The Crimson has no Moore, but it certainly has no less.
After combining to score 92 points last season, Dominic Moore ’03 and Brett Nowak ’03 are now toiling in the American Hockey League, hoping The Call isn’t far away.
This season, the Harvard men’s hockey team will be different because of their absence. But it won’t necessarily be worse.“Dom and Brett were huge losses,” senior Tim Pettit said, “but we have a chance to be even more successful than we were with [them]. We are a lot deeper.”
The Crimson returns 20 lettermen from a team that finished with the school’s best record in a decade (22-10-2) and reached the first round of the NCAA tournament, where it lost to Boston University.
The strength of this season’s team is its experience. It’s anchored by eight seniors and seven juniors—a tightly-knit group that includes 14 players who stayed in Boston over the summer to train and play in summer hockey leagues.
“This is by far the closest group of kids we’ve ever had,” said Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni, now in his fifth season.
And, as a result of the off-season work, it’s also the best-conditioned Harvard team in years.
“We’re in the best shape we’ve been in coming into a season,” captain Kenny Smith said.
Along with its cohesiveness, the Crimson begins the season as the consensus pick to finish first in the ECAC. Harvard received 10 of 12 first-place votes in the preseason coaches’ poll for a total of 120 points, the most earned by a team in four years.
The ranking doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Harvard’s roster boasts 12 NHL draft picks. Six of them are defensemen, and if Mazzoleni dresses them as a unit, opposing forwards will hop over the dasher, knowing that, no matter what, they’ll face two future pros.
On top of that, the team’s 15 upperclassmen represent the most players on any team in the nation to have made the NCAA tournament in each of the last two seasons.
“This is something we’ve been building [over] the last four years,” Mazzoleni said. “This hasn’t happened overnight. If you look at the preseason polls from the last four years...they progressively moved toward this team.”
The Coaches
Mazzoleni, 64-57-10 in his first four seasons at Harvard, begins the season with a 284-192-40 career mark. With this team’s talent, he’ll almost certainly get career win No. 300 this season.
Meanwhile, assistant coach Nate Leaman left this summer to fill the vacant head coaching position at Union (where he’s off to a 4-0-1 start). Gene Reilly, formerly a highly-regarded assistant coach in the AHL, has replaced him, joining Sean McCann ’94 on the Crimson coaching staff.
Read more in Sports
Love It Or Leave It: Fitzpatrick Should Not Have Played