BU, already the NCAA’s youngest team with an average age of 20.1, is adding 2026 NHL Draft pick Tynan Lawrence for the spring semester, a source confirmed to the Blog on Tuesday. At 17 (with an August birthday), the New Brunswick, Canada native will be the second-youngest player in the NCAA.
Of course, it’s a bit ironic that a struggling team, filled to the brim with young, high-end talent, enlists the help of another young, high-end talent. Frankly, the consensus among analysts on Lawrence is that he plays a mature, pro-ready game, and given the ways BU head coach Jay Pandolfo has criticized his forwards’ play so far this season, the Terriers could really use more of that. He also leaves the USHL as Muskegon’s captain a year after driving the Lumberjacks to their first championship (he was named MVP of the Clark Cup playoffs), and the last time BU hired a former USHL captain to win the Clark Cup was Shane Lachance.
That went quite well.
Yet Lachance was almost three years older when he attended Comm. Ave than Lawrence is now. If BU’s problem really is that it lacks experience and leadership, it’s hard to imagine Lawrence could help much in that area. If BU’s problem in a pretty frustrating first semester was a bevy of freshmen getting used to college hockey… well, Lawrence can’t exactly fix that either.
On the other hand, Pandolfo insists that the discussion surrounding BU’s youth is just an excuse, not the underlying reason for the Terriers’ bumpy start (they are 9-8-1, 6-5-1 in Hockey East and 23rd in NPI at the time of writing), and that his players are capable, regardless of age, of playing the way they need to compete for a national championship. Apparently he thinks Lawrence is no exception. And he has a good reason. Forget the Lachance comparison: the last time BU selected a 17-year-old top draft prospect straight out of the USHL, it was Macklin Celebrini. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
Lawrence is described by analysts as a strong two-way center, an archetype that would help a BU team that currently allows 3.4 goals per game (ranked 14th and worst in the country). He has an impressive motor, he performed quite well in battles in the USHL, according to RecruitScouting, he is strong on the puck and he is determined to drive the play to the net, all things BU’s forwards struggled with at times in the fall. “He’s just playing the right way,” he wrote The Athletics Scott Wheeler and Pandolfo, who uses that exact phrase all the time, will love it.
It also doesn’t hurt that he had 25 goals and 29 assists in 54 games last season as a 16-year-old in Muskegon (he came from powerhouse Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota). It’s not an uncommon view that the transition from prep to the USHL is more difficult than the jump from the USHL to the NCAA, so Lawrence’s immediate success in juniors bodes well as he prepares to parachute into Agganis Arena.
And BU feels pretty clear that Lawrence is ready. Pandolfo and associate head coach Joe Pereira had no reason to bring him in otherwise. This move isn’t all that similar to their decision to bring in goalie Mikhail Yegorov at the start of the spring semester last year; Yegorov was shelled by one of the worst teams in the USHL (his save percentage in 66 career games was just .899, and he had to make 66 saves in one game), so BU’s decision was partly about flying the 18-year-old from Omaha. And since Yegorov had already been drafted (2024 second round, NJ), enrolling early at BU made perfect sense for the Russian and his future.
None of this applies to Lawrence. He won’t be drafted until after the season, and if he just continued to dominate the USHL on an elite team (Muskegon is now 22-9-0-0), he would certainly have been a top 5 pick (and potentially higher in a fairly wide-open league). Instead, Lawrence risks a slow start in the NCAA by lowering his stock, and even if he boosts college hockey, he won’t gain much because he’s already so highly valued. The point is, the Terriers need Lawrence much more than he needs them.
Making this look like a move initiated by BU: a statement from Pandolfo and Pereira that they are still determined to make a bid for the title this season and that they need reinforcements to do so.
You can’t blame them. Now we wait to see if Lawrence specifically is the help they need.
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