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February 7, 2010 E-MAIL PRINT

It's BC, BU for all the beans

by Andrew Merritt/

For the 20th time in the Beanpot tournament’s 58-year history, Boston College and Boston University are set to meet in the final.

The championship game will be played Monday night at TD Garden. The Terriers, who this year are hunting for their 30th Beanpot title, have won 12 of those meetings, the last of which was a 2-1 win in overtime in 2007.

But that was then, and this is now. Just six current Terriers and Eagles were in uniform when Brian McGuirk scored 5:06 into overtime to give BU its 28th tournament title in 2007, and since then each team has taken the mug home once. Monday’s final is a whole new ballgame, and it’s shaping up to be a classic.

BU and BC are both playing their best hockey at just the right time. The Eagles (15-8-2) are coming off a 7-1 thrashing of UMass, in which they pumped four goals into the Minuteman net in the first period, then another three in the second.

Goaltender John Muse (East Falmouth, Mass.), who first made a splash as a freshman in the Beanpot in 2008, but struggled last year while battling a hip injury, looks a lot more like his old self of late, and turned aside 33 Harvard shots to pitch a shutout in a 6-0 semifinal win last week.

The Terriers enter the game having won five of their last six, including last Monday’s thrilling 2-1 win over Northeastern in the opening round. That stretch has them at an even 11-11-3 this year, and while they still won’t have the resume to get into the NCAA Tournament via an at-large bid, they were 4-9-3 at the turn of the year, and outside the playoff cutoff in Hockey East.

As with the Eagles, the key for BU has been the goaltending, for better or worse. Kieran Millan was the freshman sensation last year, following in Muse’s footsteps, but has been inconsistent this season. But he has sparkled in the new year, and made several big stops on the big stage last week against Northeastern. And as Millan has gone, so has the Terriers’ season.

BC is succeeding this year with a very balanced team. The offense, averaging 3.80 goals per game, is the best in Hockey East, and on the other end the Eagles have allowed the fewest goals of any conference team. The danger for BU will come when BC’s line of Joe Whitney (Reading, Mass.), Cam Atkinson and Brian Gibbons (Braintree, Mass.) is on the ice.

The WAG line has picked up a whopping 26 points in the Eagles’ last five games, and Gibbons’ 34 points (10 goals) puts him fifth in Hockey East (ninth in the nation) at 1.36 points per game.

The Eagles also lead the league on the penalty kill, stifling just over 87 percent of the power plays they’ve faced.

The Terriers’ offense hasn’t come close to matching last year’s prolific numbers, with no players in the Hockey East top 10 in scoring and a 3.12 goals per game rate that has them middle of the pack in the league. Nick Bonino (Unionville, Conn.) leads with 23 points (six goals, 17 assists), and just picked up his 100th career point.

But stats, records, and standings rarely matter when the Scarlet and White meet the Maroon and Gold at the Garden in February. The BU-BC rivalry is as heated as it gets in Boston, and was even the subject of a documentary released earlier this year. They are the tournament’s heavyweights, with 43 Beanpot titles between them – including the last 16.

BU coach Jack Parker (Somerville, Mass.) said after his team’s victory in the first round last week, “It’s not a good thing for the Beanpot if BU and BC win it all the time. The tournament loses some of its luster if it is always the same teams.”

With all due respect to the veteran coach, this is the match-up that prevails most years, and neither team is a fluke entrant in the final this year.

The Eagles have looked like a playoff-ready team for most of the season, and while the hangover from the 2009 title run lasted an agonizingly long time for the Terriers, BU seems to have plugged most of the holes. If nothing else, most of the BU roster has big-game experience, and until playoff seeds are announced in just over a month, they don’t get much bigger than Boston College and Boston University on the Garden ice.

Andrew Merritt can be reached at feedback@hockeyjournal.com.