No one can question Pettit’s goal-scoring talent – he has scored 46 times in 96 career games – but some have had trouble describing exactly what makes his shot so good.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Cavanagh, Pettit’s linemate. “I know he works on it a lot, and some of it’s natural. He just has the right motion. He’s not flashy about it, but he gets the job done. Tim’s a real smart player, and he reads the play real well.
He’s a real easy guy to play with, and he knows what to do with the puck. If he has an open shot, it’s usually in the back of the net.”
But as much as Pettit’s point total has increased this season relative to his first two, there hasn’t been much of a change in his goal-scoring numbers. He had 14 goals in 2000-2001, when he was the Ivy League Rookie of the Year, then 16 last year and 16 so far this season.
Instead, the change has been in Pettit’s playmaking.
He was the ECAC’s regular-season assist leader (23) and is tied for the team lead with 27 overall – 17 more than he had last year. Pettit had five assists—to five different goal-scorers—in the Crimson’s 6-3 win at Princeton
Dec. 6, and during a six-game stretch in February, he recorded 12 points, including seven assists.
“I’ve been really fortunate to get the chance to play with all three of our centers, Brett [Nowak] and Dom at different times, and Tommy a lot,” Pettit said. “With the skill level they have, that’s given me a lot of chances where I can make plays this year, and I’ve been able to capitalize on more of my opportunities.”
As many opportunities as Pettit has taken advantage of during the season, he has managed to stay out of the public eye to the point that Mazzoleni called him “the most unheralded player in the league” and said that “something is wrong” if Pettit doesn’t make first-team
All-ECAC and get strong consideration for Player of the Year.
“Timmy’s a quiet guy,” Moore said. “When you look at him, he’s a small guy, pretty unassuming, doesn’t play a tremendously physical game, and doesn’t attract a lot of attention off the ice. That’s why he doesn’t get a lot of recognition.
“You always don’t notice him, but he plays a very smart game. It’s his smarts that make him successful. You know you’ve got a good player on your hands when you don’t even notice him out there but he’s making a big difference on the outcome of the game.”
Pettit’s single-game contributions, however, pale in comparison to the impact he has made, along with the rest of the Crimson’s junior class, to the Harvard program in general. Pettit and his classmates were the first recruits Mazzoleni brought to Cambridge, and each has had a hand in the Crimson’s return to national respectability.
“I’ll always be indebted to those guys,” Mazzoleni said. “It’s a group that came in here when the program hadn’t experienced a great amount of success in the previous six years. I give them a lot of credit for casting their lot with us, because kids usually want to go somewhere that’s having success right then. But they believed in us as a staff and believed in this program.”
It’s a very close-knit group, as Pettit lives with seven of those juniors in Jordan.
“Those guys have pretty much been my experience here,” Pettit said. “We know everything about each other and what we’re doing. I see them all day long. And there’s nothing you do in our room that can’t be made fun of later.”
But intense video game tournaments aside, Pettit, his roommates, and the rest of the Crimson are well aware of how important this weekend is.
“When it comes to this point, we play with a lot of urgency,” Pettit said. “And our team becomes that much stronger.”
—Staff writer Jon P. Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.