New Hampshire at Boston College: Begin Donahue Year 2
By Joe Micik
If this were a hockey game, it might be a sell-out.
The 2011-12 Boston College men’s basketball season begins tonight at Conte Forum against New Hampshire, and it’s going to be some second year for head coach Steve Donahue.
Rarely have we seen so much turnover in any Boston College sport in a single year, and yet, here we are.
Only one player remaining on this roster, walk-on senior Peter Rehnquist, was around for the Al Skinner era. Further, only four players on the roster were active last season for Donahue’s first year. Our freshman-laden team will take to the court tonight, and you can expect at least three freshman to start their first-ever collegiate games.
If the exhibition game taught us anything about the Eagles’ starting lineup tonight against the New Hampshire Wildcats, it will be freshmen Patrick Heckmann, Ryan Anderson, and Dennis Clifford, as well as graduate student John Cahill and junior Matt Humphrey.
As far as what we’re going to see in this game with player rotations and player performance, your guess is as good as mine. The starting lineup is about all you can take out of the exhibition against AIC; beyond that, one does not even know if the Eagles were going all-out, and they were playing a lower-division team in a meaningless game. Tonight’s contest will tell us much more about Boston College: With a win, it would illustrate that this team is capable of winning the “gimmes” on the schedule; a loss, however, would embolden our critics who think BC will lose 30 games this year.
We do know a little bit about BC’s opponent, New Hampshire. This America East team has already played a game this year — a big win over Suffolk University. If you’re saying to yourself “what the hell is Suffolk University,” well, Bostonians should have heard of it, because it’s there. It also happens to be a D-III basketball school. Nevertheless, the Wildcats won, 85-64. The leading scorer for UNH was Alvin Abreu with 19, and he helped his team shoot 53% from the floor. Also of note: Suffolk shot 46% against them, UNH buried nine 3-pointers, and both teams sucked from the free-throw line.
Now, that’s just one game, but there’s more to build from here than there is for BC. A few general expectations for the game are that you are going to see this team shoot a lot of threes, struggle defensively (especially on the perimeter if UNH is going to be banging down threes of their own), and commit turnovers. The key will be for BC to limit their mistakes and stay loose. There will almost certainly be some nerves on the part of the freshman in their collegiate debuts, but if they don’t panic and just play their game, they’ll be fine. It is one thing to say BC is less talented than, say, Duke and more inexperienced than, say, basically every other team in the ACC, but quite another to say that an America East team is more talented. Boston College has lots of raw talent, but has better (read: ACC-quality) players.
All-time, the Eagles are 22-6 against the Wildcats. They last played on November 10, 2007, a game in which Boston College won by 10. Further, the Eagles have not lost a season-opening game since the 2002-2003 season when they got flattened by St. Joe’s (who ended up as an NCAA Tournament team that year).
It does not matter how young the Eagles are: you do not expect to lose to New Hampshire at home, in basketball, in your season opener. The game may not be pretty, but BC ought to win. When you’re a young team looking to build something, losing to UNH in your first ever game is not the way to go about it. Because I’ve never seen this team play before, I’m not going to say they WILL win, but they should.