I told myself to just watch the game. I left my notepad in the car, and didn’t even carry a pen with me. I told myself I wouldn’t tweet either, since the service at the Garden when filled is seriously lacking.

Despite my attempts to just enjoy the game, I still had two quick notes I had to write up post-game. You can take the tools away from the writer, but you can never make them stop thinking like one. Here they are:

- Speed-  There was a time a few years back when I would attend an NHL game and be instantly impressed at the speed difference between the pro game and the college game. The difference was marked – the pro game moved quicker, players not only skated faster but had better skating skills, and a player’s reflexes were that much more automatic.

The last two times I’ve attended a Bruins game, that difference has drastically decreased. It could be possible that it is because I’m simply not getting to games to make the comparison as often. But it just seems that since 2008, hockey observers have seen a marked improvement in the quality of play of college hockey players. The quality of passes and puck work in the NHL has decreased at the same level the college game has increased. Skating skills and speed in both the pro and college game have woefully decreased (qualities I didn’t learn how to evaluate until I started watching hockey with hockey players, but once I did, you can’t help but notice stride, edge security and speed.)

There is no longer that marked difference, that “wow – this is a different level” feeling, when you watch a NHL game as opposed to a college game. That’s equal parts wonderful for college hockey and a shame on the pro game.

-Seguin’s Shifts Off - Talented Tyler Seguin is still a teenager. Though you cannot deny his playmaking abilities and his contributions thus far to the Bruins, you can’t see his play purely through rose-colored glasses.

Seguin, like other immensely talented young hockey players both before and after him, has two switches. One controls his effort, and the other controls his natural talent. Every shift, a player like him has to decide to turn either one on or both on.

The natural talent switch is stuck on. It’s the switch to that lackluster light in the corner of the living room that provides you with no truely useful lighting source – it’s usually the light your grandmother leaves on a timer to try to convince would-be robbers someone is home.

The effort switch is not a given. It’s the light switch on the wall on the other side of the room. You really don’t feel like shuffling over to that side of the room. It’s out of the way of your final destination: the couch. Unless you are going to read or type and really need that light, there are times where you just don’t want to take the extra amount of energy to flip it on. You’ll rely on the lackluster light and the glow of the television.

Everyone in this world is naturally talented at something, and when it comes to whatever that is, they have those two switches. For Seguin, it’s hockey. Before every shift, he has to make that decision – is he going to expand that extra amount of energy and turn the effort swtich on?

Last Tuesday against the Jets, there were too many shifts where he wasn’t turning on the effort. He’d jump out for a shift and coast. Good plays and meaningful contributions will still happen because he’s talented, but not with the same regularity as they would if he would skate out on a shift with both talent and effort turned on. And that’s why his stats appear streaky at times – he will be on scoring fits and then be seemingly and suddenly extinguished. For example, he went on a six game scoring streak from October 29th until November 12th, amassing eight goals and three assists, and then only scored one assist in the next four games.

Seguin is far from alone. This is the same problem that was always evident to me when Colin Wilson played with BU – he took shifts off, thinking that he could coast on talent, put his stick down on the ice and volia! He’d score or assist magically, without having to try. Charlie Coyle suffered from this more severely. The shifts he turned on the effort shifts were increasingly rare as his BU tenure continued. He relies too much on his wingspan and talent, and doesn’t always put forth the effort that would push his playmaking ability over the edge. Every team has one – the young kid who thinks he’s invincible and superhuman, and can coast on the same talent that made him the star of mites, travel team, high school, and juniors.

Seguin won’t be felled by this for long – he has a tough coach and experienced teammates that won’t allow it. But it nagged me during a few games I watched on television, and when I finally saw a game live and could see the entire ice, it definitely stuck out for me. The “Seguinistas” may sling snowballs at me for pointing it out, but it’s not a death sentence for the talented forward, just a blemish.

And now that we’re a month into the season, I immediately and totally regret this decision. I’ve got too much to say. So here are my pent up college hockey thoughts from this weekend- edited and sanitized of course.

Of course, most of this will be about Boston University, and how much physical pain (from banging my head against the wall out of frustration) the Terriers caused me after Saturday evening’s 7-1 loss to UMass Lowell. The Riverhawks chased around the Terriers around the Tsongas Arena ice like my old lab-retriever mix would chase a poor squirrel facing impending doom.

What’s wrong with BU? Here are two of the issues.

Lines, Lines, Everywhere A Line - There has been little consistency to the forward lines from game to game. Surpising? No. BU head coach Jack Parker line changes with the regularity that I drink coffee. Tinkering with lines is Parker’s cure to any and all that may ail his team.

When is the last time that Parker let forward lines gel for a few games? The Terriers national championship season in 2008-09. His top three lines largely remained unchanged from game to game. Lines were allowed time to grow together as a unit. If a line performed poorly, he demoted the entire line instead of changing up its make-up.

I am not saying a coach should set lines the first week of the long college hockey season and then never touch them again. That would be impractical. But Parker himself has admitted in years past that he’s guilty of changing up lines too much (I am trying to find the exact quote, but I believe he said it in 2007-08), and this year is no exception. No one is playing with the same guys from game to game, let alone day to day. In a home and home again UMass Amherst two weekends ago, the lines changed overnight.

The Terriers saw Charlie Coyle and Alex Chiasson paired together for a while, which is a mistake because both are Colin Wilson-esque – they’re long wingspan guys with a lot of natural talent but who need to give more consistent effort. Sahir Gill gets bounced from line to line, and while he’s a good player, he doesn’t have the consistency to be relied to boost lines in that way. Taking the two strong freshman forwards in Evan Rodrigues and Cason Hohmann and changing their lines every game doesn’t help ease them into play or help them get a rhythm going (and both have shown glimpses of being decent contributors.)

The Past Is Calling - This summer, I interviewed Parker for a feature in the Red Hot Hockey game program (coming soon to Madison Square Garden, so be a dear and pick one up on game day.) We spoke at length about the BU championship teams of 1971 and 1972. During the Terriers’ first ever national championship season, Parker was a coach for the freshman squad (in that time, freshmen were not allowed to play on varsity squads.) In his coaching at the time, he was a fan of using a goaltender rotation. Then BU head coach Jack Kelley was a fan of the opposite – naming a number one goaltender and sticking to it.

Kelley chose Tim Regan to be his starting goaltender in 1970-71, until a particularly poor outing by Regan. Parker recalls Regan’s tough game being against Cornell at Lynah Rink. That would point towards the Terriers’ 5-1 loss to Cornell on January 23, 1971. After that game, Kelley decided to start Dan Brady in net. Brady would go on to start the rest of the season and be named the NCAA title game MVP.

The exact quote from Parker in my interview notes: “I think Jack Kelley had the opinion that he wanted a starting goaltender, and Timmy was our number one guy for quite a while. Then he faltered, and it might have been at Ithaca, I think, and Danny had the chance to play.”

Mr. Parker, I think Saturday night was the equivalent of that “perhaps in Ithaca” moment for this year’s squad. Kieran Millan has faltered, and you can no longer lay all the blame on the defense. It’s time to give Grant Rollheiser a greater chance as “the guy” in goal.

Gripe of the Week - It amazes me that some of the most talented members of the college hockey media are still acting like Merrimack College’s recent success was completely unpredictable and unexpected. Merrimack is an example of how long it can take for a recruiting strategy and coaching philosophy to take hold. Head coach Mark Dennehy is in his seventh year in Andover, and thus has five or so years of teams made up of primarily his recruits.

Also, don’t underestimate that the last two years brought an administration at the school who have made Division 1 hockey a priority (for better and worse) – that wasn’t a case in prior years. It was not long ago that Merrimack was on the verge of possibly leaving Hockey East because their facilities were not up to par. While their Lawler Arena still isn’t ideal, it’s as renovated and gussied out as it is able to be.

So to say, “if you saw two years ago that Merrimack would be the last unbeaten team in the nation/a top team in the nation/the top team in Hockey East” is a bit disengenous. Sure, it was touch or go for this program for a while from a facility and schedule stand point. But to say you didn’t see this success coming just means more that you weren’t paying attention to who Merrimack was recruiting three years ago than their rise being truly surprising.

Predicting that the Warriors would struggle without Stephane Da Costa was also a mistake many college hockey media members made early this season. While talented, Da Costa was ineffective for several multi-game spells last season, during which Merrimack won games regardless. Goaltender Joe Cannata and big man Kyle Bigos are back and Ryan Flangian (as College Hockey News’ Joe Meloni points out well in his Monday blog post) is currently one of the best players in Hockey East. So is it shocking that Merrimack is currently the hot hand in the league? No. These are all the next steps in Dennehy’s and his program’s building process – one that’s been in action since 2005.

“I don’t want to get into details what we think it is or isn’t and I don’t want any alarm bells going off. Like I said, you can go through our roster and there are probably 12 or 13 guys with something similar or the same thing.”

Welcome to making a mountain out of a molehill.

There are two reasons why any worry about this amongst the Bruins is somewhat unfounded. One, the motion of skating wears on your hips. Be it hockey or figure skating, if you do it long enough, you are more apt to have a hip issue. On the Bruins alone, both goalie Tim Thomas and winger David Krecji have had hip surgery. On the other side of skating, at least two of the last twenty years of Olympic gold medalists in ladies figure skating have had serious hip injuries.

Skating is not necessarily a movement the human body was designed to do, and because of that, there are parts of the body that will suffer from intense use that they were not designed to do. An analogy: Do you use a screwdriver as a hammer? No. If you did, you’d eventually damaged the tip of the screwdriver, because it is not designed to perform a repeated hammering motion. The human body is much the same way. Make it do something repeatedly and intensely that it wasn’t engineered to do, and it will eventually wear.

Therefore, Seguin will not be unique to his sport if he ever has hip issues; he is more apt to have them because his sport involves skating, and skating causes hip issues.

Secondly, many athletes have “congenital” physical issues that they play through. You can’t make news out of every single one. Odds are, there is at least one person on the Bruins who has hypermobility. That is a genetic type of flexibility that can make you more susceptible to injury because your joints can easily move in ways they should not. I have it. It made me a good dancer and gymnast, but it made me a horrible runner, because my knees can slide in ways they shouldn’t, and be pounded on in positions that they shouldn’t be pounded on. The instance of this in the general population is such that there are tons of people with it, and it usually doesn’t materialize into anything. In fact, it helps you be successful in several sports.

So is ESPNBoston and the rest of the hockey media going to next sniff out the Bruins player with hypermobility and make that a story? No, because it doesn’t really matter. Athletes get hurt. It’s a way of life. We can hypothesize all we want, but Seguin could easily be sidelined tomorrow by an injury completely unrelated to his hip. He could be boarded. He could be slashed with a skate blade. He could trip over a teammate. The odds are good that Seguin will some day get hurt – but the odds are good that any hockey player, any athlete in fact, will some day get hurt.

That’s the cross they bear for making a living in a physical sport.

Jerry York, head coach of Boston College (who are ranked tops in the country this week by USCHO), took to 98.5 The Sports Hub to speak with The D.A. Show (I can’t find the link on their site, but I’ll keep searching.) During the interview, the station announced that they will be broadcasting select Boston College hockey games this season starting tonight against Denver. This is a giant get for Hockey East, who already have games on NESN and CBS College Sports this season.

Maine head coach Tim Whitehead, who split their opening weekend, losing to Merrimack but winning against Northeastern, spoke to the good people at the Maine Sports Network on Wednesday. Whitehead may be on thin ice in Orono – losing their season opener to a team who had not beat them at home since the Clinton administration is not the way to start. He has to motivate his team to play big and consistent, or Maine fans may strengthen their call to boot him as head coach.

Vermont’s Kevin Sneddon spoke with the Chris and Rich Show on 101.3 ESPN Burlington late Thursday afternoon. Sneddon has a group not unlike last season’s Boston University team – talented youngster heavy. It could be rocky for the Catamounts, who open their season tonight against the U.S. Under 18 Team, but once their freshmen get their feet under them, they could be dangerous. I am eager to see if they can harness sophomore Connor Brickley’s enthusiasm, which last season tended to manifest in big NHL style hits that aren’t exactly kosher in college hockey.

The Sneddon interview is also significant for another reason. I happened to mention to my friend Chris that my fantasy hockey team was once named, “Kevin Sneddon’s Playoff Beard.” I find Sneddon’s post season choice of a playoff goatee as opposed as a full out beard fascinating. It’s meticulously kept, unlike most unruly and grizzly hockey beards. I once wrote that I wanted to name my imaginary garage band after it. But since I’m tone deaf, I named my fantasy hockey team after it instead.

Like a good friend, Chris then mentioned my fantasy hockey team name when introducing Sneddon. The response by the coach is priceless.

Merrimack vs. UNH in March 2011. Photo by Walter Rossini.

I’m a college hockey writer without an online home this season (time is my enemy – I couldn’t commit enough time to any one website, so I bowed out for the season), so more of my random college hockey thoughts will get featured on this blog.

In the Straight Out of Andover department, Merrimack College announced their first ever hockey television coverage deal on Friday. WBIN-TV Channel 18 (formerly MY TV 18 Boston/Manchester, NH) will air three of the Warriors’ home games in December and January. The program’s strong 2010-11 season spurred on this new deal, said WBIN’s general manager Gerry McGavick in a statement:

“Coming off a 25 win season, an NCAA berth last year and entering this season with a top 15 national ranking, the Warriors will be a strong addition to the WBIN team.”

Merrimack will not be the only team WBIN gives college hockey love to this season. University of New Hampshire announced a 12 game deal with the station this week, spanning four of the school’s winter sports. WBIN will air six men’s hockey games, and two games each for the women’s hockey, men’s basketball and women’s basketball teams. UNH men’s hockey had been without a television deal since New Hampshire Public TV (WENH) stopped covering their home games in 2008. The deal also gives the America East conference additional television exposure for basketball, which is always coveted.

Here is WBIN’s men’s college hockey schedule thus far:

Fri. Nov. 18 Mass.-Lowell at UNH 7 p.m.
Thu. Dec. 8 Boston U. at UNH 7 p.m.
Sat. Dec. 17 Union at Merrimack 7p.m.
Sat. Jan. 14 Merrimack vs. Maine 7 p.m.
Sat. Jan. 21 Merrimack at UNH 7 p.m.
Sat. Jan. 28 Boston College at UNH 7 p.m.
Sun. Jan. 29 Merrimack vs. Providence 4 p.m.
Fri. Feb. 10 Northeastern at UNH 7 p.m.
Fri. Feb. 17 Vermont at UNH 7 p.m.

But in a sad piece of news, WBIN’s rebranding has seemingly signaled the end for my favorite cable TV show, Dollar Bill’s Discount World. Dollar Bill announced himself in September that his show would be ending its over decade long run on the channel and be going web-only. For those of you who never had a chance to watch, Dollar Bill is an overly hyper and occasionally inappropriate salesman who sells closeout and discount wares in his Derry, NH warehouse. I salute you, Dollar Bill, and wish you all the best as you enter the world of online video.

In 2010, BU and BC took center stage in the first Frozen Fenway. (Photo by Kat)

On Friday afternoon, Fenway Park and Hockey East announced the second edition of Frozen Fenway, to be held on January 7, 2012. The outdoor game will feature a men’s hockey doubleheader, with UMass Amherst facing off against University of Vermont and the University of New Hampshire versus the University of Maine.

The game is being sponsored by Hockey East – who owns the event, and thus can decide its participants – and is being heavily bankrolled by Fenway Sports Group. The hope is that the event will bring out crowds of fans from the schools and their alumni bases in Boston.

Hockey East and it’s commissioner Joe Bertagna were eager to schedule up another outdoor game given the popularity of the 2010 edition, which features Boston University and Boston College. But the league wanted to give other non-Boston based schools a chance. Bertanga made that clear in his Friday press conferernce remarks. As reported by BostoInnovation’s Ryan Durling:

“(Bertanga) also acknowledged how generous a gesture it was for FSM to pick up the cost of the event. ‘It’s a bit of a risk to take up the cost, so we really appreciated that. The support from the mayor helped to push it along, too – the game between BU and BC is kind of old news, but bringing four teams from outside of Boston emphasizes our New England roots,’ the commissioner said.”

I have three quick issues with this statement by Hockey East’s commissioner, and the Frozen Fenway 2 in general:

Last I checked, the last two teams to win national championships from the conference were BU and BC. I don’t think any game between two of the best programs in the last decade of college hockey is ever “old news.” Especially when both teams sold out a freezing cold Fenway nearly two years ago, and when they play each other inthe Beanpot, they sell out the Garden, and when they play in their respective home venues, they sell out their venues no matter how awful either’s season is.

You’re taking a giant risk having this game feature teams from outside of Boston. Sure, their fan bases within Boston are relatively strong. However, you’re playing with fire – or more accurately, ice – here. Weather in January is unpredictable, and could impact the travel of those Maine, UNH, UMass and Vermont diehards who will get to those sellout numbers. At least with BU and BC, they have enough fans that can walk or take public transportation to Fenway to fill it.

Then there is the issue of Fenway Sports Group funding Frozen Fenway 2, and not including BC. Fenway Sports Group and the Eagles are joined at the hip. They’re going to have a college hockey event at Fenway Park and not include their prime collegiate partner?

Finally, by having Frozen Fenway 2 consist of two men’s Hockey East games, you run into marginal problems of inequity. Frozen Fenway’s first edition featured a women’s game pitting Northeastern versus UNH. This edition has no women’s component mentioned. The women’s game might not sell tickets, but it’ll never sell if you don’t give it the opportunity to. Plus, you legitimately have more legitimate women’s hockey stars now within Hockey East, players with a bit more name recognition than the league had pre-2010 Olympics. It’s worth a shot, and will save you some angered complaints from Title IX advocates. (Who knows – a women’s hockey game may be in the works and we just don’t know it.)

Is this just me? Please tell me it’s not just me.

Okay, it’s just me. Well, just indulge me for a second.

My favorite repository for flipping through college hockey photos when I’m burnt out  is in some dire straights. HockeyPhotography.com, run by well known college hockey photographer Melissa Wade, will have to be shut down in August because of the massive costs associated with maintaining the site.

The loss of this over 100,000 image archive would be a giant blow for those who love the game of college hockey and to the many journalists and schools who rely on Wade’s archives for their websites, media guides and the like. She covers Division I men’s and women’s hockey, Division III men’s hockey and World Junior teams. Name even the most obscure of college hockey players, and odds are that they have at least a shot or two on HockeyPhotography.com.

In an effort to save the site, HockeyPhotography now has its own Kickstarter page, which hopes to collect enough money in the next nine days to keep the site going for another year. The hosting fees are over $2,000.00 a year, and right now Wade is not even halfway there. Everyone who gives to the site will receive a reward of some sort, be it cards, prints or even View-Finder style reels.

If you’re able, I encourage you to give some money towards HockeyPhotography.com. If you love college hockey, it’s a very worthy cause.

The Buffalo Bills new uniforms, one part of a throwback Friday in Western New York. (Photo: BuffaloBills.com)

For Western New York, Friday was a day where old things were new again in the world of sports.

One of the American Hockey League’s traditional franchises, the Rochester Americans, were purchased by Terry Pegula and the Buffalo Sabres. My hometown Amerks had fallen on some tough times in the past few years, with a declining attendance and a lack of talent coming with their 2005 affiliation with the Florida Panthers. Even with increased effort (which kept being promised, but rarely seen), it was going be very difficult for the Panthers to live up to the classic days of the Sabres-Amerks affiliation, where the Amerks developed Ryan Miller, Marty Biron, Jason Pominville, Steve Shields and many others.

Buffalo’s sports teams – the Bills and Sabres – have had to take the more regional approach to maintaining a fan base due to the area’s declining population and economy. Pegulia’s purchase of the Amerks and their reaffiliation with the team makes huge overtures to the regional appeal of the Sabres franchise. Pegulia gets it – he knows that the Amerks are a key part of keeping the sport of hockey popular in his fan base’s region.

———

Friday evening, the Buffalo Bills held a grand new uniform unveiling – despite the design being leaked in a Madden 2012 promo a few weeks back. The design harkens back to the 1970s and 80s, with a white helmet and a heavy use of classic styling.

With Ralph Wilson Stadium as a backdrop, the Bills trotted out players from the Super Bowl heyday – Jim Kelly signed autographed and modeled the new jersey, while Steve Tasker hosted – and used local service people to show off the new-old gear.

One of my Facebook friends commented, “Why are they outfitting the Bills in the styles of the old days? These teams will never compare to the players that wore these styles in the past.” I don’t think the duds are something to be lived up to – they are distinctive from uniforms past – but more of a statement. The Bills, as a franchise, are classic, much like the Packers or Cowboys. No need to go futuristic for a team that has represented for so long what the sport of football’s most dedicated fan base has always been, for a team whose fans weather thick and thin. The new Bills uniforms remind us of the tradition and the circular nature of the NFL – how the Bills were woeful once before, then turned it around and had a run unlike many other teams in history.

Plus, everything old is eventually new again. That means that dark navy, silver and red of the 2000s should come back in 2030, right?

The TD Garden lit up with Bruins spirit. (Photo by me and my iPhone.)

The Boston Bruins are going to lose tonight because I am wearing pants.

Preposterous, you say. What does making a choice between a black skirt and black pants have to do with if the Bruins will tie up their Stanley Cup Finals series against the Vancouver Canucks this evening?

It doesn’t, of course. But the thought crossed my mind as I was running out the door to work this morning. Was I wearing skirts or dresses during games three and four? I know I was wearing pants on Friday, when they lost game five.

But what does the work apparel of a random university employee such as myself have to do with whether or not the Boston Bruins win a game? It doesn’t, but it doesn’t keep some of us from letting that thought enter our minds occasionally.

On Twitter, I’ve been watching the inner turmoil of one Bruins fan that didn’t want to touch up her Bruins colored nails because they had been painted as such since game three. There is another who has to wear the same Milan Lucic t-shirt every game.

The superstition goes beyond Bruins fans. I’ve written about my crazy Boston University hockey and general football superstitions before. Even recently, I was convinced that I couldn’t wear my hair up on a BU game day, because they would lose if I did. Even players have their own superstitions: they put their right skate on before their left, they always have to have yellow Gatorade before a game, they have to place their water bottle in a certain area.

So I ask all of you: what are your superstitions, either as a fan or an athlete? (That is, if you’re willing to tell!) Share them below, along with what team you do them for, or offer them on Twitter using the hashtag #sportssuper (Using the entire word superstition would cause us all to go over that precious 140 character limit.) I’ll post them later.

I’ll write up more about the NHL’s presentation and overall conference later (I am in charge of technical support for a new student orientation this week, so time is tight), but there was one ironic and timely point in it that I must share. DiLorenzo mentioned that one of the things they have struggled with is responding via their NHL Twitter account in the wake of disciplinary news: “No matter what the discipline department decides, we’re going to get tons of tweets that say ‘You’re wrong.”

He mentioned that at 2:40. By 8:40, the NHL had another massive disciplinary situation on their hands: Vancouver Canucks Aaron Rome’s hit on puck-less Boston Bruin Nathan Horton that resulted in a severe concussion.

Rome was suspended four games by the league for the incident, effectively removing him for the remainder of the Stanley Cup Finals. On Twitter the reaction to the NHL’s decision varied immediately, ranging on the Goldilocks scale: some fans thought it was too much, some thought it was too little, and some thought it was just right.

Assume you are one of the two folks who man the @NHL Twitter account (yes, there are only two, mentioned DiLorenzo Monday.) How would you effectively use your Twitter account to respond to each type of fan? Do you not respond to one group? Do you respond to all? Because of the mass of Tweets, do you just not even try to respond to them at all? Do you focus on the negative ones first, where it sounds like you’re losing a fan?

And if you are a fan who Tweeted at @NHL about today’s disciplinary decision, what response were you hoping to get?