BC Women’s Hockey vs. UCONN: Final Thoughts & Predictions

Hey hey! Welcome back to the women’s hockey season. The Eagles last played nearly two weeks ago before taking the week off for the Four Nations women’s hockey tournament, which Team USA won rather convincingly, giving national senior team gold medals to Cayla Barnes, Megan Keller, Kali Flanagan, and Caitrin Lonergan.

Unfortunately, before the bye, Boston College was forced to play a game against a Top Ten KRACH-ranked team with four of the best players in the country missing from the roster, and the Eagles were handed their third loss of the season. But the goods news is that that loss is BS and doesn’t count in the Pairwise.

(It actually does, which makes it even more BS.)

WHO

No. 4 Boston College Eagles (8-3-0, 5-1-0 WHEA)
at UCONN Huskies (6-5-1, 3-4-1 WHEA)

UCONN Huskies (6-5-1, 3-4-1 WHEA)
No. 4 Boston College Eagles (8-3-0, 5-1-0 WHEA)

WHAT

Hopefully a couple not-stressful opportunities to right the ship.

WHERE

Freitas Ice Forum
Storrs, CT

Conte Forum
Chestnut Hill, MA

WHEN

BC at UCONN: Friday, 11/16/18, 6pm EST
UCONN at BC: Saturday, 11/17/18, 2pm EST

HOW TO WATCH

BC at UCONN will be streamed at UConnHuskies.com/watch which is available for a $9.99 per month.

UCONN at BC, like all BC men’s and women’s hockey home games, will be streamed live on ESPN3. You can watch the game on TV as well if you have Xfinity. Just say “ESPN3” into your voice remote and select the game from the menu.

LAST TIME OUT

UCONN has been so very average this season, and that continued last weekend. The Huskies fell 4-1 last Friday to a BU team that’s not all that good on paper this year, but then followed that up with a 4-1 win on Saturday against a Maine team that had a really hot start to the season. Go figure.

Boston College last played two weekends ago. They easily handled UCONN with a 3-0 win on Thursday November 1st, but then after losing FOUR (4) of the best players in the world to Four Nations, the Eagles dropped Saturday’s game at Providence 4-2. This game was, I cannot stress this enough, complete BS.

THIS WEEK’S STORYLINE

BC’s had almost two full weeks to stew over a loss that shouldn’t have happened. They now have their full roster back for a pair against the Huskies. A couple of convincing wins would go a long way to making the Providence game feel like it was truly a fluke.

BIG QUESTIONS

Can the Eagles put together the same effort they had in their last game against the Huskies where they pitched a shutout and thoroughly dominated? Will UCONN’s goaltender have a game where she steals one, which happens way more often against the Huskies than we’d like, or can BC make things easy? Will BC figure out how to score goals in the first period, seeing as how they basically never do it this year and it’s probably a big reason for why they haven’t been routing teams given that teams can continue to pack it in and not open the ice up? Will coming back from playing against Canada make playing college competition feel like taking off the batting doughnut for the four BC national team players?

RANDOM, POSSIBLY INCORRECT FACT FROM UCONN’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE

UCONN football surprisingly plays in the top level of NCAA competition (FBS), and actually hasn’t been FCS since 2001.

ICE CREAM OF THE WEEK

Husky Tracks — UCONN Dairy Bar

I will allow UCONN two things and two things only: One, that Jonathan is an exceptionally good boy. And two, their Dairy Bar is pretty great. It’s an on-campus ice cream shoppe and they have a million very good flavors of very good ice cream on hand at any given time.

I highly recommend stopping by the Dairy Bar on Friday in Storrs before the game for some Husky Tracks, one of their more popular offerings, and maybe grab yourself an extra couple pints to go for the game up in Chestnut Hill on Saturday.

GAME TIME SONG OF THE WEEK

Hamilton — What’d I Miss

Caitrin, Cayla, Kali, Megan — welcome back! You didn’t miss anything at all, not us losing a BS game to a team an elite team should handle, nope, no ma’am. Now if you would be so kind as to treat UCONN like you treated Canada and get us back on track, that would be just swell.

PREDICTIONS

If the BC Women’s Hockey team is even half as salty as I am over losing to Providence, they’re going to come out very angry. The last game the Eagles played after a loss was a 5-1 thumping of Syracuse, which still stands as the highest offensive output BC’s put up all season. UCONN is actually a hair worse than Syracuse according to KRACH (which is kind of a surprise, frankly), so I’m really hoping we’ll see a nice big blowout in one of these games this weekend.

I won’t actually predict that, though, because Friday’s game is at UCONN (where BC plays terribly), Saturday’s game won’t be their first game back after a loss (uh, hopefully), and I promised a few weeks back that I would stop predicting blowout wins until the Eagles prove they can actually do it. So, let’s say BC takes the weekend series with 3-1, 3-0 scores — I like where the Eagle defense is at this point in the season.