Worst Seasons in the Past 25 Years Part 13: Brown

Welcome to the Worst Season in the Past 25 Years, a series in which r/CollegeHockey reviews the worst season for all 60 Division I teams over the summer to alleviate the crushing boredom known as the off-season and take a horrific tour down memory lane.

If you are interested in writing an entry for your team, please let me know via PM. I’ll be posting entries on weekdays at approximately at 6 pm Eastern time and will be going in alphabetical order. If an entry is not posted at that time, assume that “real life” has gotten in the way and that I am not able to post. If I am aware in advance that I will not post at 6 pm on a particular day, I will announce it in prior posts as a heads up.

And now.../r/CollegeHockey presents the Brown Bears! Known for being an actual common species name and being listed first in the ECAC tables to start the season (since 1991, when Army West Point left the ECAC). Bruno, as the Brown athletic teams are affectionately known, are usually seen as the ECAC’s bottom dwellers, something that is supported by the lack of fans in Meehan Morgue Auditorium whenever Brown plays.

And now, the first r/collegehockey contribution to the Worst Seasons Series, many thanks to u/kbd77:

UnBEARable: The Ignominious Tale of the 2008-2009 Brown University Men’s Hockey Team

Given that Brown had a record of 4-25-2 in 2016-17, you might assume it would be easy to simply do a recap of this past year and call it a day. Truly, it was a miserable and incredible (insofar that I found myself in a perpetual state of incredulity in direct response to what I was witnessing on the ice) experience.

But it was not the worst season of the past 25 years, because 2008-09 was a thing that happened. To fully convey how wretched; how feeble; how unfathomably bleak and dreary that season was, I’m going to lay the foundation by briefly recapping the Roger Grillo era.

Roger Grillo came to College Hill as head coach in 1997 following the departure of Bob Gaudet to his alma mater and Ivy League rival Dartmouth. Gaudet had some good seasons at Brown, including one in which the team made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in decades, but they were sandwiched between some truly abysmal years. Grillo immediately brought life to the program, guiding the Bears to a fourth-place finish with Gaudet’s players in 1998 and engineering a handful of years (2002-2005) in which Brown was an ECAC contender behind the otherworldly goaltending of Yann Danis.

However, the team fell off a cliff in 2005-06. Players took major steps back in their development, recruits decommitted, and the starting goalie who replaced Danis left the school unexpectedly. Brown earned a reputation for playing a dirty, thuggish style and scoring sparingly, as Grillo aired on the side of caution and neutered his offensive players’ talents in favor of a hyper-conservative shell that emphasized physicality (read: cheap shots).

The 2008-09 Brown team won three games in the regular season. This is remarkable in and of itself, because freshman goalie Mike Clemente had a .930 save percentage. If your goalie is putting up .930, you should win more games than you lose. That statistic alone is completely damning of the team’s offensive production. Indeed, the numbers support this assertion: Bruno scored a woeful 1.82 goals per game while allowing 3.48 and being outshot 39-24, on average. It’s too bad nobody tracked Corsi and Fenwick at the college level back then, because I’d LOVE to see what those numbers would have looked like.

But here’s the crazy thing: THE TEAM HAD (some) TALENT. Ryan Garbutt, Harry Zolnierczyk, Bobby Farnham, and Aaron Volpatti have all had multi-year NHL careers with admittedly limited success (but, like, STILL). Clemente, Jack MacLellan, Sean McMonagle, Matt Vokes, Jeff Buvinow, Jordan Pietrus, Eric Slais, Devin Timberlake, and David Brownschidle have all played professionally in North America and Europe.

And, yet, the top scorer on that team was Vokes with 28 points in 33 games, followed by Buvinow, a defenseman, with 17 (!!!!!). The offensive output was truly abysmal. Watching that team play became an onerous task; one I wouldn’t wish upon anyone except maybe Harvard and Yale fans.

At this point, you’re probably aware that I don’t intend to do a game-by-game recap of this season. Why should I? The team lost, lost again, and then lost some more. There were sporadic momentary respites to this torture — tying Harvard up in Allston despite being outshot 51-29 was pretty funny, and we almost upset 10th-ranked Cornell on Senior Night before losing in overtime — but for the most part, 2008-09 was excruciatingly painful.

And then the ECAC playoffs rolled around. Facing insurmountable odds and a Crimson team led by the Boisterous Biega Brothers and Alex Killorn, the truly atrocious Bears rolled into the Bright Hockey Center and shut Harvard out in back-to-back games for the very first time in that program’s 111-year existence. Mike Clemente racked up 82 saves and Brown scored two non-empty netters (lol) en route to a series sweep of the contemptible Cantabs, inverting their smug, aristocratic grins and turning their cheeks a Crimson hue indicative of their enduring embarrassment and shame.

Bruno made the trek down 95 to New Haven the following weekend, putting up a decent fight but ultimately being brushed aside by an explosive Yale team. The Elis went on to pummel Cornell in the ECAC Championship Game, before falling to Vermont in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. If there’s anything good to be said about the 2008-09 Brown men’s hockey team — which finished with an astonishingly bad 5-23-5 record — it’s that it was Roger Grillo’s last. He left Brown during the ensuing summer to take a job with USA Hockey (HE WASN’T EVEN FIRED AFTER A THREE-WIN SEASON!!!!). ...not that things have gotten any better under Grillo’s successor Brendan Whittet. In fact, I’d argue the program is in worse shape now than it was in 2009. But, I digress. That year sucked. Good riddance.

For Week 3 of this series, we will look at the worst seasons in recent memory for the following schools: Canisius and Clarkson. Once again, if you are interested in doing the entry for your favorite school, shoot me a PM. Your school, name, and date will be added at the end of each post to serve as a reminder. So far, the following people have inquired about a spot:

School	Username	Tentative Date
Cornell	u/ABigRedWallaby	6/29
LSSU	u/binkelman	7/10
UML	u/LantisEscudo	7/13
Northeastern	u/therevengeance	8/2
Penn State	u/saucysalesman	8/8
RPI	u/Nicholas1227	8/16
Union	u/azureamor	8/22
Vermont	u/LocksTheFox	8/23

Finally, a shoutout to u/saucysalesman who inspired the idea of this series for doing one for football over at r/cfb. Additionally, thanks to r/CollegeBasketball for the idea of the sub-par MS Paint logos for each school.

Previous Entries in the Worst Seasons Series:

AHA	Hockey East	WCHA	Independent
Air Force	Boston College	Alabama Huntsville	Arizona State
American International	Boston Univ.	Alaska Anchorage
Army West Point		Alaska Fairbanks
Bentley		Bemidji State
		Bowling Green

Once again, many thanks to u/kbd77 for their entry for Brown

Finally, I (Wallaby) will be busy tomorrow (Thursday) evening, so the next entry in the series (Canisius) will be posted at an earlier time. This will be most likely in the afternoon.