Nick Boucher - White Trash Presto

The Lynah Faithful take it as an article of faith that our antics help the our team by a) giving them energy to feed off of and b) by causing opposing players, particularly goalies, to lose focus.

However, certain goalies have shown the ability to rise to the occasion and play their best hockey in front of the Faithful. J.R Prestifilippo was one such goalie. One was forced to grudgingly respect Presto for both the fire he brought to the ice and the way both he and his family accepted and even encouraged the taunting of the faithful.

Boucher, on the other hand, deserves no such respect. While he has repeatedly shown the ability to have the game of his career against the BigRed, he comes across as a thug more fitting of the WWF than the Ivy League. With this in mind, I suggest that Little Nicky henceforth be known as White Trash Presto.

How did he come across as a thug ? I haven't seen him play at all this year...just curious

Boucher's rep comes from his behavior at Lynah (taunting the crowd, flipping the band the bird).

Which both the fans and the crowd deserve. I wish more players did it. Some players react and it is clear that we are in their head. Boucher reacts to show that we are not. I never would have thought that the Lynah crowd could dish it out but not take it.

Of course, Boucher is a special case, given that his antics led to a Cornell goal his Freshman year. (For those unfamilar with the story, Boucher skated over to taunt the Faithful on what he thought was a game-sealing ENG by Dartmouth, only to have David Adler deposit the puck into his vacated cage.) I think a lot of the frustration with him is that that particular Leon Lett-ism didn't cost Dartmouth that game.

Personally, I like the example set by Sinuhe Wallenheimo, a DU goalie from a few years back, who respond playfully to taunting crowds. Taking a bow is a much cleverer response than flipping the bird.

John E Hayes '98 '00 wrote:

However, certain goalies have shown the ability to rise to the occasion and play their best hockey in front of the Faithful. J.R Prestifilippo was one such goalie. One was forced to grudgingly respect Presto for both the fire he brought to the ice and the way both he and his family accepted and even encouraged the taunting of the faithful.

JR's career record against Cornell: 2-8-1

You're absolutely right about how well he took the taunting and whatnot, but I don't know if I'd say that was his best hockey.

I dunno about JR's games at Bright, but he played astonishingly well at Lynah. It's not his fault that RT was the coach for his whole career.

Actually, he was wildly inconsistent. Presto could be the best goalie in college hockey one night, and then turn in a real clunker for several games in a row. Anybody crazy enough to have Presto's stats from the games he played at Lynah? I'm sure we could get his overall collegiate records and compare them, and I think you'll find that his numbers are *far* better at Lynah than they are overall.

Because I'm incredibly bored, I took a look at some more numbers regarding JR. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a great source for his career stats. hockeydb.com is what I've used, it has 4 years worth of his GAA but only the SV% stats for his junior and senior years. Stats in his games against Cornell, for comparison, were taken from Keith's site.

Overall Career Stats:
37-58-8, 0.398 win%
0.889 SV%
3.25 GAA

Career Stats vs. Cornell, all games
2-8-1, 0.227 win%
0.879 SV%
3.77 GAA

Career Stats vs. Cornell, games at Lynah
2-5-1, 0.312 win%
0.898 SV%
3.13 GAA

Career Stats vs. Cornell, games at Bright
0-3-0, 0.000 win%
0.806 SV%
6.63 GAA

Career Stats vs. Cornell, playoff games (all at Lynah)
0-3-1, 0.125 win%
0.888 SV%
3.49 GAA

OK, so, first of all, this is obviously a fairly small sample size, so you can only read into it so much. Anyway...

I've always been of the opinion that winning percentage is a mainly meaningless stat for goalies. However, sometimes it's said that great goalies can "steal" a game for their team, a la Hasek at Nagano. I'd say JR did that once against Cornell, at Lynah on 11/13/99.

In 3 games against Cornell at Bright, JR was pulled twice; those two games were by far his worst against Cornell.

JR's career numbers at Lynah are a bit better than his overall career numbers, but not what I'd call exceptionally so.

But, his numbers at Lynah in the playoffs are somewhat worse than his overall career numbers.

What does all this say? Well, mainly, it says that I have too much free time. But other than that, for me, the moderately better stats at Lynah during the regular season balance the moderately worse stats at Lynah during the playoffs, and make me think that his play at Lynah was about the same as anywhere else.

As I said before, though, John is right, JR and his family handled Lynah with all the class in the world.

the moderately better stats at Lynah during the regular season balance the moderately worse stats at Lynah during the playoffs

Careful, you're counting those PS games twice. I know it seems like he played at Harvard forever, but in 4 years he can only play 4 RS games at Lynah, not 8. So you can't "average" his PS stats with the @Lynah stats posted above, since the @Lynah stats must include the playoff games. His stats at Lynah (RS and PS) were marginally better than his career stats. His stats at Lynah for the RS were probably substantially better than his career numbers, but his PS stats were slightly worse.

I have seen Presto steal a game from Cornell (probably the same one you mention above), and I've seen him come close one or two other times only to have his RT coached team fall just short (in fact I think that tie in the playoffs was one such game).

Still, it appears that Presto's numbers at Lynah aren't much better than they were anyplace else. Quite frankly, since I haven't seen him play against other teams (although I did read a bit about his Jekyll and Hyde performances) I can't say that he played better at Lynah from even a subjective point of view.

Apparently I too have too much time on my hands. )

Tom Lento wrote:

Careful, you're counting those PS games twice

That was intentional, since I view them as more important than RS games. I should've said so, though. You're correct, though, that the W-L-T record did suffer disproportionately from RT's coaching. As a Mets fan, I'm well accustomed to making the argument of a lack of scoring support for a pitcher (or goalie); perhaps if I'm as bored tonight as I was last night, I'll take a look at those numbers as well.