The 66th Men’s Beanpot Consolation Game: Final Thoughts and Predictions

For the second straight year Boston College hockey fans are exposed to the wonder that is the Beanpot consolation game.

Played before the main event of the evening, the Beanpot is kind of like a house show in wrestling. It is played with a sparse (to put it nicely) crowd at the TD Garden, without any video streaming (this means no TV or Internet video), and it is kind of viewed as an afterthought in the tournament.

And the thing is, it really shouldn’t be viewed that way.

Hockey scribes and fans alike cannot view the Beanpot in a vacuum: the tournament usually pits a group of teams that have NCAA tournament aspirations, which creates significant Pairwise implications. When BC played Harvard in…