BC Women’s Hockey vs. New Hampshire & Maine: Final Thoughts & Predictions

Folks... we jinxed it.

In our last preview, we talked about how Boston College Women’s Hockey was riding one of the longest winning streaks in the country at seven in a row. Woops. Over the last week, the Eagles sandwiched a heartbreaking OT loss to No. 7 Northeastern and a frustrating loss to No. 14 UConn around a win over Holy Cross. Yeah, that’s on us. Sorry.

The game against Northeastern was pretty encouraging, but the loss to UConn is really the type of thing that makes you want to pull your hair our. How did we get swept in three games by UConn? It seems like we haven’t beaten them in ten years. They are our kryptonite.

Whatever; we won’t dwell on it. Moving forward.

WHO

Friday
No. 15 Boston College Eagles (14-9-1, 12-7-0 WHEA)
at New Hampshire Wildcats (8-16-0, 6-11-0 WHEA)

Saturday
No. 15 Boston College Eagles (14-9-1, 12-7-0 WHEA)
at Maine Black Bears (11-14-0, 8-10-0 WHEA)

WHAT

A trip to the north country hinterlands

WHERE

Friday
Whittemore Center Arena
Durham, NH

Saturday
Alfond Arena
Orono, ME

WHEN

Friday, January 20th, 2023
4:00pm EST

Saturday, January 21st, 2023
3:00pm EST

HOW TO WATCH

Both games this weekend, like all Hockey East games this season, will be streamed live on ESPN+. Here is a direct link to Friday’s game, and here is a direct link to Saturday’s game.

LAST TIME OUT

New Hampshire’s last game was against Maine in which the Wildcats pulled out a pretty wild 5-4 victory with a game-winner with just over a minute to play. Neither team held a multi-goal lead in that contest — looks like it was a fun one.

After Maine’s loss to the Wildcats, the Black Bears went on to get smoked 5-0 by Northeastern. Maine is currently riding a four game skid with the first two of those games being a pair of 4-1 losses to the Eagles a couple weeks back.

Boston College played their third frustrating game of the year against UConn on Tuesday, losing 3-1 after giving up a late game-winner in the closing minutes and an empty netter with 0.8 seconds left on the clock. I’m so tired of losing to UConn in absolutely everything.

PROJECTIONS

KRACH (used for odds) has Boston College in 17th, Maine in 20th, and New Hampshire in 25th. Running the numbers gives us two surprisingly one-sided matchups for the Eagles this weekend, with BC looking at a 80.04% chance of winning against New Hampshire and a 63.50% chance of getting the W against Maine. That also works out to a 50.82% chance of a BC sweep on the weekend.

The GRaNT rankings (used for point spread) sees things slightly differently, with BC 15th, Maine 21st, and UNH in 24th. Those rankings work out to a projected score of 3.05 to 1.41 for the BC/UNH matchup, and a score of 3.00 to 1.65 for BC/Maine — or, roughly a 3-1 or 3-2 win for BC in both games.

THIS WEEK’S STORYLINE

Bank Those Points. The loss to UConn was frustrating just because it’s frustrating to lose to UConn in general, but it also kneecapped BC’s run away from the bottom half of the Hockey East standings. Now the Eagles sit just one point above the Huskies for 4th place, with a wider gap up to 2nd and 3rd as well. These games against the middle-to-bottom ranked teams are where you absolutely have to take care of business and bank as many points as you can.

Both teams are more than capable of knocking off the Eagles in a single game, but anything less than a sweep for BC would be pretty disappointing.

PREDICTIONS

BC is 4-0-0 against UNH and Maine so far this season, with this weekend’s contests being the last game of the season series for each. Oddly enough, the UNH games were closer than the ones against Maine, despite public perception (or at least my perception) of UNH being a much worse team on paper than the Black Bears.

The Eagles played pretty well in their two losses last week, so I do think they are in good enough form to take both wins. We’ll go with a comfortable 4-1 win against the Wildcats on Friday before pulling out a 3-2 squeaker against Maine on Saturday.