MANCHESTER, N.H. — For the first time since 2015, Boston University is headed to the Frozen Four.
The Hockey East regular-season and tournament champion Terriers completed their NCAA Manchester Regional sweep with a 2-1 win over Cornell on Saturday afternoon at SNHU Arena.
Seniors Wilmer Skoog and Ethan Phillips scored goals in the second and third periods. Junior Drew Commesso (Norwell, Mass.) made 13 saves to lead the Terriers in their ninth consecutive win and fifth of the postseason. They are 29-10-0 on the season.
Commesso was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Manchester regional, as he stopped 37 of the 38 shots he faced over two games. The second-seeded Terriers opened the tournament with a 5-1 Thursday win against Western Michigan.
BU will represent Hockey East in the Frozen Four after the conference went without a team in last year’s field at TD Garden. Since the Terriers’ last appearance, UMass had been the only Hockey East team to earn a trip to a Frozen Four.
Here are three takeaways from BU’s clinching victory:
Phillips steps up
An assignment with top scorer Matt Brown and center Jay O’Brien shows the trust that head coach Jay Pandolfo (Winchester, Mass.) and the Terrier staff have in Phillips, but it’s safe to say that the right winger from Nova Scotia was an unsung hero of the weekend.
Phillips went down with a lower-body injury late in the first half of the season and missed two months. He had served as BU’s 13th forward during the Hockey East playoffs.
“When he came back it just took him a little while to get his conditioning going and get his legs under him,” Pandolfo said. “With the way he played this weekend, he was a big reason why we won these games. It’s a credit to him. … He’s the type of kid you need to win.”
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Phillips entered the tournament without a point in 11 games before logging a goal and two assists against Western Michigan. Skoog and Phillips were two of BU’s five goal scores in the semifinal victory.
On Saturday, it was his brilliant break-in goal off a Brown feed that gave BU much-needed breathing room early in the third.
“I got a lot of confidence from my teammates and coaches,” Phillips said. “They’ve been supportive the whole time while I came back from injury. Playing with great players (helped the production in the tournament).”
Stifling defense
Outside of late pressure from both opponents, the BU defense was stingy and made their Most Outstanding Player goaltender’s job easy. Outside of a one-timer by Cornell’s Gabriel Seger during a second-period power play, Commesso went largely unchallenged on the way to the win.
That fact was especially true on Saturday, with Cornell being held to only 14 shots on goal and four in the third period. BU converted on two of its 21 shots while its defense blocked exactly the same number.
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Among the key blocks was one in the waning seconds by freshman defenseman Lane Hutson, the leading scorer in Hockey East who is a top-10 finalist for the Hobey Baker Award. Cornell freshman winger Dalton Bancroft had scored a goal through a scramble in front with 28.4 seconds left.
“Clearly we trust (Lane) offensively, but we also trust him defensively,” Pandolfo said. “He’s grown his game so much in that area. He’s as competitive as they come. He wants to win for his team. Him and (senior Dom Fensore) together, they’re competitive kids.”
Against two different types of opponents, the Terriers got the job done and, as a result, will make their third straight Frozen Four berth out of the regional in the Granite State.
“Our D played great all weekend, not just tonight,” said Commesso, a St. Sebastian’s product. “They did their job, and the forwards too, they blocked so many shots and let me see the puck. That was kind of the game plan going in, especially with Western Michigan’s high-caliber offense and Cornell being a team that wanted to take my eyes away.”
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Cornell’s grind-it-out game plan was a focus for the Terriers, and it worked to perfection. The Big Red was held to their second-lowest shot total of the season and managed 15 or fewer for the second time in three games.
Cornell stuck together
The past few years have been a rollercoaster for the Big Red.
Cornell was the No. 1 team in the country at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years ago, coach Mike Schafer’s team and the rest of their Ivy League competitors sat at home while the rest of the country competed and UMass wound up winning its first national title.
In a day and age of decommits, early pro signings and the NCAA Transfer Portal, nobody would have been surprised to see any of the Big Red’s nine seniors finish their careers somewhere else.
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Flanked by a pair of captains in Sam Molinski and Travis Mitchell in the postgame press conference, Schafer was emotional when asked about how his team was able to finish the season together.
“It seems like the kids don’t know how to fight through adversity anymore,” Schafer said. “They lack character and integrity. … These two guys here both could have signed pro, they didn’t. They could have transferred, they didn’t. It speaks volumes of the kids we get at Cornell. … That’s the kind of kid we literally search out. I’m so proud of them and their classmates.”
Cornell won 21 games and ousted defending national champ Denver 2-0 in Thursday’s semifinal round.
