Mazz: “Are they going to come out and play like they did tonight? Or are they going to come out and play with 15 guys playing and five imposters?”
* * *
Taken slightly out of context, it’s possible to say that Saturday night’s press conference included a discussion about the importance of always having strawberry preserves handy. Underneath Mazzoleni’s tendency towards odd food analogies, though, the question does remain: which Harvard team will show up tomorrow night in the fine state of New Jersey?
There were two keys to Harvard’s win over UMass, and really only one major difference between that win and the previous close losses to Cornell and BC.
The first key—the one that has been steady and sure—is the play of junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris. Dating back to the day after Harvard’s third-period implosion against Princeton in mid-November, Grumet-Morris has been playing the best hockey of his life.
“Dov has been so good for us since the Yale thing,” Mazzoleni said. “He’s confident, our team is confident in him and he’s making timely saves for us.”
“He’s given us the type of goaltending we need to win, and we haven’t done our part scoring goals on that end,” he added. “If we hadn’t had Dov since Yale, I’d hate to see what our record would be.”
The team’s record with Grumet-Morris over that stretch is 5-3 and, as Mazzoleni said, that winning record comes despite the team’s difficulty putting points on the board. And that is the second key for Harvard: finding a way to overcome its futility scoring.
In losing to Cornell and BC, the Crimson took 21 and 18 shots, respectively. In important and convincing wins over BU and UMass—both nationally-ranked when Harvard faced them at Bright Hockey Center—the team has fired 33 and 36 shots, respectively. The difference between the wins and the losses is obvious.
“How can you win hockey games when you don’t shoot?” Mazzoleni asked, in another part of the most rhetorical press conference of his career. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen points added to the scoreboard for not shooting the puck.”
“We’ve got to shoot the puck, and we’ve got to get to the net away from the puck,” he added.
When Harvard does get the puck on net and follow its shots, good things happen. This team is not the same as last year’s; it does not have a Dominic Moore or a Brett Nowak, players who could create their own shot and seemed to have a preternatural knack for finding the net.
What this team does have is one very gifted playmaker (junior Tom Cavanagh), three talented offensive weapons (senior Tyler Kolarik, sophomore Charlie Johnson, and junior Brendan Bernakevitch) and any number of players who can make things happen around the net. But the last phrase in that sentence is the key—around the net.
If Harvard shoots early and often, and if the team charges hard to the net following its shots, good things will happen. The offense will get back on track, and the games that Harvard lost by one goal or the games in which the team was shut out will be much less likely to occur over the rest of the regular season.
If the Crimson works cohesively, if the team bring “the jam” every night, if it comes out with 19 players skating hard every game, results like Saturday’s 5-3 win will be far more common.
That’s a number of ifs. And as Mazzoleni told me, I really don’t know what to expect from this team. (Neither does he, remember.)
But I can hope—hope that Harvard takes along some jam, some preserves, some marmalade and any number of other breakfast spreads for the Princeton game and for the rest of the season.
—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.