Goalies Headline Hockey Opener

The last two Harvard men’s hockey seasons had the same beginning (season-opening loss to an underdog Brown team) and same ending (first round exit from the NCAA tournament).

The Crimson can take its first step toward changing the latter by reversing that other disturbing trend on Saturday night, when it hosts the Bears to begin a highly-anticipated 2003-2004 campaign.

Harvard’s uber-talented varsity must exercise caution, though, amid bad omens. As in its last two openers, the Crimson is ranked nationally (No. 9). And, as in its last two openers, Brown is not.

Harvard is everyone’s pick to win the ECAC and possibly make a run in the NCAA tournament. Brown is still the upstart.

The circumstances are eerily similar. Harvard hopes the result isn’t.

“You know, some people said, ‘Harvard lost to Brown?’ but I’ll tell you what, Brown’s got a pretty good team, and they have an All-American goalie [Yann Danis], too,” said Crimson coach Mark Mazzoleni, who begins the season 16 wins shy of 300 for his career. “They play a very defensive-minded style. They’re big. They’re strong. They’re physical. They compete. They take away your space. They’re strong on the puck. They win battles on the wall. And they’re very good in goal.

“You have that formula, you’re going to beat a lot of teams.”

The Harvard-Brown rivalry is the oldest going in college hockey—this weekend will mark meeting No. 139—and it has become increasingly intense of late, with six meetings in the last two seasons (Harvard is 4-2).

The central figure in the recent renewals has been Danis, the French-Canadian dynamo whose 66 saves in a 2002 ECAC playoff game at Bright Hockey Center are the most ever by a Crimson opponent. This off-season, he turned down multiple NHL free-agent offers—including one from his favorite boyhood team, the Montreal Canadiens—to return for his senior year.

“He’s a helluva goaltender,” Mazzoleni said. “Every game Danis is in the pipes, they’ll enter that game thinking they can win, because of him.”

Said Harvard senior Tim Pettit: “He can win a game by himself.”

Danis is 1-3 lifetime against Harvard (his only win was in last year’s season-opener), but he is playing behind a physical defensive corps that lost only one everyday player to graduation and is known for its ability to collapse around net, clog passing lanes and swipe away rebounds.

“It’s going to be up to us to stay spread out and keep the passing lanes open,” Harvard captain Kenny Smith said. “We’re going to work on getting shots on the net, crashing the net and getting traffic in front. He’s an excellent goaltender, but if you take away his vision, he’ll have a hard time blocking shots.”

Junior Dov Grumet-Morris will start opposite Danis, completing a match-up of the ECAC’s top returning goaltenders. “It’s just like a great pitching duel,” Grumet-Morris said. “We saw a couple great baseball games over the last couple weeks, and I liken a good goaltending match-up to that.”

Regardless of how the duel between Danis and Grumet-Morris plays out, Mazzoleni said this week that sophomore John Daigneau (4-1-0 with a 1.45 goals-against average in five games last season) will start one game during next week’s road trip to Vermont and Dartmouth.

“I wouldn’t say one versus the other has had an upper hand in training camp, and just being fair, you go with the kid who has been your No. 1 in years past,” Mazzoleni said of his decision to start Grumet-Morris in the opener. “We’re going to find out if we have two kids that are capable of being No. 1s, or if one versus the other is going to take control of the situation.

“Both have played very well in training camp, and they both knew going into training camp that this was going to be an open competition this year. It would be different if one had played much better than the other, but that didn’t happen.”

Grumet-Morris has experience playing in a tandem. As a freshman, he split time with Will Crothers before earning the job outright in February of 2002.

“My job is to stop pucks—that’s what Coach Mazzoleni wants me to do,” he said. “Regardless of what’s written in the paper or what someone else says, my job is to get in the net and battle every night.”

Mazzoleni’s personnel decisions aren’t easier elsewhere. In training camp and exhibition wins over the University of Guelph and Dartmouth, 15 forwards have made legitimate claims to ice time. With the exception of senior Rob Fried—who Mazzoleni said was questionable for the weekend because of a nagging injury —all of them should be available Saturday.

Mazzoleni was still wrestling with his line combinations Wednesday afternoon.

“I know you’re going to ask me, but I can’t tell you what our lines are going to be yet,” he said. “I just don’t know ... They’re going to be tough coach’s decisions because you don’t like to see kids agonize. They want to play, but you have to have internal competition.”

The who-to-skate, who-to-sit decision for the defensemen was relatively easy to make—for this week only. Noah Welch will be with Peter Hafner, Kenny Smith with Tom Walsh and Dave McCulloch with Dylan Reese. All of that could change next week, though, when junior Ryan Lannon returns from a one-game suspension that went along with a butt-ending/game disqualification penalty against Boston University in last year’s NCAA tournament.

“Maybe you can call me and tell me who I should take out next week,” quipped Mazzoleni. “I couldn’t tell you. It’s that close.”

But at least after Saturday night, he’ll have a regular-season game to evaluate his players by.

“There are a lot of schools in college hockey who have played eight games,” he said. “We gotta get this thing rolling.”

And there is little doubt that the players—along with the growing number of hockey fans on campus—are ready, as well.

“There’s a lot of excitement around,” Smith said. “Lots of people have been coming up to us, talking to me and the other guys in class.

“They realize the kind of potential we have.”

A win on Saturday would be a big indication that the team is ready to do the same.

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