With the calendar month turning to October, conversation around college hockey is bound to center on the national tournament, the contenders, the pretenders, the bubble teams, possible Cinderellas and spoilers, and anything in between.
Dark horse discussions are more prevalent than ever as teams ramp their best hockey into form, and the idea among the media, message boards, and blogs is to intensify the expectations as goals become more singular in their focus.
In ECAC Hockey, most of that rightly belongs to Quinnipiac, which moved to No. 2 nationally while grabbing four first-place votes, while Harvard grabbed moments of the Bobcats’ sunshine after improving to No. 8 in the latest USCHO Division I Men’s Poll with its own six-point weekend.
Further down the poll, third place Cornell is living in a world constructed around top contenders and down-ballot underdogs. With a 13-7-1 overall record and a 10-4 league record, the No. 11 Big Red have more than overcome a slow start to their season, and as February dawns, it might be worth taking a look at the team that drew first blood from first place since it just might be the best team nobody’s talking about.
“We still have room to grow,” said Cornell coach Mike Schaefer. “We started the year with some tough road trips where we were on the road at Minnesota Duluth for two games before going right into the Princeton-Quinnipiac road trip and the trip to St. Lawrence and Clarkson, which are all tough places to play. We knew that starting a season with those six games wasn’t [easy], but we talked about it in the fall that we wanted to be playing our best hockey in January, February and March.”
Beginning a season with a trial by fire isn’t unique in the ECAC, but Cornell’s opening rounds hardened the Big Red prior to a four-game winning streak around Thanksgiving. A 6-0 win over UConn at Madison Square Garden in New York City loudly announced the team’s renaissance, and after losing in overtime to seventh-ranked Harvard, Cornell ripped off eight unbeaten games over a nine-game stretch before losing last Saturday in a road rivalry rematch with the Crimson.
That fast and furious seasoning isn’t unique in ECAC, but it positioned Cornell to make some national noise through the year’s last month. Nobody really talked about the Big Red after their resounding, 4-0 win over then-No. 1 Quinnipiac, and the loss to seventh-ranked Boston University largely went unnoticed despite Cornell holding it to a last-second goal that sank the Big Red in regulation.
Neither the loss to BU nor the loss this weekend to Harvard sank Cornell in the Pairwise Rankings, where the Big Red are tied for 11th with Michigan Tech despite a decisive lead in the RPI, but it still feels like the team is overlooked. Its 13 wins are tied with Notre Dame among teams currently on the proper side of the tournament bubble, but the Fighting Irish’s barely-.500 record is kept afloat by the Big Ten’s overall strength and lower numbers compared to ECAC, where seven teams are in the bottom half of the Pairwise with three in the bottom 10.
Cornell doesn’t have the luxury of games to spare, and as an Ivy League team, the lower number of overall games places even more premium on a team that ranks among the nation’s best in several key areas. The scoring offense is 13th in the nation while the defense is holding teams to a seventh-best 2.24 goals per game with a 10th-best scoring margin. The power play is one of three teams scoring better than 28 percent, but the penalty kill is likewise in the top-15 in the nation.
Only one team – Mercyhurst – has been penalized less than Cornell’s 9.14 PIMs per game, which means the team hasn’t had many opportunities to score more than its one shorthanded goal all year, and goaltender Ian Shane is the recipient of a 1.92 goals-against average – sixth-best in the nation – because he’s part of a greater defensive effort limiting opponents to under 22 shots per game.
Despite the gaudy numbers, Cornell doesn’t have a player with more than six goals. Ten different players have anywhere from four to six goals, and 17 different players have at least two goals. The Big Red lost forward Matt Stienburg earlier this year to an injury, but the train just kind of kept rolling because of its ability to remain deep, strong, and committed to its values on the ice.
“Guys got off to a rough start this year and didn’t score early on,” Schaefer said. “That was kind of a surprise, but I think it put an emphasis on the fact that there are lots of different ways to win games. The foundation has to be that you’re good defensively, so when the goals don’t come, you have an opportunity to win.
“We’re a team,” he reiterated. “I think that’s always been our emphasis at Cornell, and the best teams I’ve had received contributions from different guys. We lost Matt Stienburg, but we just kept clicking, and that’s a testament to our guys on the team. We’ll get production from somewhere.”
It has the Big Red uniquely positioned to ruin somebody’s season while simultaneously boosting their own postseason stock. Few teams are hotter in ECAC, and February features a number of games against teams currently relegated to the first-round home-ice battle. Five of the remaining eight games are at home, and though a home-and-home with travel partner Colgate looms next week, a sandwich of series at Lynah Rink bookend games against Rensselaer and Union with Clarkson and St. Lawrence.
Short of the games at Brown and Yale to end the season, it’s increasingly likely that a road to Lake Placid will go through Ithaca, and for a team that suffered its only loss at home in that aforementioned game against Harvard, the possibility of postseason dreams crashing into an unforgiving red wall looms large for whichever team is fortunate enough to escape a first round single elimination game.
“This has always been a tough place to play,” Schaefer recalled. “Even last year when it wasn’t normal, things are pretty much back to normal. With our fans and our rink, it’s always been tough, and that’s just been increased a little bit because we’re a little bit better. Teams love playing up here, and in our league, it’s a great environment. That’s one of the things that makes us a better hockey team. We’re getting everybody’s best, and you’re going to get a team that’s coming in and sleepwalking through a game here or there.
“Eventually, that makes us better by the end of the year, too.”
