Providence head coach Bob Deraney was pleasantly surprised when a reporter recently sized up his team’s record against the leading NCAA programs. Perhaps he had grown accustomed to the aftermath of Thanksgiving signaling the advent of catch-up season.
No, this year it’s all about giving thanks for a thicker sheet of ice and resolving to dig one’s blades deeper for the next phase of the season.
Thirty minutes of game clock time past the halfway mark of their 33-game regular season, the Friars are 11-5-1, good for the eighth-best record in the country with a .676 winning percentage. It is also their fastest sprint to 11 wins in recent memory. In each of the previous three years, they had not hurdled that barrier until January.
“Now you’re talking about some concrete stats because now you’re comparing us against everybody in the country,” Deraney said in wake of a 2-1 victory over Union, which cemented a 5-3-0 record for the month of November, following the program’s first winning October (6-2-1) since 2005-06.
“You told me something I didn’t know, and I try to make sure I know everything.
“I think that says a lot. And the encouraging thing is we haven’t played our best hockey yet. I think we’re far from it. That’s what I find very exciting for our team, and now it’s up to the coaching staff to string together practices that are going to bring out the best in our kids. That’s our challenge.”
Indeed, PC, broadly projected as the top third party candidate in a Hockey East pennant race predominated by the Comm. Ave. cohabitants, does have an outstanding handful of seams. And Sunday’s win made for the team’s first pair of consecutive victories since mid-October, after they had gone on a head-spinning win-loss-win pattern throughout November.
Even so, the fact that the Friars are consistently tinkering on the Top 10 is no accident. Most patently, the leaned-on class of 2012 is delivering according to plan.
With a power play goal on Sunday, her third 5-on-4 strike of the season, starting right winger Abby Gauthier has already stamped a career year with 11 points. Linemate Kate Bacon, the team’s top gun with 12 goals and 17 points, needed a mere 16 games to double the dozen goals she collected in 62 cumulative twirls as a freshman and sophomore.
And towering blueliner Jen Friedman, who has switched from mentee to mentor after two years under Colleen Martin’s wing to foster rookie Rebecca Morse, has a 3-10-13 scoring log to her credit. That after she went 4-4-8 and 3-7-10 in her first two seasons.
“They’re juniors now, we’re a senior-junior team, and you expect contributions like that, career years, from your upperclassmen,” Deraney said. “They’ve been around long enough, they’re battle-tested, they’ve got experience now, they know what it takes, they don’t get rattled, and they play with a lot of composure.
“All of our juniors and seniors are doing a wonderful job of becoming better playmakers and difference-makers. And our freshmen and sophomores are doing a great job as well, they’re logging some serious minutes, so we’re starting to build a complete team.”
The pivotal phrase is “starting to.” Some individuals still need to whet their blades and some aspects of the Friars’ game could still stand to shore up before they are foolproof national contenders.
Dating back to Oct. 22, the power play has only converted six of its last 54 opportunities after going 7-for-34 in the first six games, when PC went 5-1-0. Translation: since that sizzling start, the conversion rate has steadily dipped from 20.6 to 14.8 percent.
And while the top six has been appreciably productive, the rest of the depth chart is combating a lurid rash of sophomore slumps. Nicole Anderson is pointless in her last nine games after scraping out three goals and four helpers in her first eight. Jessie Vella just got back on the board with an assist against Brown last Friday to splash a seven-game scoring drought. And Jess Cohen and Emily Groth have combined for a feathery three points (all goals).
The good news: they have another 16 games, including 14 after the December deceleration, to redress themselves. And while nothing has been declared, odds are that senior co-captain Jean O’Neill, sidelined with a lower body injury since opening weekend, will use the four-week break as a mini-summer to rebuild her game and return for the Hockey East homestretch in January.
That, indubitably, will be when she is needed most, and in her old form. The rest of the conference schedule promises to be more taxing than the interleague slate, which the Friars finished at an elevating 9-3-0, their first supra-.500 record against other leagues since the 2005-06 season.
“I’ve told (the players) that this team has the ability to be one of the best teams I’ve ever coached here at Providence College,” Deraney said. “And that’s why I say to you, I’m not satisfied with winning trophies and I’m not satisfied with winning games. We’re chasing something greater than that.
“We’re chasing excellence, trying to play the game the way we’re capable of playing, not just play-to-play or shift-to-shift, but period-to-period. We want to put together a complete game. That’s what we’re chasing right now.
“But we’re finding different ways to win now. That’s encouraging.”
Al Daniel is the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond the Dashers
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