On Hockey: Hockey’s Echoing Loss Should Cause Worry

My colleague Jon Paul Morosi begins his game recount with calming assurances to the Harvard hockey faithful: Don’t worry about the team’s 2-0 loss to Brown in Saturday’s season opener, because it happens every year.

Many voiced comparable comments and an analogous tone following the Crimson’s defeat.

“A similar thing happened last year, and I think we tore off four wins in a row,” junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris said.

It’s true. Following last year’s 4-0 defeat at Brown, the Crimson won four straight, sweeping Dartmouth and Vermont at Bright, then heading up to the North Country and taking a pair from St. Lawrence and Clarkson.

“We have 28 games left,” Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni reminded me after the game. “It puts the onus on us to play well next week.”

So, yes, Dov is right. And Mazz is right. The sky is not falling. A season-opening loss to Brown is not the end to Harvard’s hope for the season, nor does it necessarily signal bad things to come.

But it is cause for some concern. If the Crimson isn’t worried about the way it lost to Brown, it should be.

* * *

Against the Bears, there always exists the possibility of being shut out. Brown starts All-ECAC goaltender Yann Danis, he of the memorable 66-save performance against Harvard in the ECAC playoffs two years ago. When Danis is on his game, it’s hard to get anything by him; if Harvard had lost because Danis stood on his head, that might be understandable.

But the Crimson did not lose because of Danis. In fact, the Crimson barely tested him through two periods. Harvard lost because it failed to execute on offense and because it spent a disproportionate part of the second period down a man, or two. Brown didn’t beat Harvard, so much as Harvard beat Harvard.

* * *

The Crimson spotted Brown two five-on-three advantages in the second period. The first two-man advantage was killed off successfully, with Mazzoleni utilizing the size of junior Noah Welch and sophomore Peter Hafner to cut down passing lanes and block shots from the point.

But with less than four minutes to go in the second, Harvard drew a sloppy penalty for having too many men on the ice. Twenty seconds later, Welch was whistled for cross-checking and the Crimson again found itself two men down. This time Brown took advantage, scoring its second, and final, goal of the game.

“We took some stupid penalties and then we lost our momentum,” Mazzoleni said. “You shoot yourself in the foot when you go in the box, and you shoot both feet off when you go two men down.

“We dodged one bullet, but we didn’t dodge the second one.”

* * *

Harvard’s infractions did more than simply give Brown the offensive edge and, eventually, its second goal. They killed the Crimson’s already-sputtering offense. When a team with a relatively impotent offense outshoots you, 9-8, in the first period, it should indicate concern. When it does the same by a tally of 10-3 in the second, you can be officially declared in an offensive slump. The team’s penalty problems, then, hurt not only the defense but also the offense, which was struggling to generate scoring chances even when it had five men on the ice.

“Danis is a very good goalie,” Grumet-Morris said. “Twenty shots didn’t get it done.”

Nor will it ever, especially when Danis got clear looks at all but two of the pucks heading his way.

* * *

None of this criticism is meant to say that the Crimson lacked effort. It simply lacked execution.

“We just had no rhythm, we had no crispness to our game whatsoever,” Mazzoleni said.

Very true. Harvard took too many penalties, and it took them at astoundingly inopportune times. It failed to generate quality scoring chances, rarely screening Danis and failing to charge hard for the few rebounds that did come off his pads. And only in the third period could it clearly be seen who the faster, stronger and more talented team was. By that point, and with Danis in net, it was too late.

“We didn’t have it,” Mazzoleni said. “It wasn’t that our kids didn’t try. I don’t know if it was nerves, [being] anxious…”

I’m not sure, either.

It’s important not to be too pessimistic, nor to over-emphasize the importance of one game. One loss, even in the season-opener, only counts as one loss.

Before traveling to Vermont and Dartmouth, Harvard has a week to find whatever it was missing on Saturday night. But if it can’t find it by then, Crimson hockey fans might want to look up every now and again to make sure the sky is firmly in place overheard.

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.