Inconsistent Crimson Tough To Figure Out

The Harvard men’s hockey team played two games this weekend at Bright Hockey Center. One was its best of the year. The other was its worst.

The contrast made for a great, big gray area. Is this team as good as it looked in Saturday night’s 4-1 win over archrival Yale? Or is it as bad as it looked in Friday’s 4-2 loss to Princeton, in which it took a 2-0 lead into the third period before it fell apart in truly agonizing fashion?

Hard to tell. The Crimson’s record—a blah 2-2-1—doesn’t help us figure out much, either.

So, let’s focus on what I can tell you for sure: The feel-good win over the Elis aside, Friday night’s collapse was the worst and most dumbfounding loss I have seen in four years of following this team.

Sure, there have been bigger losses: three first-round defeats in the Beanpot, two one-and-dones in the NCAA tournament and last year’s ECAC championship game, in which the Crimson missed out on a second straight title by three inches—literally.

But believe me when I say that none of them were as bad as this.

Semantics are important here, so please take note. Big loss means the game was important and the outcome was tough to take. Bad loss refers to a game that wasn’t necessarily critical at the outset but ended up that way because of how badly your team mucked it up.

This one was a very, very bad loss.

How else do you describe leading by two with 13 minutes left, then losing by two? This performance was to the fine tradition of Harvard hockey what Gigli was to cinema: mind-numbing to the viewers and embarrassing to the participants.

Yes. Bennifer bad.

This year’s seniors did something similar as freshmen, when they had a two-goal lead in the third period before Vermont scored four times to win.

But that wasn’t as shocking as what happened Friday, simply because that sort of thing is more understandable when your team is dominated by freshmen and sophomores. The same result is intolerable when a team has 17 juniors and seniors, as the Crimson does now.

With all due respect to the Tigers’ work ethic, they had no business beating Harvard. They are not the better team.

That’s not an opinion, either. Look at the facts.

The Crimson has more NHL draft picks (12) than any team in the country, and the most players in the nation to be on the roster of NCAA Tournament teams in each of the last two years (16) and last year alone (22).

In other words, that makes them both talented and experienced.

Now, how many Princeton players have NCAA Tournament experience?

Zero.

And how many Princeton players have been drafted by NHL teams?

One.

On paper, this was a greater mismatch than South Bend Central facing Hickory High, with no Jimmy Chitwood in sight.

Wait. There are those two words again: On paper.

On paper, Harvard should be 5-0 right now. On paper, Harvard should be going for a third straight ECAC championship this year. On paper, this year’s senior class should have a Beanpot or two.

One could reasonably argue that the best team in the country—on paper, of course—is playing right on our campus...and it has yet to rise above the .500 mark this season.

On paper, on paper, on paper.

When is this team finally going to show that it’s sick of hearing those words? As soon as it can beat Cornell, Boston University and other NCAA Tournament teams—something it didn’t do all last year.

But that becomes awfully hard to do when you can’t beat Brown and Princeton.

Despite the fact that there were six students—yes, I counted them—in Section 11 during the national anthem, this campus does have an interest in hockey. After Friday’s game, people asked me, “What’s wrong with the hockey team?”

I didn’t have an answer for them. I don’t have one for you, either. I don’t have a stall in that dressing room that oozes with brains, character and millions of dollars in NHL potential. I am not one of their coaches, either.

All I have to offer are my eyes and my memory, which have seen a lot of Harvard hockey during the past four years. And judging from that, this team, right now, is not close to the team it was at the end of last season—or the beginning of last season, for that matter, when it began 4-1-0.

Here’s the good news: This is no secret in their dressing room. After Saturday night’s game, coach Mark Mazzoleni admitted that his team is “very beatable” when it doesn’t “bring a lunchpail mentality.” He said his team was “out-competed” by both Princeton and Brown.

“Right now, we are an average team,” he said. “We need to take the next step up to be a good team.”

After all the preseason hype about this team, those words are almost unbelievable. But they’re true.

Five games into the season, the ECAC favorite looks mediocre. Could it become a great team? Absolutely. The talent is unquestionably there. So is the leadership.

Who knows? Harvard could’ve already turned the corner with Saturday’s win.

“It’s a long season,” Mazzoleni said. “It’s how you finish.”

Good thing. If it came down to how you started, Harvard’s could-be special season would be a little like, well, Bennifer’s marriage.

Over before it began.

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