The Terriers, who now sit at a paltry 8-8-1, had their NPI ranking salvaged to 27th after beating Cornell at Madison Square Garden and moved up to 25th after squeaking past Vermont on Friday. But after Saturday’s loss, BU fell to 33rd.
The prospect of an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament continues to fade, leaving the Terriers needing to win the Hockey East tournament to keep their hopes alive for the program’s elusive sixth national championship.
Less than two months ago, in the Oct. 13 USCHO survey, BU ranked first. Now, after falling at home to a 5-9-0 Catamounts team, the Terriers will likely fall out of the top 20 for the first time under head coach Jay Pandolfo.
This calls for a State of the Union address. As Pandolfo has said several times this season, “How much time do you have?”
A depleted forward group is no excuse for attacking woes
The injury bug completely consumed BU for 17 games beforehand. Eight forwards – Nick Roukounakis, Sacha Boisvert, Conrad Fondrk, Jack Murtagh, Owen McLaughlin, Ben Merrill, Cole Eiserman and Kamil Bednarik – have missed at least one game this season due to various injuries.
Against Vermont on Saturday, Fondrk, McLaughlin, Merrill and Murtagh, who was a late scratch, did not play, forcing the Terriers into a rotation of 10 forward. The situation was so dire that Cole Hutson played a shift on the wing.
While Pandolfo didn’t believe the short bench played a role in Saturday’s loss, he did hint at its impact after Friday’s win. Either way, it doesn’t excuse BU’s offensive struggles.
Vermont allows 3.6 goals per game, and the Terriers scored four goals this weekend.
“We have plenty of opportunities, like around the net, to find ways to put the puck in the net, but we didn’t do that,” Pandolfo said after the game on Saturday.
According to InStat, courtesy of BU Hockey Stats on X, BU created zero high-danger opportunities on Friday and only one on Saturday. One high-danger chance against Vermont in 120 minutes is shocking.
The phrase “19 draft picks” has been overused this season when talking about the Terriers, but it’s still worth mentioning given how difficult they were to generate offense this weekend. Simply put, it’s not going to work.
Boisvert is an interesting case here. The transfer to North Dakota came with high expectations after a strong freshman year in Grand Forks. But the scorer scored just one goal in eleven games – the only goal on the opening night. The lingering injury that has cost him six games has undoubtedly limited his production, but BU still needs more from him.
In the case of Ryder Ritchie, it was difficult to predict what he would look like if he made the transition to college hockey from the Canadian Hockey League. A grace period was granted at the start of the season to allow him to adapt to playing against older and stronger players. Seventeen games into his collegiate career, he still struggles with the physicality of the game.
You could go on and on about the Terriers’ forwards and make a case for wanting more from almost any of them. The solutions to BU’s offensive problems are not obvious – and time is running out.
Lack of defensive improvement and questions about buy-in
If there’s one aspect of Pandolfo’s tenure that can be questioned, it’s the team defense – particularly over the past two seasons, although it did improve over the course of the past year.
This season, the team defense has undoubtedly been poor and shows little sign of improvement. The youth of the defensive corps explains some of the problems, but after 17 games it is difficult to continue blaming inexperience.
Pandolfo and associate head coach Joe Pereira directly addressed the size of the defensive corps, which BU lacked last season, bringing in Carter Amico, Charlie Trethewey and Malte Vass. It was an ugly first two months of play for the three freshmen. All have struggled to adapt to the speed of college hockey and are all prone to mistakes in the limited ice time. Trethewey has separated himself from Amico and Vass and is finally showing some maturity in his game.
After Friday’s game, Trethewey admitted the transition from juniors has been difficult, but said he is finally starting to find his feet. Pandolfo sees that Trethewey is also feeling more and more comfortable.
“You can see his confidence growing, and part of that is him getting a little more ice time, and he’s taken advantage of that,” Pandolfo said Friday.
The Terriers’ top pair of Cole Hutson and Gavin McCarthy were a bright spot. McCarthy, in particular, was strong defensively, which is reflected in his team-high plus-nine rating. Yet Hutson and McCarthy are prone to one expensive blunder too many.
On the defensive side of the puck, BU’s forwards leave a lot to be desired. Apart from Roukounakis, Merrill, Brandon Svoboda and Jonathan Morello, the front group does not seem to want to get dirty. They play as they have the right to.
More often than not, the Terriers get too comfortable after a strong stretch of play. Look no further than Friday’s win: Pandolfo loved his team’s first 20 minutes, but was shocked by the next 20 minutes. He even wondered if his players thought it would be easy to beat Vermont.
“We started cheating the game. We stopped playing as a team. That’s what I saw,” he said.
They are also defensive breakdowns late in close games. The Catamounts found the winning goal with just 21.2 seconds left on Saturday. It started with a turnover in the neutral zone and ended with BU’s biggest loss of the season. Saturday’s finish was eerily similar to the loss at Northeastern on Nov. 21.
“It’s kind of the way it’s gone for us this year, where you make mistakes that you just can’t make at certain points of the game of hockey,” Pandolfo said.
This is unknown territory for the Terriers under Pandolfo. As mentioned earlier, this is a new experience for him and his employees. He has yet to face adversity of this magnitude, but doubting Pandolfo still feels irresponsible at this point, even if the rest of the 2025/26 season goes in the direction it seems to be going.
That does not mean that this season has not been a huge disappointment, because that has been the case since December 8.
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