Martins, McCann Garner Accolades

LAKE PLACID, NY--As Harvard gears up for its ECAC semi-final game against Brown tonight, the awards are already starting to arrive.

But make no mistake, this Crimson team has its game face on.

For last night's 6:00 pre-tournament banquet, Harvard showed up at 6:36, the last team to arrive. And Head Coach Ron Tommassoni seemed visibly distracted throughout the two-and-a-half hour program.

He and his team are ready to avenge last season's semi-final loss to the Bears today at 5 p.m.

But while they stayed, several Crimson players were among those to receive accolades. Three, in fact, were named to the first team all-ECAC list: senior forward Brian Farrell, junior forward Steve Martins and senior defenseman Sean McCann.

In addition, Martins won the ECAC Player-of-the-Year award. His 41 points, on 17 goals and 24 assists, led all scorers in conference play.

Martins, however, was not among those named as one of the ten finalists for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award, given every year to the nation's top Division-I collegiate hockey player.

McCann was the only Crimson player to be named as one of the ten.

Joining him from the ECAC were Clarkson senior forward Craig Conroy and RPI senior goalie Neil Little.

All ten of the Hobey Baker nominees are seniors.

Also honored for the Crimson: senior defenseman Derek Maguire was named to the all-ECAC second team and sophomore goalie Aaron Israel was named as honorable mention. And a defenseman, Ashlin Halfnight, was named to the ECAC all-rookie team.

Several other major awards were also announced. Union's Bruce Delventhal, who led his Dutchmen to the conference play-offs for the first time in three years of Division-I play, was named ECAC coach of the year.

And Vermont's Eric Perrin (24-20-44 on the year) was named ECAC Rookie-of-the-Year.

Mind you, this weekend's tournament action was also discussed at the meeting. Tommassoni talked about the consistency of his team, and of Harvard's tendencies to play strong, solid defense and find its offense from many different sources.

He also went out of his way to commend Harvard's third offensive line of Jason Karmanos, Ben Coughlin and Kirk Nielsen for their strong play down the stretch, even predicting that it would be "no surprise" to him if one of them scored three goals in the two tournament games this weekend.

Brown's coach Bob Gaudet took a little bit more of low-key approach, talking about how his team has been banged-up for the last month of the season.

"We've been smelling exhaust fumes in the last month of the season," he said, "but we still got some good hockey left in us."

Brown's junior Mike Taggio also won honors as the ECAC's best defensive defenseman.

The banquet's keynote speaker was Joe Bertagna, the Executive Director of ECAC Hockey and Team USA's Assistant General Manager and Goaltending Coach during the recent Lillehammer Olympiad. He had some interesting things to says about America's Olympic hockey effort.

"We did fail," he said of Team USA. "But I still couldn't exactly tell you what went wrong."

Most relevant to Harvard, he noted his team's inability to avoid stupid penalties, and that even when the U.S. showed flashes of brilliance, it was still never able to put 60 solid minutes of hockey together.

This evening, whoever avoids committing those two flaws should win.