Okay takeaways:
I swear to God I need to stop going to these games because my presence is clearly a hindrance. I'm also pretty sick of Toscano Family Ice Forum in general. I think BC is like 1-4-1 or something between all the men's and women's games I've gone to there since it opened (including twice in the past week). F this place.
Weird game and really not in a good way. Let's get it out there from the start that overall I didn't think we played very well. But it was also weird because I think we sat back a lot. I don't think it did us a lot of good though because it gave UConn a lot of possession and totally kneecapped our offense.
Here's the positive takeaway I got from the game: Our D really is quite good, and I know Reggie has shouted them out recently as well. In particular they are very sharp and creative at getting the puck to an open player and breaking out of their own end. That part of our game was very nice to watch.
But once we hit the neutral zone... I don't know if it was just a byproduct of us sitting back or if we just were having that much of a bad day overall or if UConn just adjusted that well to muddy things up, but it was like we didn't know wtf to do with the puck once we got to the red line. The dump and chase I think resulted in sustained BC possession exactly zero times all game, but we were forced to do it so often because getting it into the offensive zone any other way was not happening all night.
Most frustrating of all though was when we DID get across UConn's blue line, we both lacked the same creativity showed by the D on the back end AND lacked any desire whatsoever to PUTTTTT THE PUCK ON FREAKING NETTTTTTTTT. OH MY GOD. Especially with the offense really not getting anything going, most of the time our best chances came from the frustratingly few times we threw the puck into the mixer and chased rebounds. I lost track of how many times we finally got some space on zone entry, and then inexplicably dipsy-doodled the puck to the perimeter with a couple passes that either didn't connect or took us further from the net.
We really, desperately, need to shoot more. It explains why the shots were so lopsided Friday despite us playing so well.
Other thoughts:
-Man, I really don't know where this version of Grace Campbell came from but she has been playing like a total megastar for weeks now.
-I haven't decided yet on whether I like us splitting up all our best players over 3 lines, but (tonight's offensive struggles aside) I think I do. There have been some positive effects from this like Goulding playing the best hockey of her career as well as just us generally looking like we've got 3 really solid lines...
-...but, one of the downsides is it feels like Newhook has really not made her presence felt these last couple weeks, and I wonder if she could use a bit of a line shakeup. We will go as far as she takes us this year and need her spark back pronto.
Northeastern next. We need a win in this one.
