Men’s Hockey Falls To Brown In Opener, 2-0

No need to worry, Harvard hockey fans. This happens every year.

For the third straight season, the Crimson icemen stand 0-1 after a season-opening loss to Brown, the latest ignominy Saturday night’s forgettable 2-0 blanking before 1,986 at Bright Hockey Center.

In each of the three losses, Harvard was nationally ranked—this time the highest yet, at No. 9—and Brown was not. The last two times, the Crimson’s response was the same: win the next game, and eventually make the NCAA tournament.

In the last four years, Harvard is 1-3 against Brown in the first game of the season, and 5-0 the rest of the time.

“I don’t know,” said Brown coach Roger Grillo, when asked to explain the phenomenon. “I don’t know what it is.”

That was the consensus reaction outside both dressing rooms, as coaches and players tried to figure how a team with 12 NHL draft picks and all but three regulars back from the nation’s sixth-best scoring offense laid a Zamboni-sized goose egg in front of its home crowd.

“We didn’t have it,” came the blunt explanation from Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni. “They deserved the victory, but we just had no rhythm, no crispness to our game.”

In contrast to the 2001 and 2002 openers, Harvard was outshot Saturday (24-20). The main culprit was a second period in which the Crimson had two five-on-three penalty kills—one of which was successful—and mustered a mere three shots on goal.

“It wasn’t that our kids didn’t try,” said Mazzoleni, whose team was whistled seven times for 14 minutes. “I don’t know if it was nerves, [being] anxious...We got it going a couple times in spurts and then we took some stupid penalties and lost our momentum.”

And so begins the most highly-anticipated Harvard hockey season in years.

“Just because the preseason polls say one thing doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to happen,” Crimson assistant captain Tyler Kolarik said.

The preseason polls, of course, declared that Harvard was the overwhelming favorite to win the ECAC, and also tabbed Brown’s Yann Danis as the league’s top goaltender. Saturday night marked Danis’s second career shutout of the Crimson and ninth overall.

He did so while facing an uncharacteristically light workload. Danis had gone 23 games without stopping 20 or fewer shots in a win, and this was his first career shutout in which he made 20 or fewer stops. After the game, Danis said that he “loves playing against” Harvard because it’s “one of the best teams in the country.”

“I’m 46 years old, and I was a goalie, and I think I could’ve had a shutout going into the second period,” Mazzoleni said. “He saw every puck. There was no traffic.”

Harvard players spent the evening making, and lunging for, passes off the boards, off their heels and off-target in general. One player noticeably on his game was Kolarik, whose fiery style and ever-churning skates gave him seven shots on goal, more than one-third of his team’s total.

Kolarik attempted five shots in the third period alone, three of them on net. He rung the crossbar 15 seconds into the period and had his best opportunity with about 14 minutes left on a fluke three-on-one.

Junior defenseman Noah Welch gained possession after a clearing attempt bounced off a Brown skate and back toward the slot. Welch worked it left, and feathered a cross-ice pass to the crashing Kolarik.

He pushed it wide of an open net. It was that kind of a night.

“I don’t think Danis won the game for them,” Kolarik said. “Certainly, they competed hard, and we competed hard, but we didn’t get anyone to the net, and we didn’t finish our chances.

“We did some good things in the third period, but overall we didn’t play well at all...It’s very disappointing.”

The second period was critical, as Harvard was undone by a defensive misstep and two five-on-three penalty kills.

The game-winner came at even-strength, when senior defenseman Dave McCulloch and freshman blue-liner Dylan Reese—playing their first game together—each took the body on winger Mike Meech. That left the puck for Chris Swon, who swept down the left side and beat junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris at 10:21.

The second (and more costly) five-on-three came in the 16th minute. After a penalty call for having too many men on the ice and a Noah Welch cross-check, Brown needed little more than a minute for Cory Caouette to roof the rebound of Scott Ford’s point shot past Grumet-Morris.

That put Brown up 2-0, and the second intermission horn sounded Harvard’s death knell, given that the Crimson is 0-8-1 the last nine times it has trailed after 40 minutes. Harvard’s last win under those circumstances was against Brown in the 2002 ECAC playoffs, and it has not come back from a two-goal deficit after two periods to win since Dec. 29, 2001 against Bowling Green.

But as the Crimson filed out of a silent dressing room and into an unseasonably warm Saturday night, present concerns surely outweighed past. Many have pointed to this year as a potentially special season for Harvard, and captain Kenny Smith said before he left the rink that he would gather his team for a players-only meeting on Sunday.

“I don’t want to let this sit with everybody for a day,” he said.

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.