Players and coaches can talk all they want about not paying attention to polls, whether it’s the weekly national rankings or a preseason poll conducted by either media or coaches.
In reality, most try to find a balance — polls are just opinions, after all, and most teams usually find it best to ignore outside noise and focus only on what one can control. But hockey teams don’t live in a vacuum either, so when Massachusetts was picked to finish eighth in the Hockey East preseason coaches poll, it did not fail to serve as a little motivation for the Minutemen.
“We kind of fell off last year,” said UMass junior forward Lucas Mercuri. “It’s our goal this year to resurrect as a team and bounce back from that. I think we’re doing a pretty decent job so far. (Hockey East) is, I think, the best league in college hockey. It’s a dog fight every night. There are no bad teams in this league.”
Thanksgiving finds the Minutemen riding high — a weekend sweep of Providence (then ranked No. 5 in the USCHO.com men’s D-I poll) put UMass at 8-3-1 overall and 4-2-1 in Hockey East, earning them the No. 11 spot in this week’s USCHO poll. Mercuri potted the game winner with 48.2 seconds to go in a 3-2 thriller at Schneider Arena on Thursday night.
Two nights later, Junior captain Ryan Ufko scored his fourth goal of the season 1:04 into overtime for a 2-1 win at the Mullins Center.
“I thought we played to an identity that we want to play to,” UMass coach Greg Carvel said after Thursday’s road win. “I’ve liked this team a lot all year and tonight was another reason to like them even more.”
While the eighth-place preseason prediction wasn’t entirely unjustified — UMass was 13–17–5 in 2022-23 (7–14–3 in Hockey East) and were bounced in the first round of the conference tournament — it reflected a sharp and sudden downturn for a program that had been riding a wave of success. The Minutemen earned a second-place regular-season finish and a conference tournament championship in 2021-22, and the year before that won the NCAA title.
“I think we’re doing good, but we’re never satisfied here,” Mercuri said. “We always kind of want more. We’re looking to just live, every day, our core values as a team. It’s all about culture here and living up to high standards and winning the day.”
The Minutemen return to action on Friday with a nonconference, intrastate tilt at Harvard. Hockey East play resumes a week later for UMass with a road trip to Vermont, where they will look to avenge one of their ugliest losses of the season, 6-2 at home on Nov. 11, a game marred by errors and sloppy play.
In that game, goalie Michael Hrabal was pulled after Vermont made it 4-1 midway through the second period. Since then, Hrabal has been sensational, stopping 53 of 56 shots for the weekend vs. Providence, including 32 in the second game on a night when UMass was outshot 33-16.
Carvel had high praise for the freshman from Prague, Czechia, after Saturday’s home win.
“Our goaltender kept us in it,” Carvel said. “We were out-shot and out-chanced pretty badly. Discipline-wise, we had to kill too many penalties, but this is a good group of kids. (The) kids found a way. It was just an elite play by an elite player (Ufko) in overtime to score the goal, but that’s a Michael Hrabal victory tonight.”
