On March 9th, Hockey East held a press conference for the coaches involved in the Hockey East playoffs. While we wait for Merrimack Coach Mark Dennehy to respond to our questions, we post thoughts he offered with Hockey East Online.Dennehy on Boston University
“We haven’t been able to figure BU out in their building. We’re a resilient group. In the past, we’ve been intimidated to play at their place. Last year’s team could intimidate a lot of schools especially at Agganis, but we’ve stuck with it. I expect a pretty hard fought series. They’re big and physical, but we have those characteristics in our locker room as well. I’m sure Coach Parker is going to have everyone believe that we are the favorites, but everyone is 0-0 again. We have to take the positives that we can play with anyone in the league. But we have to notice the negatives. We laid a few eggs in the final stretch. You have to control what you can control and playing hard is one thing you can control. Hopefully, we bring confidence into the series. We haven’t broken through at Agganis yet unfortunately.”
“We haven’t been able to figure BU out in their building. We’re a resilient group. In the past, we’ve been intimidated to play at their place. Last year’s team could intimidate a lot of schools especially at Agganis, but we’ve stuck with it. I expect a pretty hard fought series. They’re big and physical, but we have those characteristics in our locker room as well. I’m sure Coach Parker is going to have everyone believe that we are the favorites, but everyone is 0-0 again. We have to take the positives that we can play with anyone in the league. But we have to notice the negatives. We laid a few eggs in the final stretch. You have to control what you can control and playing hard is one thing you can control. Hopefully, we bring confidence into the series. We haven’t broken through at Agganis yet unfortunately.”
Jack Parker on being overconfident against Merrimack:
“If we’re overconfident, we’d have to check ourselves into Mattapan State Hospital. Not just because how good a team Merrimack is, but who we are all year. We weren’t even close to them in the game we lost up at Merrimack and they could have won either of the games that were played [at Agganis Arena].”
“Our team knows how good of a team [Merrimack] is. When I watch this team play, I’m flabbergasted that more people aren’t talking about how good they are and I was flabbergasted at how they struggled sometimes early on on the road, but now they’re playing much better on the road as well. [At times this season], they’ve had the best home record and the best power play in college hockey.”
“They present a lot of problems and their style presents a lot of problems – the way they stretch, the way they chip pucks out of the zone. They make it difficult for us to play our game and they make it difficult for any team to go after them, and we like to go after people. They make it difficult when they get the puck – they are so talented when they come across the blue line and center ice. They can bang and cycle with anybody.”
“I’m already afraid of them, so I don’t think my team will anything but concerned with a real good Merrimack team.”
Well, Jack Parker is scared of us. He said it.
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