Only a few weeks into the 2025-26 season, Boston College men’s hockey is hovering just around the .500 mark (2-4-1) with an 0-2-0 record in Hockey-East play.
The 18th-ranked Eagles have not won on home ice yet, and will not have a chance to capture their first triumph in Conte Forum until Nov. 14 rolls around, when UMass takes a state-bound road trip up to Chestnut Hill, Mass., from Amherst.
But before that two-game, home-and-home series with the Minutemen commences, BC is tasked with a two-game road series in Burlington, Vt., against the Vermont Catamounts from Nov. 7-8. UVM holds an overall record of 3-3-0 and a conference record of 1-1-0.
Now is the time for the Eagles to show why they came into the year ranked as the No. 6-ranked team in the nation. Since that point, BC’s ranking has fallen drastically, and Greg Brown is close to seeing his program drop out of the USCHO Division 1 Top-20 Men’s Ice Hockey Poll for the first time since 2023.
Here are some notes on the matchup, players to look out for, and an outlook for the series overall.
Eags getting ready for Vermont this weekend pic.twitter.com/jY2TRXNw17
In the all-time series against the Catamounts, BC possesses a 54-18-8 record. The Eagles have won the last four matchups against Vermont, including two contests last season at Gutterson Fieldhouse.
With six points on three goals and three assists, forward Andre Gasseau—now a senior captain—was bestowed Hockey East Player of the Week honors after BC’s two-game series against the Catamounts last year, when BC picked up wins of 6-3 and 4-1 from Feb. 21-22.
UVM is coached by Steve Wiedler, who started his tenure in Burlington just last season, bringing the program to a 13-19-3 record. The Catamounts posted their best season offensively in 2024-25 since the 2016-17 campaign, averaging 2.71 goals per game. Vermont finished No. 33 in the final Pairwise rankings last year.
There is not a single player on Wiedler’s roster so far who has tallied more than one goal this season. Sophomore forward Colin Kessler leads the Catamounts in points with five—all assists.
Sophomore D-man Jax Wismer, a Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, native, trails behind Kessler with three points (1 goal, 2 assists), and Ethan Burroughs, Zachary Filak, Caeden Herrington, and Sebastian Törnqvist each have a goal and an assist apiece.
Törnqvist, a senior defenseman, leads UVM in shots blocked with 10, and senior forward Dawson Good is second with nine.
UVM ranks dead last in Hockey East in power-play goals (2) and power-play percentage (14.3 percent, which is tied with New Hampshire), along with penalty-kill percentage (66.7 percent). The Eagles have only been able to produce four power-play goals this season, so it might be a good time for Brown to test out a few different line combinations on the man advantage to get that facet of the game rolling.
UVM has only scored 10 goals this year compared to BC’s 17, and the primary reason for its low-caliber scoring is due to the fact that the Catamounts have only been able to generate 147 shots so far this year—UMass, which ranks first in total shots, has recorded 336 shots, which shows the wide gap from the bottom to the top of Hockey East.
With that being said, UVM has only surrendered 16 goals this season, good for second in the conference—Northeastern ranks first with nine goals against.
Freshman goaltender Aiden Wright, a Wake Forest, N.C., native, has started all six games for Vermont, posting a goals against average of 2.22 and a save percentage of .939, which are impressive marks for a first-year.
Read more on how the Eagles opened up Hockey East play.. dark. Next. Boston College Men's Hockey Swept by Northeastern
The Eagles are going to need to be at full strength for this series, which means having Gasseau and senior forward Oskar Jellvik healthy for the two back-to-back contests.
Gasseau was injured and unable to play in BC’s series against Northeastern last week—it dropped both games by a combined score of 7-1—and Jellvik has missed ample time this year for an injury he came into the season with. Both players are essential to the Eagles’ offensive production, and having more veterans on the ice, or even on the bench, is always better than not.
Goaltending will be something to watch, as Brown has split time in net between junior Jan Korec and freshman Louka Cloutier, and neither have run away with the job. But Brown is more concerned with what is happening in front of the net rather than the player who is between the posts.
The mission for the Eagles will be to contain the puck in the offensive zone and fix the sloppiness throughout the neutral zone and on defensive-zone breakouts.
Too many turnovers in the defensive and neutral zone have led to fatal results for BC, and the solution starts with more focus and discipline on the breakout—which starts with minimizing risks via unnecessary passes which can either lead to icings, or worse, immediate turnovers on the opposite end of the ice.
These two matchups serve as get-back opportunities for BC, given the Eagles’ series history against UVM, but in Hockey-East play, anything can happen. No matchup in the conference is a cupcake, and Brown, more than anybody, knows this.
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Graham Dietz is a 2025 graduate of Boston College and subsequently joined Boston College On SI. He previously contributed to The Heights, the independent student newspaper, from fall 2021, including as sports editor. Graham works for The Boston Globe as a sports correspondent, covering high school football, girls' basketball, and baseball. He was also a beat writer for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod Baseball League in the summer of 2023.
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