The Puck Drop: Minnesota

Last week's season-opening game against Quinnipiac provided Boston College with a required measuring stick of both teams' overall offseason progress. Both entered their first games with national rankings reflective of where their seasons ended, yet the game itself offered the first real test for rosters that were rebuilt in the aftermath of their respective postseason eliminations. Regardless of the game's location, the slim margin separating the No. 6 Eagles from the No. 13 Bobcats was more about last year's entrenched reputations than the newly-formed nuclei within each locker room.

Losing 4-3 therefore stripped away the fantastical notions about replicating or recreating the wheel from last year's team. Quinnipiac certainly wasn't the same program from last season after recruiting heavily throughout the Canadian Hockey League's newfound talent pool, and BC lacked the same polish that exemplified the highly-touted national tournament run from the No. 1 team in last year's NCAA bracket.

None of that seemed to bother head coach Greg Brown. He openly discussed putting pen to paper in real competition as a requirement for the team's overall growth, and the aftermath of the loss was the perfect first game reset for a team now headed to Minnesota for two very different games against another very different opponent.

"Some of our older guys that should know [how to approach the first game] and should be the guides and calm ones out there [were] trying to do a bit too much," said Brown in his postgame remarks. "It just wasn't clicking at all, so we have to clean things and not put ourselves in position to beat ourselves."

Friday night required approximately two periods before the Eagles settled into their game flow. Quinnipiac had overcome the first period energy by scoring the first goal after newcomer Markus Vidicek assisted on a goal scored by former Boston University forward Jeremy Wilmer, but a late period power play goal from Teddy Stiga kept BC afloat after a slow and slogging pace stopped both offenses from producing less than a dozen combined shots.

That lack of early flow then carried over into the second period, where the slower and more methodical pace enabled the Bobcats to dictate pace against the faster and more agile BC line chart. What required a power play goal to maintain equal footing on the scoreboard was erased when Chris Pelosi rebuilt an earlier two-goal lead that sent the Eagles into a much harder tempo for the start of the third period.

"You do a lot of things in practice to make sure that we're playing together, not shooting ourselves in the foot," said Brown. "You structure the game [in a way] that you're playing complementary hockey. We didn't really do that at all in the first and not much in the second. We put ourselves behind the 8-ball with turnovers."

Outplaying Quinnipiac in the third period didn't help BC overcome the earlier miscues, and the opening game on home ice went into the books as the first first-game loss since a 4-0 loss to the Bobcats in Brown's first season. That said, the shortened week and trip to Minnesota required the Eagles to quickly digest the loss and turn things around against a team that's equally battling through its own opening round miscues.

It's a sneaky key matchup for the second weekend of the regular season. Here's what to watch for when BC heads to the State of Hockey for the first games against the Gophers in nearly 10 years:

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Weekend Storylines (Mighty Ducks Edition)

Goldberg: Be careful, man. That almost hit me!
Charlie: Goldberg, you're the goalie. It's supposed to hit you.

Minnesota's reputation as one of college hockey's biggest and baddest programs took a hit in the offseason when a large chunk of the Big Ten's regular season co-champions departed for other pastures. Chief among them were Jimmy Snuggerud and Matthew Wood, but the depth that was lost during the typical postseason round robin forced head coach Bob Motzko to reinvent the team ahead of this year's start.

Snuggerud, for example, had a second 50-point season after spending his third year with the Gophers, and Wood, a 2023 first round pick, narrowly missed 40 points after transferring from Connecticut. But Connor Kurth, a depth option drafted by the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2022, signed to start his career in the AHL after scoring 18 goals and 21 assists, and former first rounder Oliver Moore made the jump to the Chicago Blackhawks after replicating a 33-point outburst from his first year in Minneapolis.

Throw in the loss of fifth year goalie Liam Souliere after he transferred from Penn State, and Minnesota is going to look like nothing of its previous five trips to the NCAA Tournament.

"Gone are a lot of names that we would count on," said Motzko ahead of the season. "We're going to find out where it goes, but I can tell you that we like what we see. It's going to be a little different version, but there's a whole can of whump-ass out there with how they compete and get after it."

Gordon Bombay: A team isn't a bunch of kids out to win. A team is something you belong to, something you feel, something you have to earn.

Like BC, that means Minnesota enters Thursday night with plenty of questions about how to bounce back from an inconsistent weekend split against Michigan Tech. Simply put, the Huskies outskated the Gophers for long swatches of both games, and the times that Minnesota imposed its fast-paced style on the Upper Peninsula-based opponent weren't enough to establish a 60-minute effort on either night. Even the 6-3 win required the Gophers to overcome a 3-2 deficit after losing two separate one-goal leads, and the next night's 5-3 loss squandered two separate leads in the first period - one of which was a two-goal advantage.

That said, the fact that Minnesota gained a win in that first game illustrated how the Gophers are quickly developing. CCHA teams and their WCHA predecessors are historically the kinds of programs built to pack-it-in on the defensive end with puck control and limited mistakes, so the numbers - even in a 15-shot performance from Saturday night - are a bit misleading because of the type of opponent involved.

"There were a ton of positives in there," said Motzko after the Friday night win. "The right guys were making plays when we needed them. A great goal to tie it up right away at the start of the third. [Michigan Tech] is a good hockey team. It was a big win for us and a good grow-up game."

Mr. Ducksworth: Gordon, stop quacking!
Gordon Bombay: Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack!

Look, I don't know what this quote is trying to accomplish, but I know that if you're reading this, you just started quacking like when Bombay annoyed his boss upon getting fired. You also just thought about how the head coach of the Hawks is the same guy who was in the courtroom alongside Vincent Gambini during the murder trial in Alabama. The judge for that case was Hermann Munster, and My Cousin Vinny is easily one of the greatest movies that's always on a cable-based channel.

Like the quote, what's achieved or accomplished from these games won't become clear until both BC and Minnesota get into the bulk of their conference schedules. Someone will likely absorb a second or third loss - it's entirely possible that they split the two-game series before venturing into an extended week of preparation - but the optics of a three-loss start to the season are significantly worse than the reality, especially given the teams' strength of schedule to start the season.

Beyond all of that, though, is the reality of seeing two of college hockey's most historic brands play one another for the first time in 10 years. The large bulk of their 33 head-to-head matchups originate in the national tournament and began with a 14-1 shellacking from 1954's national semifinals, but the majority of their head-to-head postseason meetings occurred after the bracket expanded to include a two-game quarterfinal round in the late-1980s. That they last met in 2012 as part of BC's national championship run is somewhat surprising.

As for the regular season, a 10-5 loss to Minnesota in December, 1970 was their lone game against one another and the only time that the Gophers and Eagles scheduled one another during Snooks Kelley's tenure as head coach. Their next meeting in 1982 ended with consecutive losses in Minneapolis, and even the 1985 national tournament win over the Gophers required the tiebreaker victory after BC outscored Minnesota by one goal on aggregate despite losing the first game. Even the first regular season win one year later in 1986 came one night after Minnesota beat BC in Boston.

Yet through it all, the debate surrounding the superiority of either the State of Hockey or the Hub of Hockey remains one of the more contested conversations in college hockey. Both BC and Minnesota claim two dozen first round picks, and BC's 26 Frozen Four appearances are three more than the Gophers. BC has 21 names on the Stanley Cup to Minnesota's 12, but the Gophers have more alumni in the NHL and are tied for the most NCAA Tournament appearances.

Regardless of how the pie is sliced, who wins this week will do little to settle the debate between the two most historic regions in the game.

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Question Box

How does the style of play change in Minnesota?

Big Ten hockey teams are traditionally faster-paced and much more athletic than the hard-nosed and defensive style exhibited throughout teams like Quinnipiac and Michigan Tech. Even last year, the Gophers ranked third in offensive potency over the course of the full season and finished as one of three conference teams inside of the top-10 in scoring after Michigan State and Penn State averaged around 3.50 goals per game. Both the Gophers and Nittany Lions had 30 power play goals, and both teams peppered opposing nets for roughly 30-35 shots on average on any given night.

Comparatively speaking, the faster ice and harder pace challenges teams to match Minnesota's overall scoring prowess in a way that's more indicative of NHL-style games. Given the propensity of both teams to feature NHL-level draft picks and talents, the game itself could feature into a much more entertaining and wide open game that gears towards BC's positives.

How does the defense respond to Minnesota's threat?

Greg Brown rolled four distinctive lines onto the ice for Quinnipiac, but splitting Lukas Gustafsson and Will Skahan across different defensive pairings allowed for two experienced players to pair with Michael Hagens and Luka Radivojevic. Moving into a faster-paced game likely won't necessitate changes in styles, but avoiding a slow start against the Golden Gophers might require drops or adjustments in how the lines - or personnel that's playing - is deployed.

Can we measure the importance of the series?

BC and Minnesota both dropped in this week's voted-on poll by the analysts and experts at USCHO.com (note: I'm one of the voters and one of the analysts at USCHO), which is why this matchup is the first time that a head-to-head game between the Eagles and Gophers does not feature a team ranked inside of the top-10. It's kind of a cheap stat in the sense that they're ranked No. 11 and No. 12 and the bulk of the games in their matchup were in the postseason, but teams ranked No. 11 and No. 12 are often in danger of backsliding further down the perceptive polls if they have a bad weekend.

Michigan, for example, opened last season as the No. 7 team in the nation but fell to No. 10 after splitting with Minnesota State. Two weeks later, a win and tie against Arizona State and a split with St. Cloud failed to move the Wolverines higher than that No. 10 seeding while a 1-3 start forced Wisconsin to backslide from No. 10 to No. 20. In contrast, no winless teams were ranked by the end of the first three weeks of the season, and only two teams under .500 were in the polls: Wisconsin and No. 11 Quinnipiac, which was 1-2 and inexplicably still ranked higher than Western Michigan and Ohio State.

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Weekend X Factor

There are too many one-hour players. They're waiting for one hour of indoor ice when they could use the natural ice God has given them for five or six hours. -John Mariucci

College hockey teams often schedule exhibitions against Canadian universities or other club teams from the greater United States as a way to sharpen skills for the upcoming or continuous seasons. They don't often lose, but the results are often irrelevant to a team's postseason aspirations or goals (see also: UNLV beating Denver ahead of Denver's national championship win over Boston College). Their internal mechanisms allow coaches to evaluate every player at a time while avoiding the mental thought process surrounding wins or losses that are critical to those very same tournament dreams.

In my mind, playing games against big time opponents is almost more important. It's hard to simulate, especially in real time, the organic pressures of playing someone in their building. It's also impossible to simulate the overall real-time feel of an organic matchup that takes on its own credibility and shifting importance. Yet this week, playing on national television in front of a wild Minnesota hockey crowd is exactly the necessary challenge facing this Boston College team.

Two losses to the Gophers won't kill BC's overall season, but three losses by either team to start the season would admittedly incite worries and concerns towards the NCAA Power Index and its control over the postseason - at least temporarily. It wouldn't kill either team's possible run to a conference or national championship, but it wouldn't be a throwaway result, either.

For that reason, I'm thrilled and excited at the prospect of watching these games on Thursday and Friday night. Minnesota is, after all, the State of Hockey, and I'm a Boston hockey traditionalist who loves the eastern schools juuuuust a little too much. Put them on the ice together, and it's a recipe for magic.

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Dan's Non-Hockey Thought of the Week

My younger daughter is going through a massive issue with her sleeping, so my wife spent Tuesday night with a three-year-old who didn't quite understand that bed time was not time to party with her stuffed animals. She sat on the floor of the room for a grand total of approximately three hours in the overnight hours ahead of Wednesday, which was not a good sign for Ol' Rubin when he woke up after six hours of uninterrupted slumber.

Let's be clear for a second: I would have woken up, but my daughter specifically wanted Mom and whined when I attempted to get out of bed. In the interest of figuring out the situation, Mom went into the room. So I don't want people thinking that I was intentionally sleeping the night away - I've been in there too, you know.

Anyways, the sleepless night required me to work through the breakfast routine with our older daughter, and my wife's zombie-like appearance on Wednesday morning forced me to pivot quickly to ensure that I was taking our older kiddo to her dance class. By itself, that statement isn't a huge deal, but bearing in mind that I come from a family of all boys makes it an outlier commentary that I wasn't quite prepared to handle.

One of my older brothers, for example, wrestled in the heavyweight weight class, and my other brother was a distance runner and triple jumper during his high school years. I played a ton of baseball and spent winters in the pool as a competitive swimmer, so the idea of going to a ballet class was about as foreign as ancient hieroglyphics - especially when I'm the parent more likely to attend soccer practice.

Yet on Wednesday afternoon, there I was, loading up the car with toe shoes and tap shoes, a leotard and a pink tutu, as I drove to pick up a child from school. As I pulled into the parking lot for practice, I jammed out to the usual selection of Kendrick Lamar and Meek Mill, and I got out of the car to help my kiddo get dressed for classical music and heel-toe walks.

This is Dance Dad life. We all know I love it.

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Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts

You pull on that jersey, you represent more than just yourself. You represent the Bruins, the city of Boston, and every fan who bleeds black and gold. -Terry O'Reilly.

I'm a Boston guy, right. I love all things about the city, and I was born to die in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I don't ever intend on moving away. I see the shoreline and the skyline, and I think about how many generations skated on the frozen ponds and outdoor rinks of the greater New England region. My grandfather rode the street car to watch the Boston Bruins play against the Montreal Canadiens during the NHL's Original Six era, and he chomped cigars on a daily basis while he did it.

Yes, this weekend is a fun trip through two of the most historic programs in college hockey history, but as someone who grew up in Boston, there's a part of me craving superiority over the State of Hockey. This is the Hub of Hockey, and this week, victory is hopefully coming to a different type of maroon and gold.

No. 11 Boston College and No. 12 Minnesota have two games scheduled for this week's head-to-head matchup at 3M Arena at Mariucci in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The first, on Thursday night, is scheduled for 9 p.m. (8 p.m. local time in Minnesota) with national television coverage slotted for the Big Ten Network. Friday night then reverts to a traditional 7 p.m. start time (6 p.m. local time) with coverage on the Big Ten Plus, which is part of the Big Ten Network's streaming platform on Internet and mobile device apps.

Players Mentioned

Lukas Gustafsson

Michael Hagens

Luka Radivojevic

Will Skahan

Teddy Stiga

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