UConn down to five defensemen for the rest of the first half

UConn men’s hockey will be down to just five healthy defensemen for the remainder of the first half. On Wednesday, head coach Mike Cavanaugh revealed that Charlie Morrison, Trey Scott and Anthony Allain-Samaké are all expected to be sidelined until the winter break due to various injuries.

“I've never really experienced this in my career where we have three of our top six defensemen, they're not playing this weekend,” he said. “Trey Scott, Charlie Morrison, and Anthony are going to be out — probably until Christmas.”

All three are dealing with upper body injuries. Morrison initially got hurt in a 6-3 loss at BU on Oct. 24 and has missed the last four games. Scott went down in the Huskies’ 6-5 win over Providence last Thursday. Allain-Samaké got banged up in Saturday’s 8-1 defeat to the Friars.

That means UConn will have to deploy a forward on defense for the next eight games. Cole Davis moved back to the blue line and filled in admirably for roughly the final 30 minutes on Saturday — scoring his first collegiate goal in the process. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be the choice going forward.

Instead, the Huskies are holding tryouts in practice this week to see who might be best suited for a temporary position change. Cavanaugh didn’t say who the potential options are (besides Davis) but listed a couple of the requirements.

“You look for somebody with a decent hockey IQ that can go back there and keep the game simple,” he said.

At the same time, UConn doesn’t want to reinforce its defense by hamstringing its offense, so don’t expect to see Joey Muldowney on the blue line.

“It's more about us trying to figure out, ‘All right, yeah, he might be able to do it but he's a really good forward and I don't know if we want to take away from our forward group, sacrifice that to put him back,’” Cavanaugh explained.

Luckily, the Huskies have plenty of candidates.

“We've got a team that's willing to do anything to win,” Cavanaugh said. “Some of them I didn't even ask. I said, ‘I'm going to try you here today,’ and they were like, ‘Okay.’ It's not even so much guys volunteering. They all would do it if I asked them to do it.”

UConn isn’t worried about which side its interim defenseman shoots from. Even though the Huskies’ five healthy blue liners are split between three right-shot and two left-shot, they just want to find the best person for the job regardless.

“I'm not concerned with whether you're a left-shot or a right-shot. We have to find a forward comfortable to go back there and do it consistently,” Cavanaugh said. “I think playing your off side is easier. The only place it's really not easier is the neutral zone. But when you think about it, when you're defending, being able to have your stick to the outside is a benefit. When you're going back for a puck, you're on your forehand. So there's a lot of benefits to playing your off side defensively.”

The onus might not fall on a single forward, either. UConn has to be prepared in case another defenseman gets injured, ends up in the penalty box or picks up a game misconduct.

“Where you get into trouble a little bit is if they take a penalty or something happens along those lines. You have to have some depth back there,” Cavanaugh said. “Having these guys out just doesn't affect our 5-on-5 play; it affects our special teams. So we're trying to figure out how we're going to manage that as well.”

This is the first time in Cavanaugh’s 14-year tenure that UConn has needed to use a forward on defense out of necessity, though it almost happened once before. During the 2021-22 season, the Huskies dealt with a COVID outbreak ahead of a weekend series with Merrimack. They were prepared to play shorthanded — Jonny Evans would’ve moved back to the blue line — before Hockey East stepped in and rescheduled the games.

Cavanaugh dealt with it a few times as an assistant at Boston College but never to this extent.

“Throughout my career, I've seen a lot of forwards go back and play defense for a game or two,” he said. “We're going to be asking someone to do it for eight games. So that's the challenge here going forward. We're just going to have to manage it.”

UConn can only carry eight defensemen due to the 26-man roster limits imposed by the new revenue-sharing rules. Previously, the Huskies almost always carried nine or 10 blue liners.

The NCAA Division I men’s hockey oversight committee approved a change to expand the roster limit to 28, though additional hurdles remain. Even then, it won’t be instituted until next season at the earliest. For now, UConn has to make do with what it has.

“At the end of the year, no one's going to put an asterisk on these games and say, ‘Well, they were playing these games without three defensemen.’ No, we have to find a way to compete and get results — that's the bottom line,” Cavanaugh said. “Our players are going to be ready for the challenge.”

Associate head coach Tyler Helton will be tasked with getting the group ready to take on Northeastern this weekend. The other Huskies have scored 3.5 goals per game so far, which is tied for 15th-best nationally.

“Tyler Helton's been working with our D for 10 years now,” Cavanaugh said. “He does an unbelievable job with our defensemen.”

The Huskies’ defense has been far from impenetrable this season. They’ve given up 45 goals, third-most in the country. In eight of their 10 contests, they’ve allowed at least four. They’ve conceded at least five goals in five straight games — including eight to Providence on Saturday.

UConn will have to find a way to improve despite being missing some of its best players at the position in Allain-Samaké, Morrison and Scott. It’s bad enough the Huskies have to move a forward to defense. They also need to rely on senior Owen Simpson (who has appeared in just 35 career games) and freshman Jacob Reese (who made his collegiate debut on Saturday) in addition to junior Kai Janviriya, sophomore Brendan Dunphy and freshman Will McIsaac.

The task won’t be easy. But as UConn looks to rebound from arguably its worst loss of the Cavanaugh era on Saturday, the team is keeping its focus on what’s ahead.

“I didn't even watch the tape. I flushed it and we moved on,” the head coach said about the 8-1 blowout. “I didn't know how much we could get from that. Of course my assistants certainly watched it but really, our whole focus has been on trying to figure out how we want to play going forward until we get healthy. So that's what we've spent most of our time on. Quite frankly, I told them don't waste time on that game. We gotta figure out how we want to play going forward.”