The Massachusetts hockey team is six games into its season, and three games into the conference slate. But with a home-and-home series against Merrimack this weekend – its second in a week – there are still plenty of questions to be answered.
The Minutemen (5-1-0, 2-1-0 Hockey East) will travel to North Andover tomorrow to face the Warriors, before returning to the Mullins Center Saturday night to host Merrimack in the second game.
Among those questions are how the team rebounds from being manhandled at home by the Providence Friars, who never trailed in a 6-2 win at the Mullins Center, as well as simply who will be in the starting lineup.
Although a regular cast of characters has been established, at least one or two significant changes have been made to the lines and pairings for each game since the start of the season. Greg Mauldin and Stephen Werner, whose “WAM” line compatriot Matt Anderson has been redshirted due to a shoulder injury, have bounced around with a couple of different trios, and Josh Hanson was a scratch for three games after scoring twice in the season-opening 6-3 win over Connecticut, notched his first assist of the season in last Saturday’s 4-2 victory over Providence while skating on a line with Chris Capraro and Mike Warner.
“We’ve got three or four positions up front, and a couple of positions on defense that a number of people are competing for,” UMass coach Don Cahoon said. “What it will take will be a group of people to get together and have a real feel for each other, a line you wouldn’t want to break up. So a person creates a job for himself based on that, being a complement to other people on a line … it’s a necessary protocol to go through to have your best lineup on the ice when it’s crucial to play your best hockey.”
Merrimack enters the weekend series at 2-4-1 overall, and 1-2-1 in Hockey East play. But while the Warriors’ record isn’t quite as pretty as Providence’s 4-1-1 overall number entering last weekend’s home-and-home, Cahoon warns that they could still be a handful.
“Quite honestly, there’s not a big difference between the two teams. And that’s the great thing about our league; top to bottom teams can hurt you. But you can’t go into a game saying you’ll play at one level against this opponent … we need preparation, we need to have the ability to prepare ourselves to compete in earnest for every game that we play, and there’s got to be a more workman-like mentality that is a part of this team day to day.
“We saw two very contrasting brands of hockey played by our club [last] weekend. We need that team that showed up on Saturday night, that mentality to be there every night.”
The Warriors, who battled with Providence to a scoreless draw on Oct. 25, have struggled to score against conference foes, with seven goals in four Hockey East contests. Four of those came in Merrimack’s best effort of the season, a 4-2 win over Northeastern on Oct. 24 that saw Casey Guenther post a career-high 35 saves.
Guenther’s performance against Northeastern was an anomaly, though, as his 3.12 goals against average this season puts him last on the overall list. The junior has fared better against conference foes, though, with a 2.35 GAA that puts him right in the middle of the pack.
The order of the home-and-home set will be reversed for the Minutemen, who travel first to the newly-renovated Volpe Center and the J. Thom Lawler Arena, and then return home to the Mullins Center, which wasn’t so kind to them last Friday.
“I don’t think you can let yourself fall into that trapping, where you don’t deal with playing at home well,” Cahoon said, “because you feel a little bit more pressure. I think the focus of playing at home could be a little more difficult, because you’ve got kids with friends coming and family coming. You’ve got people calling, people in the dorms talking about the game, and it’s hard to keep that narrow focus that’s so critical.”
