It’s playoff szn, baby! We already welcomed you aboard the BC Women’s Hockey Hype Train earlier this week, and with the Eagles advancing to the Hockey East semifinals, things are starting to get serious. As such, it seems an appropriate time for your favorite women’s hockey writer to emerge out of semi-retirement to inform the masses of the Eagles’ playoff run.
The next loss will end BC’s season, but a win tonight will send them to a trophy game. Winning would be a lot more fun, so let’s just do that.
WHO
Boston College Eagles (15-13-7, 13-9-5 WHEA — #4 conference seed)
at No. 10 UConn Huskies (23-7-5, 19-4-4 WHEA — #1 conference seed)
WHAT
The Hockey East Semifinals
WHERE
Toscano Family Ice Forum
Storrs, CT
WHEN
Wednesday, March 6th, 2024
7:00pm EST
HOW TO WATCH
The Hockey East semifinals and finals will both be aired live on NESN. For those of you outside of the NESN coverage area, you can watch as usual via the ESPN+ stream.
THE TRENDS
UConn is your Hockey East regular season champion, and they did manage to separate themselves from the pack nicely in the end… but you wouldn’t say they were a dominant champion. Their lead in the standings wasn’t really due to a hot finish to the season, but moreso because everyone else just seemed to drop more points than they did.
Consider that while the Huskies finished the regular season with a sweep of Boston University (and we certainly salute them for this), prior to that they lost 3-0 to a slumping Vermont team, took two wins off the teams at the bottom of the conference standings, and went to overtime in their four games prior to that. Not bad, obviously, but not the numbers you’d expect from a team that wound up with a 10 point gap to second place.
Unfortunately, BC has had a similar story on their end to the regular season, just… well, worse. After finding themselves at the top of the conference standings midway through the year, a few injuries and illnesses kicked off a bit of a second half tumble with the Eagles ending the regular season with a 2-6-5 run (yes, 5 ties) and falling to the #4 seed.
Fortunately, though, BC comes in with a bit of momentum thanks to a thrilling overtime win in the quarterfinals over Providence College this past Friday:
Sammy are you Serious!!! pic.twitter.com/5OOeoGdIss
— Boston College Women’s Hockey (@BC_WHockey) March 2, 2024
PROJECTIONS
KRACH (used for odds) has BC ranked 18th and UConn in 11th. Running the numbers gives us the Huskies with an 70.56% chance of winning, or UConn -240 with your local bookie.
The GRaNT rankings (used for point spread) tells roughly the same story, with the Eagles in 20th and the Huskies 11th. Our calculator gives us a projected score of 2.99 to 1.58 in favor of UConn, or something like a 3-1 or 3-2 Husky win.
THIS WEEK’S STORYLINE
Have their number, or time’s up? Perhaps BC’s biggest positive on the season is that they did not lose to top seeded UConn all year. Coach Crowley’s squad came away with a 2-0-1 record against the Huskies this season, with one win in overtime and the tie one of BC’s few shootout wins for BC. And so that begs the question: Is there something about UConn that BC just matches up well with? Or are we due for a regression to the mean?
The answer is probably a little bit of both. One thing that likely helps BC is the game is a bit of a strength-on-strength matchup with BC’s league-leading offense going up against UConn’s league-leading defense. Thus far, BC’s offense has been able to come out on top — the Huskies have only allowed 28 goals in conference all year (really very impressive), but 8 of those goals were against the Eagles.
But BC’s defense has had its struggles at times, and while they typically have the offense to keep up, the Huskies have a defense that can prevent a comeback. And so that’s really where the clock can strike midnight here on BC’s strong run over UConn this season — if BC’s defense falls apart early, UConn’s can start to lock down and impose its will to freeze the Eagles out of the game.
PREDICTION
Both of these teams have played a ton of overtime games, especially over the second half of the season. I suspect that UConn’s defense starts to get more of a handle on the Eagles in this game, but that BC’s goaltender Grace Campbell rides her hot quarterfinal (46 saves on 47 shots) into the next round to balance things out. Expect a 1-1 score line headed into an extra frame or two, before a big-time scorer breaks through for the win. We’ll give Sammy Taber her second game-winner in 5 days to see the Eagles edge past the Huskies by a score of 2-1 (2OT).