers Brown an opportunity to simply replace two players with two other players who are taking their next phase in development. A step forward for anyone with 37 or 30 points from last year, as Hagens and Stiga produced, would then push them north of the 40-point mark and align them with the numbers produced by Leonard and Perreault.
That said, growth isn't linear. New personnel and new leaders translates to a new or different style for BC, so it's not as simple as it sometimes looks.
Who handles the noise?
Conte Forum is officially sold out for Friday night's game. Both teams have played in that atmosphere, but the new players are new for a reason. Whoever manages their emotions best likely handles the crowd - in BC's case, that would mean a loud building. In Quinnipiac's case, silence is golden.
*****
Weekend X Factor
Who are you? -The Blue Caterpillar, "Alice in Wonderland"
I've still never made it through watching Alice in its entirety. The whole concept of those characters in a nonsensical world seemed a little bit too strange to me, but I have friends who swear by the movie's genius and overall symbolism. The thematic elements are usually too much for me to handle.
Anyways, the line uttered by the Blue Caterpillar is uttered with such disdain that Alice almost immediately and visibly undergoes a confusing pressure situation. In no uncertain terms, that's how many casual observers might feel when they see Ryan Conmy step on the Conte Forum ice for the first time.
From a shortened perspective, the UNH transfer provides BC with 64 points across two seasons for the Wildcats, before which the sixth round pick of the Los Angeles Kings gave the Sioux City Musketeers a 62-point season in the USHL. From an on-ice perspective, he's a big-framed type of player with a heavy shot and a good grit for the front line. Translating that to the Eagles, he's likely going to get a look in every zone, and he's the kind of player who can easily slot into a more defensive style if BC is looking for a depth chart presence that's not solely about scoring.
*****
Dan's Non-Hockey Thought of the Week
My wife and I never really had the right spot to store our kids' snacks. Their original placement on a kitchen counter prevented us from doing anything food-related next to the stove or toaster, and moving the snacks to the garage posted a whole other host of problems when a couple of rodents and bunnies decided to take up shelter in a hole next to my oil boiler. Keeping them at floor level ran the risk of a nonstop snacking award for one of my daughters, so we didn't really have the right place for them until we loaded them into bins and placed them in the corner of the playroom.
Unfortunately, their resting spot is now next to my desk. My house is condensed enough to warrant my workspace's placement in the corner of a living room, so I'm stuck sitting next to the finest selection of Cheez-its, Pirate Booty, Mini Muffins, Nutrigrain bars, soft-based cookies, and fruit snacks for hours on end.
The punchline here is obvious: this is a problem.
Sitting next to that snack list is like trying to pitch through the 1927 Yankees. It's a real Murderer's Row, and I'm just a complete disaster when work stresses me out at night. More than once, I've found myself elbow-deep in the finest Pop Tart selection known to man.Â
And then I wonder why the doctor's office is telling me to cut down on the sweets. My word.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
The most beautiful thing about learning is [that] nobody can take it away from you. -B.B. King
It's hard to project a head-to-head matchup against Quinnipiac when the first game of the season is loaded with so many unknowns. Questions about both BC and the Bobcats leaves anyone entering Conte Forum with a sense that the first few shifts are imperative to establishing the foundation for the upcoming weeks. Neither team is going to answer its entire season in the first 60 minutes of the season, but neither team wants to walk out of Conte Forum with a loss that conceivably impacts its postseason seeding in the newly-formed NPI.
No. 6 Boston College and No. 13 Quinnipiac drop the puck on the 2025-2026 season with a 7:00 p.m. start time on Friday night from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Television coverage is available through ESPN-Plus's direct-to-consumer subscription service with streaming available through the network's family of Internet and mobile device apps.
Yet here we are.
Nobody likely cares about the preseason - Air Force head coach Frank Serratore once joked that he looked forward to canceling the season after the preseason coaches poll once put his Falcons into Atlantic Hockey's top spot - but the perception of BC's finishing spot illustrates the overall difficulty facing the Eagles as the 2025-2026 season gets underway. The Hockey East gauntlet, after all, is exactly as hard as it sounds, and any type of misstep or backwards slip is enough to surrender the top spot a team that's hungry to unseat them early and often for a pace to the NCAA Tournament.
"I think we'll learn a lot about ourselves early in the season," said head coach Greg Brown, "and it's great to see, early, that the level of college hockey is at a high level. I think that the learning curve will be fast when you have a touch schedule out of the gate, and I also think that the intensity and the excitement of training camp has been able to stay high because they guys know what's ahead of them."
Friday night's game against Quinnipiac is, in a way, the start of that gauntlet. The Bobcats have been the class of ECAC for the better part of an eight-year run atop the conference regular season standings, and their ability to remain relevant nationally stems from their own hot streaks at both the start of years past and through midseason runs within their league. They've yet to win more than a single conference tournament because of the overall difficulty associated with winning single game playoff games at the end of a long year, but their hunger to remain on the right side of a statistical bubble is formed from a well-balanced understanding that Friday's game at BC contributes to that level.
Both teams are well-versed in the language surrounding the national tournament selection and how early season games impact future aspirations, so while Friday is loaded with questions and conversations, it's a key step for both teams.
Onto this week's single game matchup against the Bobcats:
****
Game Storylines (Wall Street Edition)
Lou Mannheim: Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.
Greg Brown isn't blind to what his team lost in the aftermath of BC's run to last year's national tournament. The nature of hockey's modern era and the tendency of National Hockey League programs to sign their draft picks in time for their end-of-season and postseason stretches make it difficult to project line charts beyond the current season. At BC, the sheer number and volume of NHL draft picks swings a looming scythe over any year's line chart, so every team is individualized into their own microorganism or microcosm-type of run.
Embracing that undercurrent is a big reason allowed Brown to fully project his team's overall depth chart from a recruiting circuit grown exponentially by the arrival of the CHL's quasi-professional prospects. Unlike Quinnipiac, which arrives with a number of players from the three Canadian major junior leagues, the Eagles chose to grow strictly from the United States development circuit for another season while adding former New Hampshire forward Ryan Conmy from the transfer portal.
"I'm sure there will be some success stories," said Brown about the modern era. "Canada has a wealth of great players, so there will be some great success stories. Teams will be deeper than they've ever been, but I'm sure there will be some stories where kids that are maybe great junior players, just like in the USHL, aren't quite ready for college. Everyone will be watching how these first couple of months go. When you add that many hockey players to the pool, in general, the depth is just going to get better and better."
Highlighting the new rule ahead of Friday's game is a necessity because the Bobcats are loaded with older talent from the Canadian circuit. Before this year, players from one of the CHL leagues - the ones historically featured in the EA Sports' NHL video game franchise - were considered professional by NCAA rules, so players signed to a major junior franchise were ineligible to enroll on a college program. As such, the only cross-section between NCAA and CHL skaters occurred during the World Junior Hockey Championships.
That changed with the advent of the name, image and likeness - or NIL - era in college sports. Because players are now eligible for compensation, the wall between the CHL and NCAA programs effectively fell, and the NCAA deemed that the only true professional league was now the NHL. As a result, players from CHL teams - those that are part of the Ontario Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and the Western Hockey League - could now come to college, and players who saw time in the ECHL likewise joined them in the player pool.
Gordon Gekko: Read Sun-tsu, 'The Art of War.' Every battle is on won *before* it's ever fought.
Quinnipiac built its roster over the past couple of seasons by adding pieces through the transfer portal, so the whole new subsegment of athletes eligible for college competition opened wider doors for the Bobcats than several of their ECAC brethren. Its group of first-year skaters are loaded with players like Antonin Verreault, a 100-point scorer for Quebec's Rouyn-Noranda Huskies, and Graham Sward, a defenseman who played approximately 50 games for the ECHL's Norfolk Admirals.
By comparison, BC averages a bigger skater, but the Bobcats are roughly one year older than the Eagles. Even if the players aren't accustomed to college hockey, their physical attributes leave them open for a quick start on talent alone if they're able to gel within the historically defensive style operated by head coach Rand Pecknold.
"Certain guys are familiar with areas of the country or with leagues," said Brown about roster building, "but where we all had a firm grasp on the USHL, we now have to expand that to the three CHL leagues as well. You're making a lot of phone calls because you can't be everywhere at once, so you're trying to gather as much as information as you can, so that when you go on the road, you're going with a purpose. You're not just going out, hoping to see players, but it'll be evolving for a while, at least a year or two, and as everyone gets more comfortable with the new landscape, we can have more defined roles."
Gordon Gekko: The most valuable commodity I know of, is information.
That leaves this matchup in a key spot to the early part of the season. It's the opening game, but evolving roster construction left both teams with pieces to fill through their own machinations. For both teams, though, the need to get out to a fast start with a win is key to the national power polls governing the NCAA Power Index and the postseason mathematical algorithm that selects the postseason tournament field.
Everything is graded on a curve, but Quinnipiac needs this game based on last year's performance and an ECAC that placed an added premium on non-conference wins. The league that produced four tournament teams for the 16-team bracket in 2024 backslid last year to one at-large bid, and it took a Bobcat loss in the conference semifinals to guarantee a second bid to the league's automatic qualifier.Â
This year's Quinnipiac team plays two additional games against Maine but otherwise doesn't see many tournament teams in its non-conference schedule. It'll attend the Ice Breaker Tournament at Arizona State but is only guaranteed one game against either the Sun Devils or Notre Dame because of a first round matchup against Alaska-Fairbanks, which later comes to Connecticut in early November. Road games against Merrimack and New Hampshire are also on the docket, but neither the Warriors nor Wildcats factored into last year's postseason race. A loss at Holy Cross or multiple losses in the CT Ice Tournament could prove disastrous if UConn isn't involved (Quinnipiac plays Sacred Heart to start the tournament in New Haven), so wins like BC or BU are quintessential to getting the Bobcats back into the tournament race.
Not a bad way to start the season, right?
*****
Question Box
Who gets first call in net?
Jacob Fowler's departure for the National Hockey League leaves Jan Korec and Louka Cloutier as the likely top options for BC's new backstop. Of those two, Korec is the incumbent after playing three games for last year's team, and his 22-save shutout over UMass-Lowell and 3-2 win at Providence from November helped the Eagles gain five points towards the Hockey East regular season championship. The year before, his 2-0 record helped BC bludgeon past Harvard and Merrimack with 37 combined saves.
Comparing him to Cloutier is a bit unfair, but the rookie freshman import from Quebec is, in contrast, a high-ceiling netminder akin to former unheralded draft picks like Scott Clemmensen where Fowler was a third round pick more comparable to Thatcher Demko. Of his 65 starts across two years in the USHL, Cloutier played 3,700 minutes and won 22 games while making 1,900 saves. A fifth round pick in last year's draft, he's also much younger at 19 than the 21-year old Korec.
How do the lines drop players into new roles?
Ryan Leonard and Gabe Perreault departed the BC program with the kind of numbers capable of earning spots in the Hobey Baker Award conversation. They each posted near 50 points with 30 goals and 30 assists, individually and respectfully, while displaying an undeniable chemistry on a near-nightly basis, so it almost didn't matter who was playing with them because their skill and vision made that entire top line an elite unit.
BC is usually at its best when the players mix and match within that free-flowing system, so stepping James Hagens or Teddy Stiga into a top line spot obviously offers Brown an opportunity to simply replace two players with two other players who are taking their next phase in development. A step forward for anyone with 37 or 30 points from last year, as Hagens and Stiga produced, would then push them north of the 40-point mark and align them with the numbers produced by Leonard and Perreault.
That said, growth isn't linear. New personnel and new leaders translates to a new or different style for BC, so it's not as simple as it sometimes looks.
Who handles the noise?
Conte Forum is officially sold out for Friday night's game. Both teams have played in that atmosphere, but the new players are new for a reason. Whoever manages their emotions best likely handles the crowd - in BC's case, that would mean a loud building. In Quinnipiac's case, silence is golden.
*****
Weekend X Factor
Who are you? -The Blue Caterpillar, "Alice in Wonderland"
I've still never made it through watching Alice in its entirety. The whole concept of those characters in a nonsensical world seemed a little bit too strange to me, but I have friends who swear by the movie's genius and overall symbolism. The thematic elements are usually too much for me to handle.
Anyways, the line uttered by the Blue Caterpillar is uttered with such disdain that Alice almost immediately and visibly undergoes a confusing pressure situation. In no uncertain terms, that's how many casual observers might feel when they see Ryan Conmy step on the Conte Forum ice for the first time.
From a shortened perspective, the UNH transfer provides BC with 64 points across two seasons for the Wildcats, before which the sixth round pick of the Los Angeles Kings gave the Sioux City Musketeers a 62-point season in the USHL. From an on-ice perspective, he's a big-framed type of player with a heavy shot and a good grit for the front line. Translating that to the Eagles, he's likely going to get a look in every zone, and he's the kind of player who can easily slot into a more defensive style if BC is looking for a depth chart presence that's not solely about scoring.
*****
Dan's Non-Hockey Thought of the Week
My wife and I never really had the right spot to store our kids' snacks. Their original placement on a kitchen counter prevented us from doing anything food-related next to the stove or toaster, and moving the snacks to the garage posted a whole other host of problems when a couple of rodents and bunnies decided to take up shelter in a hole next to my oil boiler. Keeping them at floor level ran the risk of a nonstop snacking award for one of my daughters, so we didn't really have the right place for them until we loaded them into bins and placed them in the corner of the playroom.
Unfortunately, their resting spot is now next to my desk. My house is condensed enough to warrant my workspace's placement in the corner of a living room, so I'm stuck sitting next to the finest selection of Cheez-its, Pirate Booty, Mini Muffins, Nutrigrain bars, soft-based cookies, and fruit snacks for hours on end.
The punchline here is obvious: this is a problem.
Sitting next to that snack list is like trying to pitch through the 1927 Yankees. It's a real Murderer's Row, and I'm just a complete disaster when work stresses me out at night. More than once, I've found myself elbow-deep in the finest Pop Tart selection known to man.Â
And then I wonder why the doctor's office is telling me to cut down on the sweets. My word.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
The most beautiful thing about learning is [that] nobody can take it away from you. -B.B. King
It's hard to project a head-to-head matchup against Quinnipiac when the first game of the season is loaded with so many unknowns. Questions about both BC and the Bobcats leaves anyone entering Conte Forum with a sense that the first few shifts are imperative to establishing the foundation for the upcoming weeks. Neither team is going to answer its entire season in the first 60 minutes of the season, but neither team wants to walk out of Conte Forum with a loss that conceivably impacts its postseason seeding in the newly-formed NPI.
No. 6 Boston College and No. 13 Quinnipiac drop the puck on the 2025-2026 season with a 7:00 p.m. start time on Friday night from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Television coverage is available through ESPN-Plus's direct-to-consumer subscription service with streaming available through the network's family of Internet and mobile device apps.
Players Mentioned
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/ Men's HockeyWomen's Basketball: 2025 ACC Tipoff (Oct. 6, 2025)
Monday, October 06
Football: Pittsburgh Postgame Press Conference (Oct. 4, 2025)
Saturday, October 04
Men's Hockey: Quinnipiac Press Conference (Head Coach Greg Brown - Oct. 3, 2025)
Saturday, October 04
Football: Head Coach Bill O'Brien Media Availability (October 2, 2025)
Thursday, October 02
