Harvard’s first Beanpot title in 24 years is historic
proof of Crimson’s emergence as a potent force in the
East in the post-Vesey era
PROSPECTS PULSE: KEITH PETRUZZELLI | BELISLE WINS 1,000TH
BREAKTHROUGHBEANPOT
March 2017
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IN SPECTACULAR FASHION, RYAN DONATO AND THE CRIMSON
CURSE BUSTERS
March 2017 www.hockeyjournal.com 17
REEL IN THE 65TH BEANPOT CHAMPIONSHIP
By Joshua Kummins
A Boston College repeat? Not this year.
The BU Invitational? Closer, but not that, either.
On Feb. 13, NESN’s Tom Caron put Boston’s signature hockey tournament into perspective. This year though, a much different perspective.
“For the first time in 24 years, the Beanpot is covered in Ivy,” Caron called as the buzzer
sounded and applause roared inside TD Garden.
THE BEANPOT had resided on Commonwealth Av-enue — at either BC or BU — every year for nearly a quar-
ter-century, longer than the entire history of this magazine. But, this year? Goodbye, Comm. Ave. The Beanpot is
headed across the Charles.It was Harvard’s night. This is Harvard’s year.“I thought we were relentless and just felt that our group
felt like it was their night and they were willing to work to make sure it was their night, so I’m very proud,” said Harvard head coach Ted Donato (Dedham, Mass.) after his team earned a 6-3 victory over Boston University to cap-ture the 65th Beanpot title.
“It’s been a long time coming.”A long time coming, indeed, but not just for winning a
Beanpot title. The Crimson had not skated in the late time slot on February’s first or second Monday — or, in the case of two years ago, on whatever night Mother Nature decid-ed the games would be played — since 2013.
There was added motivation for a Harvard senior class that has been a major part of a run of play that has brought a storied program back among the nation’s elite.
“These guys might not choose to talk about it much, but I think they really wanted to win this Beanpot,” Do-nato said. “I think the last couple years (with players) like
Jimmy Vesey (North Read-ing, Mass.) and Kyle Cris-cuolo, you could see how important it was. These guys really set their sights in the offseason that this was something they really wanted to accomplish.”
After winning the ECAC championship two years ago and playing for another title last March, it’s clear
Harvard had what it took to play in big games, and win them. The second Monday in February was just about getting over a hump, breaking a “curse” of its own.
CURSE BUSTERS
Dave Arnold/New England Hockey Journal
Continued on Page 18
Harvard’s Ryan Donato wheels around the BU defense and prepares to beat goalie
Jake Oettinger for a highlight-reel third-period strike for the Crimson. Inset left, senior Phil Zielonka
celebrates a goal. Above, Sean Malone (17), Devin Tringle (22) and Ty Pelton-Byce savor the moment.
They wanted a taste of the Boston spotlight. And, they would get it.
Relentless also would describe Har-vard’s play on the Beanpot’s opening night, as it scored two third-period goals on the power play and another short-handed to edge past Northeastern, 4-3.
For Alexander Kerfoot and his seven classmates, it felt real good.
“I think it will be cool to come out for warm-ups and there will be more than seven people in the stands,” Kerfoot said on Feb. 6, after the Crimson advanced to their first Beanpot title game since 2008. “For the last three years, it’s been pretty demoralizing coming in on the second Monday and playing in that consolation game. Nobody wants to be part of that.”
Of course, the job wasn’t done. BU was next, and the Crimson took it to the team that has owned the Beanpot for al-most half of its 65-year history.
Harvard had an 18-2 shot advantage in the first period. At the 15:10 mark, fresh-man Nathan Krusko slammed home his first of two goals off a scramble in front of BU goaltender Jake Oettinger.
“From start to finish, we were fighting an uphill battle,” BU head coach David Quinn (Cranston, R.I.) said.
It was looking like Harvard’s night right from the start, but the Terriers re-sponded. Freshmen Kieffer Bellows and Clayton Keller put BU ahead less than five minutes into the second period, a stretch that was part of “the best eight minutes we played all night,” Quinn said.
It was nothing the Crimson had not seen before. And, again, this would be their night. “Our team has been resilient because we have so many leaders on the team,” Harvard senior captain Devin Trin-gale (Medford, Mass.) said. “We do a really good job of responding to goals against
and getting back to our game, even when it seems like the tides are turning.”
Harvard could not have drawn up a better response, and its leaders led.
Senior Luke Esposito (Greenwich, Conn.) drew the Crimson back even at 10:46 and Krusko potted his second of the game with 1:06 left before the sec-ond intermission. From there, the Crim-son would never trail. Kerfoot netted the game-winner just 31 seconds into the third period, putting home classmate Tyler Moy’s pass towards the crease.
The consensus was that no lead was safe against the Terriers, but if there was one goal that made Donato’s group feel a sigh of relief, it was its fifth. At 12:47, sophomore Ryan Donato (Scituate, Mass.) rushed down the right side, past several Terrier defenders and beat Oettinger with a hard wrister from the circle.
“It was a big goal,” Ted Donato said. “I don’t think any of the goals tonight I
THE 65TH BEANPOT
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Continued from Page 17
BU’s Charlie McAvoy does his best Bobby Orr impression — sans the clinching goal — as he’s upended in front of the Harvard crease.
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would characterize as anything but, but that made the light at the end of the tunnel a little bit brighter.”
As predicted, BU was not done, as Keller scored his sec-ond of the night at 13:20. But, it was too little, too late. It was Harvard’s night.
“At the end of the day, this is a game of want. And, boy, did they want it more,” Quinn said of the Crimson, who entered the sea-son’s last week ranked third na-tionally and receiving three first-place votes in the USCHO.com poll. “They outskated, outhit, out-competed, outshot us. Just about the only thing they didn’t do was out-goaltend us.”
Not many teams out-goaltend the Terriers. Oettinger made a career-high 40 saves in the los-ing effort after a 22-save perfor-mance in a 3-1 semifinal win over rival BC, becoming the second straight BU netminder to win the Eberly Award, given to the Bean-pot goaltender with the best two-day save percentage.
Freshman defenseman Adam Fox made a Crimson victory all but official with 1:50 left, adding an empty-net goal from nearly 200 feet away.
The drought was over. The curse was broken.
“I think this group has a lot of character and has been through some ups and downs,” Ted Do-nato said. “This is a group that takes a lot of pride in being a team, and that’s what we stressed coming into the game. Obvious-ly, that’s a very talented group over there. … But, I thought our guys just kept coming and our best players were just immense.”
Krusko became the first freshman to win Most Valuable Player honors in the Beanpot since 2013 when Northeastern’s Kevin Roy scored five goals in two games in a losing effort, and the first Harvard recipi-ent since Ted Drury (Trumbull, Conn.) in 1993.
It’s safe to say that the Beanpot was not on Krusko’s barometer growing up in Alpharetta, Ga., but he sure learned its significance upon arriving to Cambridge.
“I can’t speak as to what (the Beanpot) means to me, but I know how much it means to my teammates,” Krusko said. “For me, not necessarily thinking about the Beanpot as the biggest tournament, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t easy for me to get up for
this game and get motivated. It’s almost easier to get the wheels going when you’re working for the guys next to you.”
There was an obvious level of excitement following the vic-tory, but the Crimson quickly turned their attention to the stretch run.
The Ivy League title is al-ready in Harvard’s hands, and there’s potential for much more.
“So much work went into this game and building this team that we have this season,” Tringale said. “It’s really tough to describe how good it feels, but I’d just like to say we’re not done yet. We have a bunch of big games coming up, but we’re really excited about this one.”
For the Harvard Crimson, it’s been a long time coming.
1993 CATEGORY 2017
Boston Garden Arena TD Garden
Harvard 4, Boston University 2 Championship score Harvard 6, Boston University 3
Harvard 7, Northeastern 5 Semifinal score Harvard 4, Northeastern 3
Ted Drury MVP Nathan Krusko
Ronn Tomassoni Harvard coach Ted Donato
22-6-3 (16-3-3) Harvard record 22-5-2 (16-4-2)
29-9-2 (18-5-1) Boston University record 21-10-3 (13-6-3)
10-24-1 (6-17-1) Northeastern record 16-13-5 (9-10-3)
9-24-5 (6-15-3) Boston College record 18-14-4 (13-6-3)
St. Lawrence Saints Reigning ECAC tourney champ Quinnipiac Bobcats
Maine Black Bears Reigning Hockey East tourney champ Northeastern Huskies
Lake Superior State Lakers Reigning national champion North Dakota Fighting Hawks
Pittsburgh Penguins Reigning Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins
En route to winning Adams Division before first-round sweep vs. Buffalo
Bruins Fired Claude Julien
5-11, missed playoffs 7th straight season Patriots 14-2, won fifth Super Bowl in 16 seasons
Extends title drought to 75 years Red Sox Co-favorites for fourth World Series championship in 14 seasons
En route to 48-34 record in first season after Larry Bird’s retirement
Celtics Currently second seed in East
Limited to just 13 games after knee injury Cam Neely President of Bruins
Kennedy and Kerry U.S. senators from Massachusetts Warren and Markey
William Weld Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker
Raymond Flynn Boston mayor Marty Walsh
William J. Clinton U.S. president Donald J. Trump
In its third year of construction Big Dig 10-year anniversary of completion
“Unforgiven” Academy Award for Best Picture “La La Land” — oops, “Moonlight”
CRIMSON TIDE
Harvard’s Wiley Sherman (Greenwich, Conn.) tries to pull away from the pressing Clayton Keller. Bottom left, winning Crimson goalie Merrick Madsen honed his skills at Proctor Academy.
DIGITAL BONUS/BEANPOT GALLERY HOCKEYJOURNAL�COM
Comparing the tides of change in college hockey, Beantown sports, politics and pop culture from 1993 and 2017, the last two years the Harvard Crimson have won the Beanpot championship:1993 ... 2017
20 NEW ENGLAND HOCKEY JOURNAL March 2017 Free digital subscription at hockeyjournal.com/free
By Joshua Kummins
Throughout this season in Hockey East, freshman goaltenders have been a big story.
And, not just any fresh-man goaltenders. They took starting jobs in the opening weeks and ran with them, leading several teams to outstanding sea-sons and prime playoff positioning.
Vermont’s Stefanos Lekkas is one of them. “I came into college ready for that step, and chose to come play in Hockey East against the best teams all the time,” said Lekkas, a two-year starter for the USHL’s Sioux Falls Stampede.
“We were in school for six weeks this summer, so that helped me transition into college hockey more. From there, it was trusting what I was doing, getting into my first few games and kind of roll-ing from there.”
Lekkas and the Cats rolled, indeed. The Elburn, Ill., native was unbeaten through his first four starts and won three straight decisions to begin the 2017 calendar year and moved to 13-3-2.
Of course, seasons are never perfect. UVM was without four of its cap-
tains for five games at the beginning of the season, and Lekkas has been the main man in net for much of the year. The Cats won just once in their first six games in February. But as the postsea-son approaches, Lekkas knows that the adversity his team faced earlier in the season and down the stretch of the regu-lar season can become a positive.
“Every game is tough. We were still playing good hockey through those times despite some of the losses we faced, but just not getting the end re-sults,” said Lekkas, who won the USHL’s Clark Cup title during his first full sea-son in Sioux Falls in 2014-15. “As a group, I think we learned and grew, and it will be safe to say that we’ll come out stron-ger from it.”
Through it all, Lekkas still entered the second-to-last weekend of the regular sea-son with a .660 winning percentage that ranked third in Hockey East, while his 2.52 goals-against average was ninth nation-ally among freshman puck stoppers.
While being without senior Mike Santaguida for much of a second con-secutive season forced Lekkas into do-ing the heavy lifting, he seized the job, just as Packy Munson did in 2015-16.
“He’s played a lot of hockey because Santa’s been out for a while now with a lower-body injury and not available to play,” Vermont coach Kevin Sneddon said. “He’s played a lion’s share of the games and probably deserved a healthy night off here or there, and we just didn’t think we could do that.”
Santaguida — who made 19 starts and posted the eighth-best GAA for a single
season in program history (2.46) as a freshman — started the Catamounts’ first two games of the season against Clark-son, but the 5-foot-9, 170-pound Lekkas started all but three from that point until the holiday break and every game after it.
There is an adage in hockey that says teams are built from the goal out. While UVM is having one of its best offensive
seasons in recent memory, Lekkas quick-ly found his role and established confi-dence within the club.
“We knew he was going to make an impact,” sophomore defenseman Mike Lee (Hamden, Conn.) said. “Santaguida is a senior and has been a big part of this team, but I think (Stefanos) is a hard worker and earned his spot. He’s a great
goaltender. Not that big, but he can really play. And, I think having Santa here push-ing him to play his best separates him from most of the goalies in the league.”
Lekkas played against Boston Col-lege’s Joseph Woll, Boston University’s Jake Oettinger and Connecticut’s Adam Huska in the USHL, the top junior hock-ey circuit in the United States.
Their immediate impact, and that of three other rookies who also have taken the starting job for more than half of the season, also speaks to the league’s pedi-gree and its competitiveness night in and night out.
“You know they’re all good goalies and they all are going to very success-ful teams, so I think that just speaks to how competitive the conference is every night,” Lekkas said. “It’s a playoff-like game, even if it’s November. That’s why we all come here.”
HOCKEY EAST
Lekkas finds groove in Catamount creasen After injury to Santaguida, rookie netminder fills big void for Vermont
March 2017 www.hockeyjournal.com 21
Sixteen players from Hockey East were named semi-finalists for the 65th Walter Brown Award, presented an-nually to the best American-born college hockey player in New England by the Gridiron Club of Greater Boston.
Harvard’s Jimmy Vesey (North Reading, Mass.) won the award in 2015 and 2016 before signing with the New York Rangers, but eight of the conference’s nominees — including Boston College’s Colin White (Hanover, Mass.) and Ryan Fitzgerald (North Reading, Mass.) and New Hampshire’s Tyler Kelleher (Longmeadow, Mass.) — also were semifinalists last year. ...
Kelleher recorded his 100th career assist in New Hampshire’s Feb. 3 loss to Boston College and his 150th point the following night at UMass-Lowell. The senior from Longmeadow, Mass., is the first Wildcat since Jacob Micflikier in 2007 to reach the 150-point marker and the 17th ever to reach the century mark in assists. ...
Speaking of assists, Fitzgerald recorded the Eagles’ eighth playmaker of the season on Feb. 10 against Mer-rimack. Only Northeastern and American International have had players record three assists in a game that many times. ...
BC saw it streak of consecutive 20-win seasons end at seven, as head coach Jerry York (Watertown, Mass.) guided the Eagles to 18 wins and a tie for the Hockey East regular-season title with Lowell and BU.
The second-to-last weekend of the regular season was quite an interesting one, as there were five ties and one overtime victory (for Merrimack) in 11 league games, including two draws between BC and Vermont at Conte Forum. The Eagles had not skated to back-to-back ties since 2008. …
Senior Mario Puskarich became the first Vermont player in more than 20 years to reach the 50-goal mark for his career, scoring twice in a 5-3 win over New Hampshire on Feb. 11. J.C. Ruid was the last Catamount skater to achieve that milestone, doing so in 1995-96 with eventual NHLers Martin St. Louis and Eric Perrin on his line. ...
On Feb. 4, UMass-Lowell improved to 11-0 all-time at home on weekends during which the New England Patriots play in the Super Bowl with an 8-2 win over New Hampshire. Seven different players scored goals for the River Hawks, who notched a five-goal third period for the first time since an 8-4 win over Boston College on Jan. 12, 2002. ...
Northeastern junior Dylan Sikura turned one of the most rare feats in hockey on Jan. 27, scoring a natural hat trick in the final 7:19 of regulation of the Huskies’ 4-3 win at UMass-Lowell. He became the first Huskies skater to score three goals in a period since Cody Ferriero on Dec. 29, 2012, at Harvard.
THE NOTEBOOK
CONTENT BY JOSHUA KUMMINS
Brian Bowen, VermontBowen scored three goals and added an assist in two ties at BC, becoming the first Catamount to win Hockey East Player of the Week honors this season. A native of Littleton, Mass., Bowen registered a goal and an assist to aid his team’s three-goal comeback in the Friday series opener and scored both goals the next night.
Erik Foley, ProvidenceFoley recorded seven goals and 13 points in his first 13 games since returning from the IIHF World Junior Championship, becoming the first Friar forward in just over two years to record a hat trick in a 4-3 win over UConn on Feb. 10. It was the first career multigoal game and four-point effort for the Mansfield, Mass., native.
Nick Marin, UMass-LowellThe Shrewsbury, Mass., native got on the scoreboard in a big way in the River Hawks’ 8-2 win over New Hampshire on Feb. 4, scoring a goal and two assists for his first three collegiate points in his 13th career game. Marin did not dress for Lowell’s first seven games of the season, making his debut Oct. 29 at Omaha.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
THE QUOTE THE LIST: FRESHMAN GOALIES
In the November issue, NEHJ noted the emergence of several freshman goaltenders around Hockey East. That trend continued all season through-out the league and across the country, too, as six of the league’s 12 teams had a rookie play more than half of his team’s minutes in goal. See the breakdown above.
With all of its offensive firepower, Northeastern’s struggles during the first half of the season left some Hockey East fans scratching their heads.
Injuries did not help, as the Huskies did not have their complete top line of seniors John Stevens and Zach Aston-Reese and junior Nolan Stevens healthy for more than one game since October, and sophomore goaltender Ryan Ruck’s play — like the team’s — has bounced up and down. Again, they have found a way.
“This is the best time to get hot, going into the playoffs,” Aston-Reese said after scoring his third hat trick of the season in the Huskies’ 4-1 win over Connecticut on Feb. 18, their fourth straight victory and eighth in a 10-game span at the time.
Aston-Reese has been a model of consistency for the Huskies all year as his 56 points through 32 games led the team, and the lone trio of scorers in Division 1 college hockey with 40 or more points. Sophomore Adam Gaudette (Braintree, Mass.) and junior Dylan Sikura each entered the final weekend of the regular season just one point shy of 50 for the season. The Huskies have not had three 50-point scorers since 1975-76.
Aston-Reese also is the first NU skater since 1985-86 to record 25 goals and 25 as-sists in a season and the first since Harry Mews in 1989-90 to reach the 50-point mark.
The Staten Island, N.Y., native’s four-point effort against UConn lifted him into
a tie for 17th place all-time in the Northeastern record books with 141 points, while his 79 assists cracked the top 20. In the single-season ranks, he is tied for 13th in both points and goals (27).
Aston-Reese gives head coach Jim Madigan (Milton, Mass.) a great deal of confidence. That’s for sure. But, he’s not alone.
“Even when he doesn’t score, he plays 200 feet,” Madigan said. “He’s very good defensively, a plus-13 player on top of it. He’s a guy that contrib-utes in many ways other than scoring goals, so it’s comforting when he’s on the ice, and the same thing when we have Nolan and John Stevens on the ice, Sikura and Gaudette.
“They’re making things happen, those kids.”
PLAYER TEAM PCT MIN. PLAYED
Jake Oettinger Boston University 86.7
Stefanos Lekkas Vermont 82.5
Tyler Wall UMass-Lowell 80.6
Joseph Woll Boston College 78.7
Ryan Wischow Massachusetts 66.2
Adam Huska Connecticut 54.0
ASTON-REESE, HUSKIES RACK UP NUMBERS
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Senior Zach Aston-Reese is tied for 13th in both points and goals in Northeastern single-season history.
BU’s Jake Oettinger
‘If you would tell me in July that we’d be battling for first place in Hockey East, I don’t think that would have gone by too many people without, “Woah, wait a second. They were picked, what, sixth in the league?” So, the kids have done a nice job.’
— Boston College coach Jerry York
