BC-UMass Basketball at the Garden off in 2015

As reported by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the fairly annual basketball tripleheader at the TD Garden which has featured BC and UMass will not be played in 2015-16.

According to the article, this is not about the lack of interest from the Garden; rather, the available dates don't match the individual school's schedules.

The article essentially states that a lot of this had to do with Boston College coach Jim Christian's desire to go elsewhere to fill the non conference portion of the schedule.

"You want to test your team in the nonconference. UMass has had success and is a great program. It’s a great test for us," Christian said in October. "It’s a good game for now. Scheduling is a funny thing. It’s not one game. It’s a balance. You have to try to balance your nonconference based on where you are in your league. It’s a fine line. You can go over that line and hurt yourself before you play those 18 grueling (league) games. We have to be very careful with the way we schedule outside our league. Eighteen league games is a lot. You have to make sure you’re not doing things to hurt the mentality of your team before you get to those 18 games that are going to be battles."

Now I know there won't be a lot of tears wept here for not playing UMass. There isn't much if any love lost for the school or the basketball game. It's one of those games where BC is damned if they do and damned if they don't, coming from the larger conference, despite not being as good as the Minutemen right now. Besides that, the game seemed like a pseudo-home game for the Minutemen, drawing virtually no local interest.That said, having local rivalries is good for the program and good for basketball in the area and right now, that leaves the Eagles with just Providence to fill that bill.

Is this the start of a deep freeze between the programs or as the article intimates, just a brief time out? Will the Eagles and Minutemen potentially play a home and home series to make use of other available dates or look to a neutral site like the DCU Center to bridge the gap?