Friday, November 28 and Saturday, November 29 Army at Bentley Dan: Bentley’s had some problems in back, giving up nine goals over their last two games. They’re also battling the injury bug with Alex Grieve and Ryan McMurphy missing time. As for the Black Knights, Brian Riley likes to joke that his team is better suited to play in the JAR than Tate Rink, and they’ll face minimal noise with students away on Thanksgiving. Army wins on Friday, Bentley wins on Saturday. Chris: The Falcons have had the better of things with Army recently (4-0-1 in their last five meetings, and I’m expecting that to continue. Bentley sweeps.
Air Force at Canisius Dan: Air Force is in eighth place, but they’ve played the least amount of conference games. They have the third best winning percentage at .583. They’re also 2-1-2 in their last five games overall with their only loss coming to a Denver team that’s a top 10 team nationally. Air Force sweeps Chris: The Golden Griffins are still looking for their first win at HarborCenter. Air Force has been hot and cold so far this season but I have a feeling the Falcons are on the upswing. Air Force sweeps.
Saturday, November 29 Rochester Institute of Technology at Yale Dan: Yale’s an interesting case study at 4-2-1 since they’ve played only one game outside of ECAC (their 1-0-1 non-conference record came against fellow Ivy/ECAC member Princeton and UConn in the Liberty Invitational). That said, their goaltending’s been outstanding this year, with Alex Lyon seeing all but 40 minutes of action this season. Lyon carries a 1.87 GAA and .933 save percentage. Yale wins Chris: These teams have never met, and this game has the subplot of RIT coach Wayne Wilson coaching against his son Stu, who’s a junior forward for the Bulldogs. I think Stu will have bragging rights. Yale wins.
American International at Dartmouth Dan: Since beating Niagara, AIC’s allowed an average of 5.8 goals per game. That’s going to be a problem against a Dartmouth team that dropped six on a struggling Brown squad and defeated Union earlier this year. Dartmouth wins Chris:Dartmouth has had a tough schedule out of the gate, and has to be careful not to look past AIC to a game against Boston University the following day. But I think the Big Green will manage. Dartmouth wins.
Sunday, November 30 Brown at Holy Cross Dan: Holy Cross picked up a win in the first leg of their Rubin Gauntlet on Tuesday by beating Bentley, 4-2. Now they draw my older brother Mike (Brown graduate of the class of 2000 and the Bears’ radio voice) while looking for a clean sweep of the family. This is a must win for the Bears, who’ve been struggling with injuries on defense and a power outage up front in losing six straight. That said, “must win” situations are when Brendan Whittet has his team at their most dangerous. Brown wins Chris: Brown is off to a rough start and Holy Cross is tough at home. I’m going with the Crusaders. Holy Cross wins.
Last week, Arlan and I were even, both going 14-4-4 (.727). On the year, I am 126-39-22 (.732) while Arlan is 122-43-22 (.711). I’m holding on to a slim lead.
Friday, Nov. 28
Harvard at Boston College Candace: It could be close, or not. Boston College 4-1 Arlan: My question regarding Harvard is not if it will start to play better, only when. Boston College 3-1
Ohio State at Robert Morris Candace: Colonials games are torture to pick. Ohio State 3-2 Arlan: Likely a close game, but I think the Buckeyes avenge last year’s loss. Ohio State 2-1
Clarkson at Connecticut Candace: The Golden Knights look to rebound. Clarkson 5-2 Arlan: The Nutmeg teams would get more trophies if they invited a softer fourth. Clarkson 3-0
Quinnipiac vs. Yale Candace: I want to pick Yale, but can’t bring myself to. Quinnipiac 4-2 Arlan: Interesting measuring stick for the Bobcats, as Yale played BC three days before. Quinnipiac 3-1
Friday-Saturday, Nov. 28-29
Minnesota-Duluth at Bemidji State Candace: I really don’t want to pick this one. Since I have no idea who will win on what night, I’ll call a sweep. Minnesota-Duluth 3-2, 4-2 Arlan: One of the most important series remaining in 2014. Bemidji State 1-0, Minnesota-Duluth 3-1
RIT at Rennselaer Candace: I don’t think the Engineers have enough weapons to hurt the Tigers. RIT 3-1, 3-2 Arlan: I don’t remember a season where the availability of key players was in question so often. Will Ali Binnington play? RIT 2-1, 2-1
Wisconsin at New Hampshire Candace: Will the Badgers go for a BC-like beatdown? Wisconsin 4-1, 5-0 Arlan: Since thumping Vermont, the Wildcats have been outscored 21-2 in three games versus Boston schools. Wisconsin 6-1, 4-0
Providence vs. Brown home-and-home Candace: The Friars have shown signs of life, as have the Bears. I like home ice in each. Brown 3-2, Providence 2-1 Arlan: After a dreadful start, the Friars have rebounded with a 2-2-2 stretch. Brown 4-2, Providence 5-4
Saturday, Nov. 29
Boston University at Dartmouth Candace: The Big Green seem to have come back to reality. Boston University 5-2 Arlan: Dartmouth scored 19 goals in its four wins, but only tallied once in dropping the last two. Boston University 4-2
Harvard at Northeastern Candace: I don’t think Vermont is quite the caliber that the Crimson are. Harvard 4-2 Arlan: Would have expected these teams to be better than one game over .500 combined. Harvard 3-2
Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 29-30
Maine at Vermont Candace: Vermont looked awful against Northeastern, but I still think the Catamounts have it. Vermont 3-2, 4-2 Arlan: Maine is a puzzle; in two-game series, it held Mercyhurst to three goals and Qunnipiac to six, but Brown scored 10. Vermont is suddenly a mess defensively, yielding 30 goals over its last six — while strangely holding BC to four. Vermont 3-2, 2-0
St. Cloud State at North Dakota Candace: While the Huskies are getting better and UND is in a funk, home ice equals a sweep. North Dakota 3-1, 4-1 Arlan: The Huskies’ play is improving, but they’ve been blanked in four straight games. North Dakota 3-0, 2-1
Minnesota at Princeton Candace: 12-1-2 has people wondering what’s wrong with the Gophers; shows you how amazing they’ve been. Minnesota 4-1, 4-0 Arlan: Switching venues should make the results closer than last year’s 15-1 combined result. Minnesota 4-1, 3-0
Monday, Dec. 1
Mercyhurst at Cornell Candace: I would have picked up more games on Arlan if I had picked Mercyhurst earlier; why not now? Mercyhurst 3-2 Arlan: Though the record may not show it, I think this is the best team the Lakers have seen thus far. Cornell 2-1
Tuesday, Dec. 2
Dartmouth at Harvard Candace: This should be close, but I think home ice prevails. Harvard 4-2 Arlan: Pivotal conference points for both clubs. Harvard 4-3
Happy Thanksgiving, WCHA fans! I’m particularly thankful for my ability to guess correctly on the some splits last weekend, while Jack went the other way, and therefore pass my cohort for the overall lead. Sure, we could have stuck with picks straight sweeps or splits, but we’re going game by game for a high degree of difficulty.
It gets no easier this weekend with eight teams in action, including two in nonconference play.
All right, let’s make the picks before the tryptophan kicks in:
Minnesota State at Lake Superior State
Shane: The Mavericks return to the U.P. one week after sweeping Michigan Tech and will try to avoid a letdown after those two big victories. Minnesota State only moved to No. 7 in the rankings after that, which was probably just fine for coach Mike Hastings, who has done a good job managing MSU’s tough road schedule. I think that continues this weekend against the improving Lakers. Mavericks 5-2, 3-2
Jack: Not quite sure why the Mavericks failed to move ahead of the team they just swept on the road, but I will never understand how most people vote in polls (to each his or her own, I guess). The only thing that really matters at the moment: MSU is No. 1 in the pairwise. I foresee that continuing. The Lakers have been better in November (the return of forward Chris Ciotti from has helped immensely) but I don’t think they will matter against the Mavericks. A sweep seems likely. Mavericks 5-2, 6-3
Michigan Tech at Alabama Huntsville
Shane: Despite dropping their first two games of the season, I was impressed with what I saw from the Huskies last weekend. Minnesota State won those games; Tech didn’t lose them. Like MSU, Tech is taking a long road trip and playing a much-improved (and much more confident) team that struggled early on. But I think the Huskies are good and will rebound. Huskies 4-1, 4-2
Jack: I just want the record to show that although I did pick the wrong way on a few of those split, I DID pick an Alabama-Huntsville split in Ferris! (Unfortunately for me I picked it on the wrong day… C’est la vie). Anyway, I think the Huskies are too good to let this losing streak extend too long, so I think they rebound here. But don’t be surprised if it’s a pair of one-goal games once again. As we’ve seen, Carmine Guerriero can keep Huntsville in any game. Huskies 2-1, 1-0
Northern Michigan at Alaska
Shane: The Wildcats are in the midst of their long Alaska road trip, so it will be interesting to see how they come out in the second series. The Nanooks, meanwhile, are home after their own long trip to the Sault where they got their first league win of the season. I see a split. Wildcats 3-1, Nanooks 2-1
Jack: Mathias Dahlstrom gave up four goals last Saturday against Alaska-Anchorage. He’d given up just six total in nine previous games. It says a lot about him and his defense that said game bumped his goals-against all the way up to… 0.99. He’s gonna want to get that exorbitant rate back down this weekend, huh? Seriously though, I can see the Nanooks scoring the split but, I doubt the Wildcats are going to give up four goals again anytime soon.Nanooks 1-0, Wildcats 4-1
Ferris State at Wisconsin
Shane: The Bulldogs head to Madison to face the nation’s only winless team. Shocking, isn’t it that Wisconsin is 0 for the season so far. Ferris State, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out some things after that home split with Huntsville a week ago. While I’d like to pick a Bulldogs sweep, I think Wisco gets off the schneid and they split. Badgers 2-1, Bulldogs 3-0
Jack: I’m tempted to agree with Shane and say the Badgers will finally score a W but I’m already on Badgers’ fans naughty list for picking them to be swept by Northern Michigan earlier this season. I see no reason to turn face again, seeing as how I’m public enemy No. 1 in Madison (probably not, but I’d like to think they hate me). Bulldogs rally back from splitting with Huntsville and sweep.Bulldogs 4-1, 3-2
St. Cloud State at Bemidji State
Shane: I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: This Bemidji State schedule is brutal. Every team the Beavers have played has been ranked at the time of the meeting. If they’re learning from the tough competition and not losing confidence, they could be scary in the second half. Perhaps their improvement starts this weekend with a split. Huskies 4-2, Beavers 3-2
Jack: It’s been a frustrating six games for Tom Serratore’s crew. They’ve played well enough to win in all six but are still 0-6 against the league’s top three teams (MSU, Tech and BGSU). They haven’t really gotten any bounces their way, either (watch Sean Walker’s empty-netter for Bowling Green in last Saturday’s game for proof of this). This week BSU steps out of the conference to take on another highly-ranked instate rival. I feel like at some point the bounces have to start going BSU’s way. I’ll pick the split. Beavers 4-2, Huskies 5-3
Mitch Jones and the Northern Michigan defense have been stingy this season (photo: Adelle Whitefoot).
After surrendering just six goals in its first nine games, Northern Michigan’s Saturday in Anchorage must have seemed like a strange dream for the Wildcats — especially after they had shut out the Seawolves 1-0 the night before.
“We got a good start with a win on Friday, but we didn’t play well on Saturday,” Wildcats coach Walt Kyle said. “Whether that was fatigue or something else, I don’t really know.”
Alaska-Anchorage’s 4-0 victory Saturday was the first time all season the Wildcats had surrendered more than two goals — odd in itself for a team that had, until that moment, played lights-out defense backed by netminder Mathias Dahlstrom.
But the Seawolves scored three goals in an eight-minute span of the first period — something that Kyle said hadn’t happened yet this season.
“They put us on our heels and that was that,” Kyle said. “We weren’t able to generate very much offense. And I thought we got a little out of ourselves.”
Still, if the Wildcats’ track record in 2014 is any indication, they should be themselves again very soon — possibly as soon as this weekend in Fairbanks, Alaska, against the Nanooks.
“I really like the leadership we have. I don’t perceive that’s going to be an ongoing issue,” Kyle said of giving up four goals in Saturday’s game. “That’s not to say we’re not going to get scored on, but I think we’ll get back to playing the way we’re going to playing the way that we need to to be efficient.”
Northern Michigan has certainly been efficient on the back end. The Wildcats’ 1.00 GAA through 10 games is the nation’s best, while Dahlstrom, a sophomore from Smedjebacken, Sweden, has established himself as one of the best goaltenders in the country. He’s tied for the NCAA lead with four shutouts and has the top save percentage (.958) and GAA (0.99) in the country.
Aside from the loss to the Seawolves, the only other time Dahlstrom (who has started all 10 games so far for NMU) has given up more than one goal was a 4-2 win against Upper Peninsula rivals Lake Superior State on Oct. 24.
“I think collectively we’ve played pretty well,” Kyle said of his team’s defensive performance.
“And [Mathias] had certainly been outstanding. We haven’t been able to score much, so we have to find some solutions there. But while we’re doing that we’re going to have to maintain a good defensive posture.”
With a 7-2-1 record overall and a No. 19 ranking in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll, the Wildcats have gotten there because of that defensive posture.
“At the end of the year it’s always good to be in close games, and to have won close games because you know you feel comfortable and confident you can do it,” Kyle said.
Kyle seems to be taking a relatively zen approach to his team’s success this season. No matter who the team is playing, he said, he wants to keep the Wildcats’ focus on how they play rather than the results.
“We’re trying to keep everything quality-of-play-oriented,” Kyle said. “We’ve been doing that, and we’ve been efficient. We’re not going to go off of that on a loss or two or 10. We just have to keep managing that.”
Northern Michigan is in the midst of a 10-day Alaska excursion. The team arrived in Anchorage last Wednesday, split with the Seawolves over the weekend, then made its way to Fairbanks on Wednesday for this weekend’s series with the Nanooks.
“Last year we went up twice,” Kyle said. “We’re fortunate up to have it over break.
“We’re trying to let the guys have some fun and make the most of it.”
Stephon Williams and Minnesota State won twice at Michigan Tech last weekend (photo: Jim Rosvold).
Depth becomes them
It took an all-around team effort, including a resurgent Stephon Williams in goal, for Minnesota State to sweep previously unbeaten Michigan Tech last weekend.
“We played all four lines all weekend. We played six defensemen,” coach Mike Hastings said this week. “Depth has become a strength.”
The Mavericks came from behind to win both games, scoring two third-period goals in each game.
Five different players scored goals for Minnesota State, even as the red-hot Bryce Gervais was kept off the score sheet.
“We stayed after it,’ Hastings said. “We had a pretty flat nose by the beginning of both third periods. We ran into that wall often. But that showed the maturity of our upperclassmen — Matt Leitner and Jean-Paul LaFontaine [both of whom scored in the third period Saturday] — and I thought our defensive corps played as well as they’ve played all season.”
Hastings’ upperclassmen have been getting things done most of the season.
The team’s top five scorers are juniors and seniors, including Leitner and Gervais with 14 points each, which puts them in a tie for the WCHA lead, and LaFontaine, Teddy Blueger and Zach Palmquist with 11 points each.
Meanwhile, Williams stopped 55 of 58 shots in the series, reminding observers of his fantastic rookie season of two years ago.
Williams, who had lost the starting job to Cole Huggins last season, is 9-1. However, going into the Tech series, he had a so-so .901 save percentage. That’s been bumped up to .915.
The Mavericks, who are 9-3 and have won seven of their last eight games, return to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this weekend to take on Lake Superior State.
Ice chips
• At 10-3-1 (7-1 in WCHA), Bowling Green is off to its best 14-game start since the 1995-96 season. The Falcons have won six of their last seven games.
• Alaska-Anchorage’s rookie class has been solid so far. The group leads the Seawolves with 11 goals, and goalie Olivier Mantha has a .935 save percentage and 2.26 GAA. Mantha recorded his first shutout on Saturday, a 4-0 win over Northern Michigan.
• Alaska won its first league game of the season on Friday, defeating Lake Superior State in a wild, 7-5 game in which six different players scored goals for the Nanooks.
• Ferris State senior goaltender CJ Motte played in his 100th game on Saturday. In his three-plus seasons, he is 55-35-10 with a .929 save percentage and 2.10 GAA.
• Alabama-Huntsville’s improvement this season isn’t just in the win column (UAH is 3-9-2; the team was 2-35-1 last year). Through 14 games, the Chargers have posted 27 goals and 47 assists for 74 points, compared to 13 goals and 24 assists for 37 points through 14 games last season.
• Michigan Tech saw its school-record 10-0 start and five-game home winning streak snapped last weekend when swept by Minnesota State. The Huskies will make their first-ever trip to Huntsville this weekend; the teams met for the first time during last season’s Winter Carnival series, with Tech sweeping the Chargers.
• Bemidji State’s challenging schedule continues this weekend, with the Beavers hosting No. 15 St. Cloud State — the sixth straight ranked opponent for the Beavers. BSU has played well despite its 3-9 record, but special teams have been an issue. The Beavers have given up as many short-handed goals (six) as they’ve scored on the power play.
Players of the week
This week’s WCHA players of the week were Ferris State forward Chad McDonald (offensive), Minnesota State goaltender Stephon Williams (defensive) and Lake Superior State defenseman James Roll (rookie).
Joey LaLeggia is one of seven seniors playing regularly for Denver (photo: Candace Horgan).
Coming into this season, the No. 10 Denver Pioneers had their largest senior class since the last year they won the national championship, in 2004-05. So far, that leadership has paid dividends.
With seven seniors playing regularly, the Pioneers are 8-3 and have won a variety of games, from tight low-scoring affairs against Boston College and Wisconsin to a come-from-behind offensive win against Western Michigan to blowouts against their in-state rivals, Colorado College and Air Force.
“Having that big senior class helps for that,” said senior defenseman Joey LaLeggia. “Over the last few years, we’ve been in a lot of tight games, and even when Wisconsin scored the goal to cut the lead in half and make it 3-2 with under 10 minutes left, nobody was panicking. Everybody was very calm on the bench and still confident. I think that really has everything to do with our experience and our large senior class leading everybody top to bottom.”
With the graduation of standout goalie Sam Brittain, no one was sure what to expect from Denver, especially considering its struggles to score last year, when they ranked 36th nationally in offensive production. The Pioneers have used their seniors to become an offensive machine ranked fourth in team offense and second on the power play.
The Pioneers’ top line includes last year’s leading scorer, sophomore Trevor Moore, freshman Danton Heinen and senior Daniel Doremus. The three lead the Pioneers in scoring, each with 13 points. After last Saturday’s win over Wisconsin, Denver coach Jim Montgomery said of the line that “they’ve got it on a string a lot.” Doremus and Moore also played together on a line last season.
“I think our line just clicked right away,” said Doremus. “It’s tough to put a finger on anything specific. Those two are incredibly talented, and can make plays from anywhere on the ice. I just try to create space for them. I think I kind of balance it out by getting them the puck and making space and letting them make creative plays.”
One of the big strengths of Denver is the offensive production it gets from its defensemen. LaLeggia, who earned his 100th career point against Colorado College, is fourth on the team in scoring. His partner Nolan Zajac is sixth, and Will Butcher of the second defense pair is eighth. Someone from a rival school observed that the Denver defense attacks in waves.
“I think that’s a tribute to coaching, to Jim Montgomery,” said LaLeggia. “We all came to Denver with very good offensive instincts and offensive skills that not a whole lot of defensemen have, and Monty has done a great job of teaching us how to be 200-foot players and teaching us how to take care of our own end, but still giving us the green light to do what we do offensively.”
Added Doremus: “We want them to have the puck and get engaged in the play. That’s what makes our team so dynamic and hard to play against, because we rely on all five guys on the ice to take part in the offense.”
The defensemen are also a key to Denver’s second-ranked power play unit, which clicks at a 28.3 percent success rate.
“A lot of it has to do with our defensemen,” said Doremus. “They’re extremely talented, and they quarterback the power play. They are a big part of breaking it into the zone and starting it off.”
“Like Danny said, I get the opportunity to play with Nolan Zajac on the power play, and he just makes it so easy,” said LaLeggia. “He’s one of my favorite players that I’ve ever had the opportunity to play with. He is so easy to play with, with how smart he is and the offensive instincts he has. When you have a guy like that on your power play, it just makes it easier for everybody else to click and find each other out there.”
After going 5-1 in November, Denver is off for Thanksgiving and will resume play on the road at Cornell Dec. 5-6 before closing the first half with a series at home against North Dakota. Doremus thinks the team’s experience will help it remain focused.
“Our leadership group this year, our senior class and even our juniors, they’re outstanding, so I think we have learned lessons in the past and the consequences of coming back unfocused, or a lack of attention to detail, and pushing the pace in practice right from when we get back and how that can affect us,” Doremus said. “I think we understand that we have to get back to that level when we get back. At this point, we are out of school, so all we have to do is focus on hockey, which is really nice.”
Cody Bradley and Colorado College have most of their final games at home (photo: Candace Horgan).
Giving thanks
In the spirit of the holiday, this week we’ll look at what each NCHC team has to be thankful for. Overall, the league is off to a great start, with six of its eight representatives ranked in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll.
There haven’t been many bright spots for the Tigers so far this year. They are 0-5 in league play, sitting in the cellar, and are only 3-8 overall, the worst mark of any team in the league.
Scoring continues to be a problem; the top scorer on the team is Cody Bradley, who averages .727 points per game. Hunter Fejes is second, averaging .545 points per game. Neither of the two goalies, Chase Perry and Tyler Marble, has a save percentage above .900, and both GAAs are high at 3.73 and 4.77, respectively. The Tigers are 58th out of 59 teams nationally in team defense while ranking 55th on penalty-killing efficiency.
So what does first-year bench boss Mike Haviland have to be thankful for? The Tigers just earned their third win of the year last Friday at home against Wisconsin 5-2, and returning home in the second half is a good thing.
CC is 0-7 on the road, and its next seven NCAA games are on the road. However, after facing Connecticut in Hartford on Jan. 6, CC is home for seven of the last nine weekends. World Arena is a tough place to play, between having an Olympic-sized ice sheet and being at an altitude of over 6,000 feet.
CC is 3-2 at home so far this year, and having the second half of the season played mostly at home could help the Tigers get on a roll.
Denver
A year ago, Denver rode the coattails of goaltender Sam Brittain while struggling to score goals. In fact, Denver didn’t have a single player average a point a game last season; Moore led the team in scoring while averaging .761 points a game on an offense that ranked 36th nationally, averaging 2.67 goals a game.
What a difference a year makes. Second-year coach Jim Montgomery has to be thankful for his team’s offensive production so far.
Through the first six weeks of the season, Denver has five players averaging 1.10 points per game or better, including freshman phenom Heinen, who leads the team in scoring. Defenseman Zajac, sixth in scoring, has a better scoring average than Moore posted last year.
Denver’s offense is now ranked fourth nationally, averaging 3.64 points per game. The power play is second nationally, clicking at 28.3 percent. The ability to score seemingly at will is a big reason Denver is off to an 8-3 start. The team is 3-2 in league play and currently fourth in the standings.
All the goal-scoring hasn’t come at the expense of defense. Denver ranks 18th nationally in team defense, giving up on average 2.18 goals per game, which is lower than last year’s defensive-minded squad did.
Miami
Last year at about this time, Miami lost Blake Coleman to injury and went into a swoon, one it didn’t really recover from until the NCHC tournament. However, even when Coleman went down, the RedHawks were barely above .500.
This year, Miami is off to a much better start. The team is 10-4 on the season and is 6-2 in league play, sitting atop the standings. Miami is No. 5 in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll thanks to its fast start.
On a team blessed with offensive talent, including Coleman, Sean Kuraly, Austin Czarnik and Riley Barber, coach Enrico Blasi is probably most thankful for the play of goaltender Jay Williams, who sports an NCAA-best record of 10-1 while recording a 1.55 GAA and a .928 save percentage. Williams is sixth nationally among goaltenders in GAA and is tied for fifth in shutouts with two. The RedHawks are tied for 12th nationally in team defense, giving up only 2.00 goals per game on average.
The RedHawks are off for Thanksgiving and end the first half with a key league series against Omaha.
Minnesota-Duluth
Minnesota-Duluth has been one of the surprises of the season. The Bulldogs sit second in the league standings behind Miami and are ranked eighth in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll. After .500 play through October, Minnesota-Duluth caught fire, winning its first five games in November before losing to Omaha last Saturday.
The stretch was more impressive because of the opponents against whom the Bulldogs claimed victories: then-No. 7 St. Cloud State, then-No. 1 Minnesota, and then-No. 13 Omaha, the lowest-ranked team the Bulldogs have played so far. Overall, Minnesota-Duluth has played the third-toughest schedule in the country to date.
What has been the key to the Bulldogs’ great run? Look to freshman goaltender Kasimir Kaskisuo, who has won the starting job while posting a 2.09 GAA and a .924 save percentage. Coach Scott Sandelin must be thankful to see the freshman display such poise early in his collegiate career.
While the Bulldogs have gotten some balanced offensive production, including scoring from Dominic Toninato and Alex Iafallo, it is the defense that has helped the team go 5-1 in November. Before Saturday’s 4-1 loss to Omaha (which included an empty-net goal), the Bulldogs hadn’t given up more than two goals since Nov. 1 in a 4-3 win over Miami.
UMD is 21st nationally in team defense, giving up on average 2.21 goals per game. Despite not having a single player averaging over a point per game, the Bulldogs are 17th in team offense, averaging 3.14 goals per game.
The Bulldogs are off for Thanksgiving and resume play Dec. 5-6 against Colorado College at home.
Omaha
Under coach Dean Blais, Omaha has always been an explosive offensive team, and that continues this year. Despite losing two of its top scorers from last year, UNO is ranked 15th in team offense, averaging 3.20 goals per game. Sophomores Austin Ortega and Jake Guentzel have led the way, and a trio of freshmen — Jake Randolph, Tyler Vesel and Avery Peterson — have stepped up in their first season to produce points at a respectable rate, with Randolph leading the way with nine points.
Despite the continued offensive production, Blais has to be most thankful for the play of senior goaltender Ryan Massa, who has posted a 6-1-1 mark so far and a 1.48 GAA and .951 save percentage. Massa is ranked fifth nationally among goalies for his GAA, and his save percentage is second only to Mathias Dahlström of Northern Michigan.
Massa’s play is a big reason UNO is ranked 11th nationally in team defense, giving up only 1.90 goals per game, a substantial decrease from last year’s mark of 3.24 goals per game, when UNO ranked near the bottom in team defense at 49.
Massa’s play has also helped UNO rank seventh in penalty-killing efficiency, killing at a 90.9 percent success rate.
UNO already has had two bye weeks but closes with three straight weekends of key league series and a nonconference series with Alabama-Huntsville right before Christmas. The Mavericks travel to North Dakota this weekend, Miami the following weekend and close at home against St. Cloud State and UAH.
North Dakota
North Dakota is second in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll, third in the league standings and sports a 9-3-1 mark so far. The team is 12th nationally in team offense, averaging 3.31 goals per game, and 15th nationally in team defense, giving up only 2.08 goals per game.
North Dakota has had a lot of success in part due to a strong defense. Zane McIntyre has a .927 save percentage, and the team leads the country in short-handed goals with seven.
Coach Dave Hakstol has to be most thankful that senior Mark MacMillan got healthy again after being hurt against Providence and missing four games. North Dakota struggled in MacMillan’s absence, eking out a come-from-behind OT win over Air Force, sweeping woeful Wisconsin and then losing to Miami.
In MacMillan’s first game back in the lineup, he had a goal and an assist in a 4-1 win over the RedHawks, scoring a four-on-four goal to tie the game just two minutes after Miami had taken the lead.
MacMillan is tied for the national lead in short-handed goals with two (as is his teammate Drake Caggiula), and is second on the team in scoring average with 1.22 points per game. MacMillan is on the top line with leading scorer Caggiula, who is tied for fourth nationally in scoring, and Michael Parks, who is 17th. The trio has been a big part of North Dakota’s success.
After the series this weekend against Omaha, North Dakota hosts Lake Superior State, then travels to Colorado to end its first half with a key league series against Denver.
St. Cloud State
The defending NCHC regular season champion, St. Cloud State has had a rough start, sitting at 5-6-1 overall and sixth in the conference. Of course, when you look at their schedule, the Huskies’ record makes more sense, as they have faced the No. 2-ranked team twice in Union and North Dakota, top-ranked Minnesota, sixth-ranked Colgate, and (at the time) No. 17 Minnesota-Duluth. Two of St. Cloud’s losses have been in overtime to Minnesota and Minnesota-Duluth.
Overall, St. Cloud has the seventh-toughest schedule in the country to date. That strength of schedule, as well as the graduation of Nic Dowd, has resulted in a reduced offensive production from the Huskies, who are averaging 2.33 goals per game, good for 36th nationally, and significantly off their pace of 3.58 goals per game last year.
Forward Jonny Brodzinski continues to pace the Huskies. His offensive production is a little off last year’s pace of 1.07 points per game, but he continues to be a tough player for opposing teams to contain. His seven goals are good for a tie at 13th nationally.
One thing coach Bob Motzko has to be thankful for is the Huskies’ power-play production, which is fifth nationally at a 25.49 percent success rate. Brodzinski is a big reason for that, as he has potted four power-play goals, tied for third nationally, and only one behind the top two of Quinnipiac’s Sam Anas and Bentley’s Max French.
St. Cloud renews an old rivalry this weekend when it travels to Bemidji, and then closes its first half with a series in Omaha in the second weekend of December.
Western Michigan
Western Michigan has also had a tough start. The Broncos are seventh in the league standings and have an overall record of 3-8-1.
Since beating Denver 6-3 on Nov. 8, which was the third straight game in which the Broncos scored four or more goals, the offensive production has turned anemic again. They scored three goals in a loss against St. Cloud, then one, none, and two goals over a stretch where the Broncos have gone 0-3-1-1.
Nolan Laporte and Chris Dienes lead the team in scoring, each at nine points, good for .750 points per game.
In team stats, the Broncos are 40th nationally in both team defense and penalty-killing efficiency, and rank 36th in team offense. One bright spot so far has been the power play, which clicks at a 19.61 percent success rate, good for 22nd nationally.
Ultimately, the Broncos are a young team, with only two seniors, Will Kessel and Justin Kovacs, seeing regular playing time. Senior goalie Frank Slubowski has played four games so far, while junior Lukas Hafner has appeared in nine and posted a .916 save percentage and 2.28 GAA. His play was a big part of the Broncos’ success in Denver in early November.
Coach Andy Murray has to be thankful that the power play is clicking well and that with Hafner in net, the Broncos have a solid goaltender who can keep Western Michigan in a lot of tight defensive games, which should help until Western’s younger players can grow into their roles.
Over Thanksgiving, the Broncos will face Ohio State in Notre Dame’s Shillelagh Tournament, then face the Union-Notre Dame winner. Western is then off before closing its first half with two games at home against Colorado College.
Players of the week
Offensive player of the week — Quentin Shore, Denver: In Denver’s weekend sweep of Air Force and Wisconsin, Shore had five points on four goals and an assist. On Friday, in a 7-0 win over Air Force, Shore notched his first career hat trick, and a natural one at that, scoring thrice in the second period, one short-handed and one on a power play. He added an assist on a power-play goal in the third. On Saturday, he scored a power-play goal in the second period to give Denver a 2-1 lead after Wisconsin had tied the game up five minutes earlier. He had a plus-2 rating on the weekend and eight shots on goal.
Defensive player of the week — Will Butcher, Denver: Denver gave up only two goals on the weekend, in part due to Butcher’s play. Butcher also pitched in on the other end of the ice, recording two assists and a goal. He assisted on the first goal in Friday’s 7-0 win over Air Force and assisted on a power-play goal and then scored a power-play goal in the second and third periods, respectively. On Saturday, Butcher finished plus-1 in Denver’s 3-2 win over Wisconsin. Butcher helped Denver kill six of seven power-play opportunities on the weekend.
Rookie of the week — Tyler Vesel, Omaha: In UNO’s split with Minnesota-Duluth, Vesel had three points, including assisting on a power-play goal in Friday’s 3-2 loss and scoring the first goal on Saturday in UNO’s 4-1 win. He also assisted on the game-winner Saturday. He finished plus-2 on the weekend and blocked five shots.
Goaltender of the week — Jay Williams, Miami: Williams earned the honors for the second time this year, earning two wins in a weekend sweep of Western Michigan while posting a 1.00 GAA and a .958 save percentage. On Friday, he earned his second shutout of the year and fourth of his career with 23 saves in Miami’s 1-0 win. On Saturday, he gave up two goals, one on a power play and one at even strength, while making 23 saves. He helped kill eight of nine Western Michigan power-play attempts on the weekend, and has the best record in Division I college hockey at 10-1.
St. Anselm senior Robin Yoshida is one of two New Mexico natives in all of NCAA women’s hockey (photo: Jim Stankiewicz).
It’s well-documented that hockey talent has been emerging from nontraditional places such as California, Arizona, and even Florida and Texas.
And New Mexico.
Seriously.
St. Anselm senior defenseman Robin Yoshida is just one of two New Mexico natives in all of Division I and Division III women’s hockey (Amherst’s Kristen Molina, an Albuquerque native, is the other), and has a story similar to how other players got their start, only hers starts in a place that can hardly be considered a place where hockey thrives.
“My dad taught me how to skate when I was really young,” said Yoshida, a Los Alamos native. “I had been figure skating my whole life, and when I was around eight years old, my friend’s dad was coaching a hockey team and trying to get some kids to join. I switched to hockey skates and have been involved ever since.”
Yoshida added that reflecting back on those early years has been humbling when she realizes the sacrifices people made.
“I have a lot of memories having to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning to make it to a game in Taos or Santa Fe on the weekends; I still can’t believe my parents did that for me for so long,” Yoshida said. “Other than that, my most significant memories are probably playing on the outdoor rink in Los Alamos. You don’t see rinks like that in New England. It was cold, but I was lucky to get to experience that growing up.”
During her sophomore year of high school, Yoshida left home to play travel hockey in Anaheim, California, and then went to the Cushing Academy outside of Boston for her junior and senior years.
“That experience was the best thing I could have done to prepare myself for college not only in hockey, but academically as well,” explained Yoshida. “At Cushing, I had all of the guidance I needed in one place to help me develop. My coach, Paul Kennedy, was a big name on the East Coast and he helped me get to where I needed to be to compete for a college spot. Playing in the prep school league, I had to acclimate to the competition around me, and I also got more exposure and recruiting opportunities.”
Growing up, Yoshida always dreamed of playing college hockey, and when she realized her talent was college-ready, as was her academic profile, it was then just a matter of deciding on a school.
Enter St. Anselm.
“I always wanted to play in college and I knew that hockey could help me get into a good school,” Yoshida said. “In the prep school league, most of the girls are trying to play college hockey. Once I realized that I could hold my own among the college competition, I knew I could play somewhere. It was more about finding out what kind of school I wanted to go to and what level of hockey was the best fit. By senior year, I knew that I wanted to go to a small school with good academics and a good Division III program.”
In 34 career games with the Hawks, Yoshida has recorded three assists. More than that, though, has been the “great experience” she has experienced at the school.
“I walked into a highly competitive, winning program,” Yoshida said. “We won 24 games last year and have won the ECAC Open the last three years in a row. We have a tradition of winning, but we have a culture of hard work. St. A’s is a hard school academically and with such high expectations hockey-wise, it is hard to keep up and it takes a true work ethic. This year, we were ranked second in the polls for our league behind Norwich, and some of our team goals are to win at least 20 games, win the ECAC tournament again and compete for a full 60 minutes every game. Coach (Kerstin) Matthews always says that at the end of the day, her hope is that we leave St. A’s strong and confident women and that is what I hope for myself.
“This is the best I have ever played and I just want to get better every day until it’s over.”
A sociology major, Yoshida wants to get her masters in public health with a focus on epidemiology and maybe global health.
“I hope I can get a job studying infectious diseases and be able to use my education to help people,” she added. “I will be applying to grad schools on the East Coast after graduation, and in the next five years, I plan to get my masters and then I hope to do the Peace Corps before I look for a job.”
With the season just getting underway and the Hawks sporting a 6-1-1 overall mark and a 4-1-1 ECAC East mark, the team is taking the “one day at a time” approach and so far, it’s working to a ‘T.’
“As a team, we have a lot to accomplish this year,” Yoshida said. “We are focusing on taking care of each game one at a time and showing up for three full periods. We have a really young team and as seniors, we are making sure that we are instilling the culture of the program into our team. We need to make sure we are staying focused, working hard, and doing the little things every day to get better. I am focusing on finishing this year doing my best academically and getting the most out of the rest of my experience here.”
As for back home some 2,254 miles away, Yoshida keeps an eye on the hockey scene and yearns for more exposure and growth in that part of the country.
“The talent is only getting better, and I hope that there are more opportunities for kids in New Mexico to get the kind of exposure they need to compete in college without having to live across the country,” said Yoshida. “The world of women’s hockey has really taken off, and I really hope that there are more girls getting involved, especially in New Mexico. I don’t think people realize how many opportunities there are out there to not only play hockey, but to use hockey to further your education. Being on a team and playing a competitive sport teaches you such invaluable skills.
“Hockey is the best sport in the world, and I hope that more kids in New Mexico are getting to experience it along with all of the benefits it can have.”
Noteworthy
Plattsburgh received 11 first-place votes to stay atop the USCHO.com Division III Women’s Poll. Elmira garnered the other four first-place nods and sits second. … Elmira senior Ashton Hogan has scored 11 goals in her first six games this season, and is on pace to shatter her career-best of 19 in 2012-13. She also needs 12 points for 100 in her career. … In three games, St. Thomas freshman goalie Paige Kittelson is 2-0-1 with a staggering .981 save percentage and a miniscule 0.32 goals-against average. Only Bowdoin sophomore Lan Crofton has a better save percentage (.982). … Oswego has allowed an NCAA-best 0.86 goals per game. … Adrian’s power play is operating at a remarkable 38.46 success rate (10 goals in 26 chances). … On the flip side, St. Catherine and Connecticut College are the only two schools that have not allowed a power-play goal yet this season.
Cornell reached its first NCAA tournament in 2010. That team finished with nine losses, three of which deserve asterisks. They occurred while Catherine White, Laura Fortino, and Lauriane Rougeau, ultimately the team’s top three scorers, were competing internationally for Canada, leaving the Big Red with just 13 skaters for one game and 12 for two more. The team’s final loss came in Minneapolis in triple overtime to Minnesota-Duluth in the championship game.
By March of this year, Cornell had qualified for five consecutive national tournaments, claiming either an ECAC regular-season or tournament title, or both, each time. The Big Red didn’t lose more than six games in any of the last four of those championship seasons.
On Friday and Saturday, Cornell traveled to Duluth to face UMD for the first time since that NCAA Championship and dropped a pair of games, giving the Big Red (3-6-0, 3-2-0 ECAC) as many losses in a month as any player on the roster had suffered in a previous college season.
Forward Brianne Jenner missed that 2010 NCAA run as she delayed the start of her Cornell career so that she could centralize with the Canadian national team as it prepared for the 2010 Olympics. Jenner played for Canada at the 2014 Games and won a gold medal. In between, she piled up 178 points for the Big Red in three seasons, including 70 points as a junior in 2012-13, the most by a Cornell player since the 1977-78 season.
Her return to Ithaca, N.Y., for a final campaign was reason for optimism for many, Jenner included.
“I was pretty excited for the season two weeks after the Olympics,” she said. “Obviously, that was the highlight of my career so far, but I’ve had a great three years so far at Cornell, and I’m just kind of looking forward to the senior season.”
The season hit a speed bump right out of the gate, and in this case, the bump was moving, as the Big Red opened with a pair of 6-2 defeats at current No. 1 Boston College.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a really tough start, for sure,” Jenner said. “We were still pretty excited for the opportunity, to see if we could have a good game against them. Unfortunately, if you watch that game, we just weren’t ready for the game pace. We’d been practicing hard, but it’s still tough to adjust. They are a fast team and they’re a really good team, so we’re just going to try to get better and looking forward to an opportunity to play them again.”
To get another crack at the Eagles from Hockey East, Cornell would need to advance to its sixth-straight national tournament, and that doesn’t look overly promising for a squad that sits three games below .500.
However, five of the six losses have come against ranked opponents, which may cause the situation to look more bleak than it actually is.
“Cornell is good; they’re going to win a lot of games,” Minnesota-Duluth coach Shannon Miller said after her team completed the sweep.
There aren’t many teams that have a presence like Jenner atop the line chart.
“It means so much, not just on the ice,” Cornell coach Dough Derraugh said. “Obviously, there’s that side of things, what she brings there, but off the ice — her experience, her character, a great leader in all aspects, a great person overall. To come back from a centralization year and to bring all those experiences back for our team and for our girls to see that and to learn from that is a tremendous boost for us.”
After growing up dreaming of competing for Canada in the Olympics and having that dream become a reality, might there be a bit of a letdown for anything that follows an Olympic high?
“I’m sure it’s a challenge,” Derraugh said. “We’ve been fortunate. The ones that have done that like Brianne Jenner and Rebecca Johnston are really consummate professionals. They’re just very competitive, and it doesn’t really matter whether they’re playing pond hockey in the backyard or whether they’re playing at Cornell or whether they’re playing for the Olympics. They’re very disciplined in their training and everything that they do and they’re tremendous competitors and they want to win wherever they go. For them, I don’t think there is that hangover.”
For the team as a whole, there has been some sort of malaise. After losing its first four games, and then rebounding with wins over Brown, Yale, and Colgate, the 7-2 and 2-0 losses in Duluth stalled Cornell’s momentum.
“I feel like tonight, the effort was there,” Derraugh said after the Saturday game. “I think we worked hard. We just got to work a little bit smarter and improve on some of our habits right now. We’re just getting a little bit careless. You can’t in this league, and when you do that, we just don’t have the firepower that we’re going to be able to come back against the strong teams.”
To be sure, the Big Red do possess some firepower beyond Jenner. Senior Jillian Saulnier has posted 159 points in three plus seasons. Emily Fulton leads the squad with 14 points thus far, after having a breakout 43-point performance as a junior. Beyond that trio, nobody has yet reached 50 points in her career. That allows opponents like the Bulldogs to focus their defensive efforts on those three seniors.
“It’s tough, especially when you’re coming into a team’s building,” Derraugh said. “It doesn’t give you much opportunity to get them away from the matchups. But it’s a good challenge. It’s a good challenge for our young team early on. I think we’re learning a lot through these experiences, and hopefully, we stick together and continue to use that adversity to get better. I think sometimes you go through a season, and if things go real smoothly, especially in the first half, and you don’t get those challenges, I think you get surprised at the end. Hopefully, it’s going to be a good thing for us to have to battle through this.”
What makes the college game intriguing is that it is hard to predict when everything will start to click for a less-experienced player, and potential suddenly evolves into production.
“I think those younger players, they’re getting a lot more looks this year and getting some ice time in big games like this,” Jenner said. “I think that experience, hopefully it will help them down the line. I’m pretty confident that they’ll be there for us and score some big goals.”
Junior Taylor Woods, a player who might have been poised to provide another scoring threat up front, was shifted to defense a couple of weeks back.
“She told us that she had played defense before and since we were down to five [defensemen], it was pretty hard for them to keep the pace up, so we tried her back there one weekend, and it’s worked pretty well, so I think we’ll continue,” Derraugh said.
After some of the early losses, it became apparent that the blue line needed reinforcement.
“The class that I came in with, we had some really strong defensemen there,” Jenner said. “They played under Fortino and Rougeau in their younger years and they became premier defensemen.”
Having graduated Fortino and Rougeau one year, and Hayleigh Cudmore and Alyssa Gagliardi the next, the defensive corps is unlike the one that Jenner played in front of as a junior.
“I think we have a different look, for sure,” she said. “It’s just going to take some time to get used to. I still think that we have the parts in this dressing room to make a challenge for any championship at the end of the year. It’s just going to take us kind of working through it. Right now, we’re still struggling through some things.”
Opposing coaches notice those struggles, particularly given only Brown and Minnesota State are yielding goals at a higher clip.
“They’re very strong up front, but there’s a weakness in behind,” Miller said. “That’s what we attacked. We put the puck low in their zone. Especially late in the game, everything was down low, down low. We just wanted to keep it down low, attacking down low, and expose their weaknesses.”
With the addition of Woods, the unit now is comprised of three juniors, a sophomore, and a pair of frosh in Erin O’Connor and Sarah Knee.
“It’s sometimes a steep learning curve for the incoming freshman when they get to the NCAA,” Derraugh said. “They’re certainly getting lots of experience, and I feel like our freshmen defensemen have gotten better since the start of the year and are improving, so hopefully, that continues throughout the year, and we’ll see what happens at the end.”
Compounding the youth on the blue line is the fact that sophomore Paula Voorheis is in her first season as the primary goaltender.
“From what I heard from the girls, last year she was very solid for them whenever she was called on,” Jenner said. “I think we’ve had some games where we’ve kind of hung her out to dry in the third period. Those high-scoring games are mostly on us and not on Paula’s play.”
To remain in contention for an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, it is imperative that Cornell begin its turnaround sooner rather than later.
“We’ve talked to the young team; there’s only 30 to 35 games in the NCAA, and you don’t have a long season where you can make it up at the end, so every game is so important,” Derraugh said.
Should the losses continue to build and the possibility of receiving an at-large berth die, there’s still the hope of winning the league tournament and earning the automatic invite, but that’s a demanding order, given the current composition of the ECAC.
“It’s strong from top to bottom,” Derraugh said. “That’s great now in the NCAA, because all the leagues are so competitive and you can’t take a night off. It makes it exciting for the fans, and I think it makes it exciting for the players. It really is a real challenge, and we see that in our league now, the ECAC. Lots of surprises, and you never quite know what you’re going to get from weekend to weekend. It’s going to be the team that can really put it together here in the second half and pull together.”
Jenner expects that hers will, and that could lead to one more trip to Minnesota in March for the Frozen Four.
“I’d love to be here,” Jenner said. “It’s a long way between then and now. We’re just going to try and get a couple more wins before the Christmas break, and we’re going to go pretty hard during the exam break and really push ourselves. Hopefully, we can peak at the end of the year. That’s what our goal is.”
Kevin Keenan is one of the more veteran Hockey East referees (photo: Melissa Wade).
Let’s face it. If your job called for you to sit in your office on a Friday night and watch college hockey on a big-screen TV while two different computer monitors played other college hockey games, you might think of it as a dream.
Such is the life for Hockey East Coordinator of Officials Dan Schachte, but while he certainly seems to enjoy his profession, you would hardly call his job a dream.
For sitting and watching hour of college hockey is often followed with phone calls from coaches unhappy about a call or an official. It includes needing to recruit, manage and maintain a core base of referees and linesmen that need to travel anywhere from South Bend, Ind., to Orono, Maine.
And most importantly, the job requires mentoring and teaching officials how to call games in a way that provides a balance of fairness and player safety, each of which sit on a razor’s edge.
Now in his third year in the position, the retired NHL linesman masterfully manages his craft from Madison, Wis., occasionally traveling to each of the Hockey East venues throughout the season. In his three years, Schachte said he believes things have improved among Hockey East officials, but he also sees room to grow.
The biggest area of improvement since Schachte’s arrival, he believes, is reducing the amount of embellishment and diving around the league. Although there are penalties to address the issue, it often can be difficult for a referee on the ice to successfully sniff out a dive. Thus, Schachte and his staff have been aggressive in using postgame video review to identify when players dive and embellish with appropriate protocol in place to deal with the offenders.
“After my first year, I went to the Hockey East directors, I laid the numbers out on the table and told them we have an epidemic,” Schachte said of the amount of diving that existed when he first came to the league. “I showed them some video. I had an idea of how we could try to clean it up. It involved tracking [diving].
“I proposed after [a player’s] fifth contact with me for diving/embellishment you would sit for a game and after that it would be incremental. [The directors] came back to me and said [suspend them] after three.”
While Schachte hasn’t yet issued a suspension for such violations, that doesn’t mean he has yet to contact numerous players.
“I wrote an awful lot of letters and made an awful lot of phone calls to coaches and kids, but this year, not so much,” Schachte said. “Last year, I’d say we cut [the number of infractions] in half. This year it’s maybe a third or a quarter of what it was last year. A lot of that credit goes to the coaches.
“Flopping is not allowed. I think that’s a buzzword in our league. It cheapens the game. It disturbs the competitive balance and I think we’re really making some good inroads. I see kids telling guys on their own team, ‘Get up. Don’t flop.’ I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
One area where Schachte still believes there needs to be significant improvement is the reduction and elimination of blows to the head. Concussion awareness over the past decade has significantly increased across all sports. And while treating concussions has taken major steps forward, Schachte still struggles with the amount of fouls that result in head contact across all of college hockey.
“It’s still a major problem in college hockey, not just Hockey East,” Schachte said of head contact. “It’s something that a player just does instinctively.
“Until we can get into their heads and make it so that they don’t do it, we can call penalties all night long and we’ll still see it. It’s just something that’s in their blood and it’s a dangerous play that we need to get out of the game.”
Another major portion of Schachte’s job involves recruitment and retention of officials. Living in Madison, he is geographically in the middle of the United States Hockey League, a league that doesn’t just develop some of the best college players but also many officials that make the jump to the college ranks.
Twenty of the 51 current Hockey East officials have been hired under Schachte’s watch, one of the most aggressive recruiting cycles of officials in the league’s history. Part of that was dictated by the geographic move to the Midwest with the addition of Notre Dame.
But there is an obvious sense that Schachte takes interest in developing new, young officials. You can hear the enthusiasm in his voice when he talks of them.
“Geoff Miller and Ryan Hersey worked the national final last year. It was their second year with [Hockey East]. They’re back this year for the third year,” said Schachte. “Another young fellow from the Twin Cities who I picked up [from the USHL], Cam Voss, he and his wife decided to move out and live in Worcester, [Mass.] right now. He wanted to be in our league and he just got hired full time by the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League has their fingerprints all over him.”
Certainly, and for good reason, you realize when he talks about his officials, Schachte speaks like a proud father.
Kyle Criscuolo scored in overtime to lift Harvard past Boston University on Tuesday (photo: Melissa Wade).
It’s tough at the top
Last Friday and Saturday, Michigan Tech learned that life at the top ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The Huskies made their first appearance at the top of the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll the previous Monday but lost twice to then-No. 9 Minnesota State.
That opened the door for Boston University to rise to the top spot for the first time since the final poll of the 2008-09 season, when BU was also the national champion.
BU’s ascent to No. 1 will last at least a week, but it took just 24 hours for the Terriers to fall, dropping a 3-2 overtime decision to Harvard on Tuesday.
The loss wasn’t about BU players getting caught up in being No. 1, according to coach David Quinn. Instead, it was about facing a very good Harvard team that was able to be opportunistic.
Quinn said that he felt his team played better in Tuesday’s loss than it did in its previous two wins last weekend against Maine and Connecticut.
BU put 42 shots on goal against Harvard and attempted an incredible 87 shots in the game. With numbers like that, Quinn likes his team’s chances going forward.
“I’d like to see more [chances] get through. I thought we missed the net on some golden opportunities,” Quinn said about Tuesday’s loss. “If you’re not having the chances, that’s a concern. We had chances. We just need to be more opportunistic.”
Quinn is also ever the realist and understands his team has come out on the right side of a lot of tight decisions. Tuesday, that wasn’t the case.
“I’ve said this all along: We were 8-1-1 going into [Tuesday’s game] and we’re about 15 plays from being 4-6,” said Quinn. “That’s college hockey.
“But if we play like [we played Tuesday], we’ll get rewarded.”
Inside the numbers
Every now and again, I like to look deeper into some interesting statistics. And thanks to our good friends at College Hockey Inc. (I call them the Elias Sports Bureau of college hockey), we can do just that:
In Monday’s blog, I had examined where BU’s Jack Eichel stacked up against the top freshmen in Hockey East history. I found only one person, Paul Kariya, to have a rookie season ahead of Eichel’s scoring pace. At the time, Eichel was averaging 1.90 points per game; that has since dropped to 1.73 PPG.
Even with that drop, only Kariya in Hockey East had better numbers (2.56 PPG). And only one other player, 21-year-old freshman Ryan Carter, who played with now-defunct Iona in the early seasons of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, had numbers in the same hemisphere when he averaged 1.91 points per game in the 1998-99 season.
Coaches absolutely love to score in the first and last minutes of a period. Hockey East teams are tied for the lead in each category. Boston University is tied for the most goals in the first minute of a period with four. Maine is tied for the most goals in the final minute of a period with five.
Massachusetts-Lowell goaltender Kevin Boyle likes playing away from the Tsongas Center. The redshirt junior transfer from Massachusetts holds a .950 save percentage and a 1.45 GAA in road games, both tops in Hockey East.
Jake Fallon leads all Hockey East players with 151 faceoffs won, but his 53.7 faceoff win percentage pales in comparison to Northeastern’s Mike McMurtry’s 79.3 success rate. Granted, McMurtry has taken only 29 draws compared to Fallon’s 281 draws. If you want to find the “best” faceoff man in Hockey East, you have to look to Merrimack’s Hampus Gustafsson, who owns a 61.2 winning percentage with 232 total draws.
Notre Dame’s Mario Lucia leads Hockey East in shooting percentage, scoring 31 percent of the time. Pretty good for a guy who averages a little more than two shots on goal per game.
You usually think of defensemen as being the top shot blockers, but Connecticut forward Patrick Kirtland is the league leader in blocked shots with 28.
Youth (well, underclassmen, at least) is serving Hockey East well as not a single Hockey East team appears on the list of top-five scoring senior classes.
Wisconsin-River Falls goalie Tanner Milliron played sparingly as a freshman and sophomore, but is now the Falcons’ starter (photo: Kathy M Helgeson/UW-River Falls).
Tanner Milliron will tell you that one of the most instrumental things to the success of Wisconsin-River Falls’ early-season success can’t be found in the box score or on a stat sheet.
It goes far beyond any of that as far as the junior goalie of the Falcons is concerned.
“Everyone trusts each other, and that trust on the team translates into success,” Milliron said. “We all play for each other and when you do that, it makes easier to win games.”
So far, Milliron and the Falcons have been racking up the wins. River Falls is 7-0 after a thrilling 4-3 overtime win against Augsburg on Tuesday night. It was the fourth road win of the season.
While trust has certainly driven the Falcons in this early part of the year, so has motivation.
Last season, the Falcons won the WIAC regular-season championship, but lost a semifinal series to Wisconsin-Superior in the conference tournament.
“We felt like we missed out on an opportunity after winning the regular-season title,” Milliron said. “We were motivated to be better this year. We all worked hard in the offseason.”
Milliron spent a lot of time working on his game in the offseason, striving to make himself the best goalie possible.
He played in two games as a freshman and then played in nine games a year ago.
This season, Milliron has started all seven games and has given up only 14 goals, recording one shutout.
“I spent a lot of time in the ice over the summer trying to eliminate the deficiencies in my game,” Milliron said. “I also worked a lot with our goalie coach. It has made a difference. I continue to work hard every week and stay as focused as possible.”
Milliron has had plenty of support from the offense, which is has put up 30 goals.
Alex Murphy has paved the way with five goals while Mike Fazio, Blake Huppert, Ryan Doner and Christian George have come through with three goals apiece. Terry Leabo leads the team with seven assists.
Although the Falcons have started strong, they know there is still a lot more to accomplish. Bringing an intense effort to the rink night in and night out will be the key to achieving their goals.
“Our league is very good and we know that on any given night we can be beat if we don’t play our best,” Milliron said. “We understand that we have to come in focused and play every game like it’s our last.”
Building Momentum
After winning once in its first four games, St. Thomas has started to turn things around, winning two of its last three, including a 4-1 win over St. Olaf on Friday. The Tommies missed out on a sweep of the series as they lost the finale 2-1.
Drew Fielding made 19 saves in the victory over the Oles and has come through with 186 saves on the season. The veteran goalie has allowed only 12 goals and owns a 1.48 goals against average for the Tommies (3-3-2, 2-1-1).
St. Thomas has scored only 17 goals this season but has scored four in each of its last two wins. The Tommies have been led by Alex Altenbernd and Willie Faust. Both players have four goals apiece.
Knight Time
Defending national champion St. Norbert has yet to lose a game and will return to action this weekend against Buffalo State after a 10-day layoff.
The top-ranked Green Knights last played on Nov. 18th when they knocked off Wisconsin-Eau Claire 3-2 in a battle between the last two national champions.
St. Norbert (6-0-1, 5-0-1) has thrived offensively, racking up 36 goals. It has scored at least two goals in every game, tallying three or more six times and the balance has been tremendous.
Eleven players have scored two or more goals, with Erik Cooper, Michael Hill and Ross Pavek tallying four goals apiece to lead the way.
Hill, Pavek and Blake Thompson lead the team in power play goals with two apiece. The Green Knights, who average 39 shots per game, have seven power play goals in all.
Tough Stretch
Eau Claire won three of its first four games but has struggled as of late, dropping two of its last three. It skated to a 1-1 tie against Lake Forest at home on Saturday despite holding a 44-28 advantage in shots.
The Blugolds (3-2-2) haven’t been able to score more than two goals in each of their last three games after putting up three or more in their first four. But to Eau Claire’s credit, it has played tremendous competition lately. Eau Claire lost just 3-2 to St. Norbert before falling 5-2 to Adrian, which features one of the top offenses in the nation.
Eau Claire has the talent and ability to get back on track, though, especially with Ethan Nauman pacing the offense with five goals. Ross Andersen has scored four goals. Eau Claire has scored 22 goals on the season.
Jay Deo and Tyler Green have split time in goal. Deo has made 107 saves while Green has come up with 77 saves. The two have combined to give up 17 goals.
In the Poll
St. Norbert is still the No. 1 team in the nation, receiving 19 first-place votes in the most recent poll. Adrian is fourth this week while River Falls is up to seventh. Wisconsin-Stevens Point is ninth, while St. Scholastica is tied for 11th. Eau Claire is 13th and St. John’s is 14th.
Joe Cardarelli has been tasting success in his first year as head coach at Cortland (photo: Dan Hickling).
For a team trying to fight its way upward through a tough league (think SUNYAC), progress can often be measured thusly.
Two steps forward, one step back.
So it is with Cortland (2-5-1, 2-4-1) under first-year coach Joe Cardarelli.
Winless in their first five starts, the Red Dragons presented Cardarelli with his first two wins last weekend – including one versus nationally-ranked Geneseo – then stumbled Tuesday, 6-3 against independent Canton.
That’s often the way as teams struggle to find their way while on the fly.
“We are a young team,” said Cardarelli, a Cortland assistant last year who took over for interim head coach Tom Cranfield, “playing eight freshmen most games, with a new coach and new systems. It’s been a process establishing a culture where we can overcome adversity and compete for 60 minutes.”
Cardarelli said that the twin wins gave his squad some extra jam.
“This past weekend we were able to get some confidence,” said Cardarelli, “as we became more consistent in our effort.”
It may come as a surprise to some (maybe to everybody) to see three Cortlanders – senior Nick Zappia (6-6-12) and freshmen Dan Broderick (7-4-11) and Darren McCormick (1-10-11) – planted at the top of the SUNYAC scoring list.
Cardarelli said that there’s a lot to like about this high-scoring trio.
“Nick Zappia is a very talented player,” he said, “who, as a senior captain, has a vested interest in his and the team’s success this season. He dedicated himself this past summer to getting in great shape and leads his teammates by his work ethic. Both of the freshmen had successful junior careers and both dealt with injuries during their last season that I believe pushed them to be more prepared than the average freshman player. That line really likes to push the pace and use their speed to create offensive opportunities, and are have fun doing it.
“It really is that simple they’ve developed good chemistry by having fun.”
Nazareth trending upward in ECAC West
While on the subject of progress, consider the upward trajectory of Nazareth within the ECAC West.
The third-year program had recorded just five league wins during the first two seasons (just one in Year One), but have already record three against Western rivals so far this campaign.
The Golden Flyers are now 3-1-1 (4-2-1 overall) and are just one point off the league lead.
If you ask Nazareth head man George Roll, his club is simply building off last year’s foundation.
“I think it started in the second semester last year,” said Roll. “We started to understand what it took to win games and started to believe we could win every night or at least learn how to compete to win. It has been a learning process but we continue to grow as a program. We have great leadership and to man they have bought in to a team first philosophy.”
Helping the cause has been the emergence of forward Dominick Gabaj (4-2-6), who coupled with fellow sophomore Ben Blasko (1-4-5) gives the Flyers a youthful one-two scoring punch.
Gabaj played locally at Monroe Community College and “we felt he would be a great compliment to Ben. We had a feeling there would be chemistry between the two and that has been the case along with Oliver Janzen – they have been very effective,” said Roll.
As to what it should take to keep the puck bouncing their way, Roll said his club will have to keep following the plan.
“We have such a tough schedule this year,” he said, “but if we can continue to build on what we have done to date it should be an exciting season.”
Hamilton making strides
In the NESCAC, eyebrows were arched last week when middle-of-the-pack Hamilton held powerhouse Trinity, then ranked No. 8 in the nation, to a 1-1 overtime tie, on the road no less.
“Trinity was a great game,” said Hamilton coach Rob Haberbusch. “I thought both teams played well and the crowd got their money’s worth.”
Hamilton received a yeoman’s effort from freshman goalie Evan Buitenhuis, who pulled off 46 stops against Trinity, the NESCAC’s most prolific scoring squad (at 5.5 gpg).
Buitenhuis, the NESCAC’s reigning player of the week, is the backbone of the Continentals’ outstanding (12 for 12) penalty killing performance.
“He’s certainly capable of making the big save,” said Haberbusch, “and he gives the team a lot of confidence. But the entire team is committed to a strong penalty kill. Scott Vazquez, Seamus O’Neill, Jon Carkeek and Bennett Hambrook are blocking shots like they enjoy it.”
Princeton’s Tom Kroshus and Cornell’s John McCarron battle for the puck (photo: Shelley M. Szwast).
Let’s be honest here, Lynah Faithful: Some of you entertained heretical thoughts through the Big Red’s 0-3-1 start, a four-game stretch that saw the Ithacans outscored 6-3 and fail to achieve two goals in any single outing.
While a home split against the North Country tandem may have relieved some of the pressure, last weekend’s seven-goal sweep of Yale and Brown was an exhale as Cornell set — then topped — its season-high offensive output.
“[This feels like] a little bit of a breakthrough,” coach Mike Schafer said. “Once you start to score, you get some confidence. The biggest thing for us is to get that confidence, but also get some guys healthy. It’s been a real struggle, with the amount of injuries we’ve had, especially back on the blue line, and I’ve always believed that the blue line kind of ignites your offense. With all the guys we’ve had banged up back there, it’s been a tough start.”
Only 12 players have made all eight appearances, while eight more have played between five and seven games. With three defensemen currently on the shelf with a variety of ailments, Schafer said that the quality of his team’s defensive play has actually gone “beyond expectations,” but what is missing is the defensive corps’ offensive contributions.
“The biggest [loss] is obviously [senior defenseman and San Jose Sharks draft pick] Joakim Ryan. He’s been out since the first game of the year, and having him out of the lineup has been difficult because he’s on the ice all the time. He’s a big part of our power play, and it was just this last weekend that we were been able to get our power play going a little bit.”
Schafer hopes to get Ryan back “sometime after Christmas.”
While the offense is getting on track, the defense has been steady since Day One. Opponents are scoring only 1.62 goals per game, the penalty kill is tickling 91 percent and the team save percentage is .946. Not bad for a group whose biggest question mark preseason regarded the graduation of Andy Iles.
“We’re pretty happy with the defensive numbers, but the offensive numbers have suffered because of it,” Schafer said. “So, yeah, it was nice to score a few goals and have some players regain some confidence in themselves.”
The Big Red play only once this week, but it’s at the World’s Most Famous Arena, Madison Square Garden. It’s Cornell’s sixth trip to MSG, where the Red are 1-3-1.
While Schafer and the Big Red are beginning to feel more at home in the Big Apple, the experience is anything but another day on the job.
While previous MSG opponents Boston University and Michigan drew well, this week’s foe — Penn State — hasn’t generated perhaps as much demand as the former pair, but Schafer said, “the Cornell alumni have been picking up the slack.”
“It’s just an awesome feeling to play in front of that many Cornell alumni,” he said. “To have a crowd of 14,000 alumni coming to the game is a phenomenal feeling.”
Princeton’s Colton Phinney makes a diving save on Cornell’s Joel Lowry (photo: Shelley M. Szwast).
Princeton pounding away
It has not been a brilliant start for Ron Fogarty at Princeton.
Hired as the leader among active NCAA coaches in win percentage (167-23-10 — .860 — in seven years at Division III Adrian), Fogarty inherited another staff’s players and a mediocre recent history. The Tigers are 1-6-1 overall and 1-5 in league play, having scored just eight goals while surrendering 30.
Fortunately, Fogarty is no novice, and he isn’t about to throw in the towel just because of a rough month or two.
“We’re struggling to score goals. We’re getting opportunities to score, but we just haven’t been able to put it behind some pretty good goaltenders here in the ECAC,” Fogarty said. “We’re still tweaking. We have some players coming back from injury this week that will play some impact minutes for us, so we’re looking forward to that positive injection of potential goal-scorers up front in the next three weekends before the break.”
A former ECACer himself, Fogarty played at Colgate (class of 1995) with assistant Brad Dexter (’96) for current Raiders coach Don Vaughan. He knows his way around this league and has played — and coached — through his fair share of adversity. The key, he said, is to take the long view and resist the urge to seek the quick fix.
“I think the building blocks are within the systems,” he said. “We have to stay with them. We can’t just scrap everything because the results haven’t been there. We are playing well at times, we just haven’t put it together for 60 minutes.”
One bright spot for the Tigers has been the play of goaltender Colton Phinney, whose .914 league save percentage is unfortunately overshadowed by the poor record and 3.22 GAA.
“He’s seeing a lot of shots … we’re tracking the number of quality scoring chances the opposition is getting, and those numbers are decreasing, but we still have to eliminate a good chunk of them to give Colton better looks at shots,” Fogarty said.
The biggest issue facing his team is its poor puck-possession skills, statistically exposed by the Tigers’ minus-14 average shot differential per game.
“We have to take better care of the puck and watch our quantity and quality of shifts,” Fogarty said. “Our shift times have to be lower than they were in the first six games, and we worked on that last weekend but it still needs to be improved moving forward.
“It’s not a snowball effect. Some of the goals that we’ve given up have been the product of our error. We’ve had full control and haven’t executed plays to break out, or to put the puck in safe areas, and we’ve continually addressed that. You have to work on it Monday through Thursday in skill drills, making plays in tight areas, and making decisions in pressure situations, so we’ve worked on that the past couple of days. That’s the key to improve: You have to have the playmaking abilities to get the puck out of your end, and also the ability to score goals.”
The Tigers know that while their record is not insignificant, it does not destine or doom them to anything at all. All that matters in the end, after all, is how you play down the stretch.
“Fortunately, every team makes the playoffs in the ECAC,” Fogarty said, “and obviously we want to climb higher in the standings to have the opportunity to host playoff games here at Baker Rink. We just have to continue to tweak and find those right line combinations, defensive pairs, special team units, so they can be peaking come mid-February.”
Hudson Fasching (24), Justin Kloos (25) and Minnesota have seven of the Big Ten’s 23 nonconference wins this season (photo: Jim Rosvold).
The Big Ten began league play last week and already there are hockey fans out there willing to pan the entire conference. One fan tweeted that the Big Ten looks “fairly awful,” while another emailed to say that the conference is “so over.”
Relax. It’s the end of November. It’s the second week of conference play. For the love of all that is Hobey, it’s the second year of the league itself.
Yes, the Big Ten has a losing record (23-30-3) in its early play against nonconference opponents, and that doesn’t include the league’s 1-1 record against the U.S. Under-18 Team. Minnesota’s 5-4 overtime loss to the visiting youngsters last Friday prompted the Twitter discussion that resulted in the “fairly awful” proclamation. After all, the Golden Gophers had been swept the week before by Minnesota-Duluth, swept and kept to one goal in the series after having begun 2014-15 with one loss in eight games and entering that weekend with Duluth second in the nation in scoring offense, averaging close to four goals per game.
An exhibition loss to a highly touted and well-coached team with a roster full of young players that nearly every NCAA Division I program would at least take a glance at while recruiting was surely the end of the world for Minnesota hockey and a harbinger of bad things to come for the Big Ten, right?
“We talked about the skilled team that they have,” Minnesota coach Don Lucia said after the game, “and obviously we made some mistakes.
“I think any time you put on the gear you want to win the game. Obviously, we’re all competitive. But did it have the same emotional stake? No. Let’s be honest, but I don’t want to take anything away from the other team.”
After being swept by Duluth, the Gophers used the exhibition game to get some players time on the ice, including freshman goaltender Nick Lehr, who made 35 saves.
“We wanted to get some reps this weekend without having a weekend off,” said Lucia. “We wanted to get Nick a game tonight. It’s the first time he’s had an opportunity to play. I thought he did a pretty good job in there tonight, so no issues with that, and just get some other guys game time that maybe haven’t had as much this year.”
So there’s that.
Minnesota travels east for Thanksgiving weekend, playing Boston College on Friday and Northeastern on Saturday.
Then there are the Badgers
Further evidence that the sky is falling for the Big Ten is Wisconsin’s 0-8 start. This is certainly not how the Badgers envisioned their season beginning, eight straight nonconference losses culminating in last weekend’s 5-2 loss to Colorado College and 3-2 decision against Denver.
This, however, is less about the Big Ten than it is about Wisconsin, a team with 16 freshmen and sophomores on the roster and no one yet as able to produce consistent scoring. Averaging 1.38 goals per game — second-to-last nationally — the Badgers actually outpaced themselves during their trip to Colorado.
And coach Mike Eaves said he is hesitant to address the Badgers’ start, hesitant to reinforce anything that may undermine the confidence of his young team.
“We may not be able to measure ourselves by our wins and losses yet, but certainly video and in our comments on the ice and off the ice and in extended meetings that we have had, we’re able to point out and talk about areas of growth,” he said.
“So that’s kind of that bridge between not having success in wins and losses, but having sight that we’re going in the right direction and seeing good indications of growth.”
Eaves said that he saw positives in the loss to ranked Denver on Saturday. From video of the game, Eaves said the coaching staff saw the Badgers “out-chance our opponents, out-hit them, out-blocked them. The only stat that we didn’t out-do them was goals for.”
Many programs go through rebuilding periods, and even a perennial powerhouse like Wisconsin is not immune.
“It’s an interesting journey we are on right now because we have not had a lot of puck luck, and we believe the harder you work the more you get and that’s an old quote,” said Eaves, who added that there are “some good things on the horizon” for the Badgers.
“They’re going to be rewarded for the efforts they’re giving each other,” said Eaves. “They worked their fannies off and they’re playing some pretty good hockey right now.”
Wisconsin hosts Ferris State on Friday and Saturday.
Casey Bailey has nine goals this season for Penn State (photo: Omar Phillips).
And when Penn State beats Michigan …
… bad things, man. Bad. Things.
That was another gripe that I heard from fans, that the Nittany Lions’ split with the Wolverines last weekend in Ann Arbor was further evidence that the Big Ten is weak.
Several things here. Penn State beat Michigan twice last season, so why would a split now be such a surprise? And if the Nittany Lions put together a good season, does that necessarily mean that the rest of the Big Ten is down? Can’t it just mean that Penn State has improved? After all, PSU split with Massachusetts-Lowell on the road the week before, beating the River Hawks 4-1 on Nov. 15.
The Nittany Lions are scoring 3.5 goals per game, the eighth-best offense in the nation. And that offense has blossomed this year: Senior Taylor Holstrom (4-13–17) and juniors Casey Bailey (9-6–15) and Eric Scheid (7-1–8) are formidable and playing the kind of up-tempo offense that coach Guy Gadowsky likes.
The 3-2 Penn State win Friday was an interesting contest and fortunately was televised. Michigan maybe would have won that one, too, had it not been for three minutes in the first period in which the Nittany Lions scored all three of their goals.
Gadowsky said that Friday’s contest was good for individual efforts but wasn’t so much PSU’s best effort.
After Michigan’s 8-1 win Saturday, Gadowsky said: “I thought we were really lucky to win last night. Absolutely. We certainly didn’t come with our best. Believe it or not, we played a better game tonight than we did yesterday. Tonight, it caught up to us.”
Gadowsky wasn’t exaggerating. After Andrew Copp put the Wolverines up 4-1 six minutes into the third period, the Nittany Lions took many risks to attempt to generate offense, risks that resulted in Michigan odd-man rushes and other opportunities for the Wolverines.
While Michigan coach Red Berenson acknowledged that the 8-1 win was probably his team’s best effort from start to finish this season, he said, “This was not an 8-1 game.” And Berenson wasn’t exaggerating.
That eight-goal performance bumped the Wolverines’ offense up to a tie with Denver for fourth in the nation, averaging 3.64 goals per game. “It was good to see the puck go in,” said Berenson.
This weekend, Penn State meets Cornell in Madison Square Garden on Saturday in the game dubbed “The Frozen Apple.” Michigan hosts Rensselaer on Friday and Saturday.
And what about those Spartans and Buckeyes?
They split. Big surprise. And further evidence of the erosion of western civilization as we know it. I got a message through Facebook — seriously — that both split series from the opening weekend of B1G hockey indicate a “certain mediocrity” in the league.
Sigh.
You know what the split between Michigan State and Ohio State indicates? A split.
The Spartans beat the Buckeyes 3-1 to open Big Ten play last Thursday, and Ohio State rebounded with a 3-0 win Saturday. After Thursday’s loss, OSU coach Steve Rohlik said: “They scored on the power play, we didn’t. At the end of the day, those things are the difference.”
The game-winning goal Thursday was Matt Berry’s second-period power-play marker, the senior’s sixth goal of the season.
Rohlik proved to be prophetic, as Buckeyes sophomore Nick Schilkey’s second goal of the season gave Ohio State a two-goal lead in its 3-0 win Friday.
Said Michigan State coach Tom Anastos after Friday’s contest, “We did have some good looks throughout the game tonight for sure, but their goalie came up big.”
Jake Hildebrand had 34 saves for the Spartans for the win Thursday; Matt Tomkins stopped 29 for Ohio State Friday.
The Spartans play at Princeton on Friday and Saturday, while the Buckeyes face former CCHA foe Western Michigan on Friday in the Shillelagh Tournament and will play either Union or host Notre Dame the following night.
Players of the week
Three players from two former CCHA teams are honored this week … and I think that very well may be a sign of the apocalypse. One of them is from Canada, too. Doom. I smell doom.
First star — Michigan sophomore forward Max Shuart: Shuart had a goal and three assists in Michigan’s split with Penn State. His goal came 46 seconds into Friday’s 3-2 loss. The Northville, Mich., native has three goals and four assists in his last five games; in 11 games last season, Shuart had no points. This is his first career Big Ten weekly award.
Second star — Ohio State sophomore goaltender Matt Tomkins: Tomkins had a .939 save percentage and 1.54 GAA in OSU’s split with Michigan State, and he turned aside 29 shots Friday in his first career shutout. In eight games this season, the Sherwood Park, Alberta, native has a .917 save percentage and 2.11 GAA. This is his second career Big Ten weekly award; he earned his first on Nov. 4.
Third star — Michigan sophomore defenseman Michael Downing: Downing recorded two goals in Michigan’s split with Penn State, one in each contest, and he leads all Big Ten defenseman this season with three total goals in 11 games. The Canton, Mich., native had two goals and 10 assists in his freshman season. This is his first career Big Ten weekly award.
My ballot
1. Boston University
2. North Dakota
3. Michigan Tech
4. Minnesota
5. Massachusetts-Lowell
6. Minnesota State
7. Colgate
8. Minnesota-Duluth
9. Miami
10. Boston College
11. St. Lawrence
12. Robert Morris
13. Omaha
14. Denver
15. Vermont
16. Quinnipiac
17. Union
18. St. Cloud State
19. Bowling Green
20. Providence
Kayla Black of Minnesota-Duluth. (Ryan Coleman/Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com)
Arlan: Many of the noteworthy events of the week involved ECAC teams. Among those, the impressive version of St. Lawrence remained in evidence, Harvard is still trying to get its rhythm, and the hole for Cornell got a little deeper. I thought the most significant game of the weekend was Quinnipiac’s 1-0 win over Clarkson. I don’t think that game necessarily demonstrated that the Bobcats were measurably superior. They held the Golden Knights to 15 shots on net and Chelsea Laden pushed her shutout total for the season to seven, but Quinnipiac only had 19 shots itself. The difference is that Emma Woods scored on a nice snipe while the visitors couldn’t get anything by Laden. The big key was it got the two points, and it is starting to look like every point will be crucial in the league race. The Bobcats did give a point back the next day when they had to come from behind in the third period to tie St. Lawrence, 2-2. That was the first time Quinnipiac has trailed this year and the first time it has allowed multiple goals.
When you’ve asked, I’ve always said that I thought Harvard was the team to beat in the ECAC, if not the country. As the weeks tick by, that is looking less and less accurate. If not the Crimson, then who? Should we be looking to Quinnipiac, or defending champ Clarkson, or some dark horse team?
Candace: I wasn’t completely sold on Quinnipiac, but this weekend has changed my mind. Holding Clarkson to only 15 shots is pretty impressive. The Bobcats play a stifling defensive game, and they have a proven netminder in Laden. Coach Rick Seeley has his squad playing well in the defensive zone, knowing that the Bobcats don’t have explosive offensive players who can break a game wide open. Since many teams actually lack that, it’s a very good strategy, and plays to the current team’s strengths.
If we are looking at the ECAC, aside from Cornell, which has Jillian Saulnier and Brianne Jenner, Clarkson is really the only squad that has players who can break a game wide open. Of the top 10 scorers nationally, only one is from an ECAC team, Clarkson’s Shannon MacAulay. Holding her, Cayley Mercer, and Geneviéve Bannon in check like the Bobcats did is pretty impressive. I think Quinnipiac is well-positioned to possibly win the regular season title. Playing a defensive-minded game will also be helpful in the one-and-done format of the semis and finals in the ECAC playoffs.
They say there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, and I think an examination of offensive production bears that out. While the ECAC has six of the top 12 teams in scoring offense, I think those numbers are a little skewed. Yale, for instance, is third, but their average is boosted by the 10-2 and 13-0 beatdowns of D-I independent Sacred Heart and 6-2 and 5-2 wins over Providence, which has also struggled defensively. Dartmouth’s only real impressive offensive outing was the 5-1 win over St. Lawrence, as New Hampshire and Rensselaer aren’t strong defensively. Harvard too is boosted by scoring a lot against Rensselaer and also Union. Providence has also boosted the offensive numbers of Clarkson, which also gets a boost from the 9-0 win over Syracuse.
However, when you look at the games between the top teams, most are of the low-scoring, one-goal win variety, so I think Quinnipiac is possibly the favorite at this point. I look to five teams as contenders in Quinnipiac, Clarkson, Harvard, St. Lawrence, and Cornell, in that order.
Speaking of the Big Red, they were just swept in Duluth, including losing 7-2 in the first game. The Bulldogs have quietly put together a nine-game win streak after a terrible start. That streak also includes a shootout win over Minnesota. Do you think the Bulldogs can challenge Minnesota and Wisconsin for the WCHA crown?
Arlan: Looking first at the math of that question, Wisconsin has already completed its first pass through the league and gained 34 points, eight short of the maximum. The Gophers sit at 29 and still have their St. Cloud State series remaining in the first half, so they could possibly get to 35. UMD has four WCHA games left in its first half of the season with Bemidji State and Ohio State coming up. If the Bulldogs can sweep those games, they could increase their point total to 29 and be within range of the two leaders. However, both series are on the road, and as we’ve seen when facing Bemidji State in particular, those games in hand don’t automatically convert into points in the standings. The other hurdle for UMD is that it has to go on the road to face both of the leaders. The Bulldogs haven’t won in Madison since November of 2010, and their last win in Ridder Arena was the 2010 NCAA Championship over Cornell.
Maybe defeating the Big Red again over the weekend made Shannon Miller a bit nostalgic, but she told me her current Bulldogs can win a national championship. The team is on a nine-game winning streak as you said with wins over North Dakota, Lindenwood, Minnesota State, St. Cloud State, and now Cornell, but UND has the best record of that bunch and it is two games under .500. The Bulldogs only other win of the season was over Connecticut. A number of teams have the potential to be factors in the national tournament, but until they start posting wins over the type of teams that they’ll meet in the postseason, it is premature to look too far down the road.
When I watched UMD against Cornell on Saturday, the Bulldogs were missing a couple of their key Europeans in senior defenseman Tea Villila and freshman forward Michelle Lowenhielm, but they still had enough to subdue the Big Red. Kayla Black was very strong in net, stopping both Brianne Jenner and Jillian Saulnier on early breakaways to keep the game scoreless. Sophomore forward Ashleigh Brykaliuk is developing into someone who is not only the team’s leading scorer, but can be depended on to make plays all over the ice. Senior forward Jenna McParland played the most complete game I’ve ever seen from her. There are a number of other key pieces in place, including Zoe Hickel, Lara Stalder, and Brigette Lacquette. The talent and depth of UMD are definitely a few steps up from the last couple of years. If the Bulldogs put it all together, it is possible, but both the league and the NCAA picture are stronger than when they won their last titles in 2008 and 2010, so there is a ton of work left to do.
As for Cornell, I spoke with Jenner and coach Doug Derraugh and they’ll be the subject of this week’s column, so I’ll reserve further comment until then, but I think it is safe to say that they are one of a number of teams that has had to feel its way defensively in the early going. We’ve seen wild fluctuations from St. Lawrence when Carmen MacDonald didn’t play, inconsistent goaltending has contributed to the underachieving start for Robert Morris, and Vermont definitely had issues over the weekend versus Northeastern. What are you observing on that front, and what team or teams do you think have the best chance to improve in goaltending and overall defense?
Candace: Well, exhibit A would be Harvard. Emerance Maschmeyer is highly touted in net, but her stats are not that great so far, as she has a 2.51 goals-against and only a .904 save percentage. Harvard itself is giving up over two goals a game on average, hardly Crimson-like numbers. Maschmeyer will face a stern test this weekend when the Crimson travel across town to face Boston College, which has the top two scorers in the country in Alex Carpenter and Haley Skarupa, and the top offense in the country, which averages over five goals a game. If ever the Crimson needed Maschmeyer to be sharp, it would be this Friday.
We’ve talked about MacDonald a lot, but her numbers are hardly stellar, with a 2.34 GAA and .922 save percentage. If MacDonald starts putting in consistent outings, St. Lawrence will be a troublesome out.
Over in Hockey East, Northeastern’s Chloe Desjardins also has room for improvement, with only a 2.21 GAA; her squad is 13th nationally in team defense, giving up 2.33 goals on average. If Victoria Hanson at Boston University continues to show improvement, the Terriers will be a more difficult team to play as well; she currently has a 1.90 GAA.
It may sound strange to say, but I also think to a certain extent Wisconsin’s Ann-Renée Desbiens hasn’t been as solid as she could be. She’s currently ninth overall in goaltending with a 1.52 GAA and .922 save percentage, and Wisconsin is 13-2-1 overall on the year. However, in the two losses to Minnesota and the tie with North Dakota, the team let up four goals, two goals, and three goals, respectively. Wisconsin also escaped Bemidji after giving up three goals in the second game. I think Desbiens has been outstanding against lesser competition, but she and Wisconsin failed to step it up when playing the elite.
When it comes to offense, Northeastern finally looked like it got it going this weekend in convincingly sweeping Vermont, something I wasn’t expecting after the Huskies had lost to Providence the week before. Kendall Coyne is currently fourth in the country in scoring; are you expecting more consistent performances from the Huskies in the future?
Arlan: This is Hockey East, where the Huskies can beat BU by three goals and then lose to Providence by the same margin four days later, so I’m reluctant to use the word consistent. But overall, yes, I think that Northeastern will show improvement going forward. Its current three-game winning streak has it back to .500 for the season. Next the Huskies play Harvard and Union, then they go on their Christmas break. They’re back on the ice to close out 2014 with Dartmouth on New Year’s Eve, and a week into 2015, they start a critical BC-BC-BU stretch that will go a long way to determining their fate in Hockey East.
Northeastern was already up on Vermont by the time I started watching both of their games over the weekend, so I’m likely missing a key piece of how those games unfolded. Despite posting two one-sided victories, the Huskies weren’t exactly a finely-tuned machine. There’s a lot of youth on the roster; of the 22 skaters to see game action this year, 13 are freshmen or sophomores, including the next five top scorers after Coyne. A number of times, a forward would get the puck near the top of the circles with the defense set, and rather than moving it back to an open point or starting a cycle in the corner, she would attempt to carry it to the net through two defenders. That resulted in a number of unnecessary turnovers. I imagine that eventually, they will start to make more veteran decisions, but until then, there may be some ragged games. Also, these younger players weren’t on the roster during Coyne’s sophomore season, so she’s still trying to develop chemistry with them. I’m told that Paige Savage will sit out the remainder of the season for personal reasons, so that means Northeastern will be without a veteran scoring threat up front.
There is some nice talent there. Sophomore Hayley Scamurra had a hat trick in the first win over the Catamounts. Rookie Denisa Krížová had five points in the series and demonstrated skill and good synergy with Czech countrywoman Lucie Povová. McKenna Brand also had five points, including three goals, and looked very confident with the puck. So I think that the Huskies can be a very dangerous team beyond Coyne, but they have to limit the mistakes that will cost them against better teams.
A few weeks back, it looked like the winner of the CHA’s automatic bid would be the league’s one representative to the NCAA tournament. Now, Mercyhurst looks like a fairly safe bet to make the field as an at-large entry, even should it get tripped up in the conference playoffs. I just don’t see many losses in its remaining schedule, even though it has to travel to Cornell for one and a pair at St. Lawrence, and the Lakers are up to sixth in the PairWise Rankings. In most years, I look at its schedule and Mercyhurst has such games that are must-wins; this year, doesn’t it look more like those are more vital for the ECAC squads if they want to appear in the PairWise picture?
Candace: Yes, but also for Hockey East and the WCHA. First, look at the ECAC. If the season ended right now, Quinnipiac and Clarkson would qualify via the PairWise, while Dartmouth, St. Lawrence, and Harvard, ranked 10a, 10b, and 12, would be out. Traditional power Cornell isn’t even in the PairWise top 16, and it looks like the Big Red might actually need to win the ECAC tournament to qualify. They have some places they can make up ground, with single games against Mercyhurst and Boston University and two each against Clarkson, St. Lawrence, Dartmouth, and Harvard, but it’s by no means a certainty. Even Yale and Princeton are above Cornell right now. I think Cornell has to run the table to have any chance of an at-large bid.
Harvard has a couple of games that I think it must at least split with in Boston College this Friday and Quinnipiac the following Saturday; if the Crimson lose both, I don’t see any opportunity for an at-large bid. In the second half, the Crimson have Quinnipiac again and Boston University again, and possibly Boston College if they beat BU, and end the season against Clarkson, but even should they win all four, it might not boost their PairWise high enough.
Quinnipiac is looking pretty good, as long as the Bobcats keep winning. They play BU and BC in January, but even if they lose both, I don’t think they’d drop too far. To fall out of at-large contention, I think the Bobcats would have to go into a major swoon.
For Hockey East, Boston University is currently an at-large bubble team. I think the Terriers need to either win Hockey East, or steal a win from Boston College and win their next game with Harvard or alternately beat Quinnipiac to feel a little more secure, especially with Bemidji State nipping at their heels. BSU has more places where it can improve its position, with two more each against Minnesota and Wisconsin and four against Minnesota-Duluth.
You are right that Mercyhurst looks to be fine for an at-large, but given the fairly inconsistent play from the rest of the CHA, I think it’s hard to see anybody but the Lakers winning the CHA tournament and first league autobid. I certainly expected more from RIT than a pair of 4-1 losses against the Lakers. Syracuse could only muster two ties against Robert Morris this week. In fact, the Orange haven’t won a game since beating Mercyhurst for the first time in team history a few weeks ago. Penn State also continued its up and down record by splitting with Lindenwood. It’s kind of crazy to look at the CHA, because aside from Mercyhurst, only Penn State has a winning record this year.
What’s going on there?
Arlan: Back to teams and possible NCAA tournament positioning for a second. It is important to remember that Harvard, disappointing as it may have been to date, currently has but one loss. Along with two ties, that is effectively two losses. Teams catch fire in the second half on a fairly regular basis, with the most prominent case being UMD in 2009-10. That team was 13-7-2 heading into the break and wound up as the No. 2 seed in the tournament. I think I counted Mercyhurst out about a dozen times last year; come March, the Lakers were not only in the field, but back at the Frozen Four. So Harvard could lose to both BC and Quinnipiac and still wind up hosting an NCAA quarterfinal.
As for the CHA, I did a fairly comprehensive rundown of the league in our discussion last week, and I don’t think that this week’s results changed my opinions much. With RIT not having Ali Binnington in either game, it wasn’t surprising that the Tigers were swept. It’s hard enough to visit the top team and get points under any circumstance, and minus their best player, that was a big ask. Penn State has had trouble putting together two strong games on a weekend, and Lindenwood is scrappy if not overly talented, so a split there wasn’t surprising. It was noteworthy that the Lions held PSU to just 11 shots in their 2-1 win.
Syracuse looked to be finding its offensive game in spite of getting swept when it scored nine goals in a series with Vermont a week ago, but in light of UVM’s leaky effort with Northeastern, that production is likely not indicative of what we can expect from the Orange moving forward. As for RMU, the two-tie series with Syracuse was its second-best weekend of the season, topped only by taking three of four points from Northeastern. When we consider that Rebecca Vint and Brittany Howard each hit 41 points last year and have combined for only six so far with Howard appearing in just two games, there was bound to be a slump. They were the only returning players who bettered 15 points last year. Katherine Murphy is having a solid rookie season with eight points, tying her with Ashley Vesci and Katie Fergus for the team lead, but nobody is taking the game by storm like Vint and Howard did in their first years. It’s starting to look more and more that by the time some other club gets everyone pulling in the same direction, Mercyhurst will already have wrapped up the season and have the inside track for the playoffs.
You mentioned BU being in the vicinity of the NCAA bubble, and in that respect, the tie with Harvard was pretty much a wash. The tie didn’t surprise me as much as the score. I thought BU was better offensively than defensively when I saw it play, and nothing since has changed that opinion, so the 1-1 draw was puzzling. Marie-Philip Poulin missed a few games as well as the Four Nations Cup due to injury, so perhaps that has taken a toll on the offense. I was shocked that she had only one assist entering Sunday’s win over New Hampshire, where she added three more. Playing with a proven scorer like Sarah Lefort, I’d have expected the points to come regularly, so maybe the injury has continued to hamper her. How should those in the Terriers’ camp feel about the tie with Harvard? Outshooting the Crimson by more than a two-to-one margin is nice, including 11 to two in the third period, but it would have been nice to pull out a win on home ice.
Candace: Yes, I think the Terriers have to be a little disappointed in that result, especially after convincingly sweeping Clarkson last month and how Clarkson tied Harvard. Poulin’s production has been a little puzzling, especially since it has seemed that as she goes, so go the Terriers. Poulin is currently fifth on the team in scoring, though she has admittedly played five less games than the people above her. Poulin’s scoring average per game is a little below Sarah Lefort, who really has keyed the Terriers’ offense. Perhaps, like Coyne, Poulin has had trouble adjusting to people she’s never skated with before this season. Whatever the reason, Poulin is still the player whose leadership will make or break BU this season. The Terriers only have one game this weekend, against Dartmouth, a game I think will tell us more about the Big Green than BU.
I think another team that has be disappointed in its weekend output is North Dakota, which tied and lost a shootout to Ohio State on Friday before finally breaking its winless streak with a 4-3 win on Saturday. I said last week that I thought UND was likely out of the NCAA picture unless it wins the WCHA tournament. I’m starting to think that this year’s North Dakota team might not even get home ice for the WCHA tournament, which was unthinkable to me at the start of the year. In fact, UND might finish as low as six. What is your opinion of this year’s North Dakota team?
Arlan: Like many teams, there is a gap between UND playing well and UND going through the motions. Five of its six games versus Minnesota, Wisconsin, and UMD were very tight games. It lost three of those and only managed one overtime win, but if it could play at that level every time out, it would be okay. Maybe not at the top of the league, but solidly in the top four. The problem is that it mixes in games where it doesn’t seem quite as interested, as in the loss to Vermont, the second game in Minneapolis, and the first game in Bemidji. It doesn’t give itself much of a chance in those contests.
North Dakota has lost a lot of leadership in the last couple years with the graduation of Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux and Michelle Karvinen, on top of their point production. The burden has fallen on younger players to lead, and they are growing into the role. The team had to deal with a very turbulent week with the serious accident involving sophomore Lisa Marvin. That her sister Layla is a junior on the squad just multiplies the impact. In an emotional media conference after Friday’s game, Brian Idalski said that there have been other things going on as well. I’m sure every team has to deal with a lot of things over the course of the season — 25 or more lives intersect a lot of events. Some seasons stand out. Three years ago, Minnesota went through a Murphy’s Law type of year including death and serious medical issues involving family of several team members, and it just seemed like one thing after another. Adversity can either break a team down or make it stronger, and by the time that year ended in the program’s first NCAA title in several years, the players reacted as though they’d learned how to cope with any obstacle.
I expect that these events will strengthen the North Dakota team. It doesn’t mean that it will result in championships, but the bonds will have been formed by all of the turbulent times that they have weathered together. No matter what happens in the WCHA quarters, North Dakota will be hosting the league semis and final, so that can serve as a carrot on the stick later in the year. If as you say, it needs to win to advance, UND won’t lack for motivation, but there will be some tough opponents standing in the way.
Monday night, I saw St. Cloud State play for the first time since its opening weekend versus BU and Penn State when the Huskies faced Minnesota in the Hockey Hall of Fame game. After the game that Minnesota won, 5-0, first-year coach Eric Rud was encouraged that his team was making more plays.
“That’s really what we’re trying to teach our kids; you can’t win hanging on,” Rud said. “You got to come out and play and compete. I thought we made plays tonight from start to finish. Coming up the ice, we’d connect one, two, three, four passes. Now our next challenge is we kept fizzling out on our offensive blue line or in zone.”
We’ve seen opponents of the two undefeated teams, BC and Quinnipiac, exhibit both of those problems. Both won again on Tuesday night. BC opponents often find themselves just trying to hang on, while the Bobcats cause many opponents’ offensive thrusts to fizzle. What will it take for someone to hang a first loss on either before the two collide in January?
Candace: For Quinnipiac, I think it will take a team that can generate sustained rushes into the offensive zone and fire more shots. Princeton actually got 22 shots on net against Chelsea Laden, but most teams have had trouble getting more than 20. In their last few games, Quinnipiac faced 19 shots from St. Lawrence, 15 from Clarkson, eight from Union, 13 from Rensselaer, and only 14 from Cornell. Quinnipiac is a stifling defensive team, so you have to figure out a way to get through the neutral zone with speed. I was curious, so I just looked at the box scores, and Princeton is the first team all season to break the 20-shot barrier against Quinnipiac. Several teams have been held to under 10.
I think it would help if the team can match the Bobcats defensively as well. Quinnipiac plays Yale this weekend in the Nutmeg Classic, and the Bulldogs may have lost starting goaltender Jaimie Leonoff to an injury; she left during the game against the Eagles Tuesday and didn’t return. That won’t help the Bulldogs when they face Quinnipiac, but Yale exhibited an ability to skate at times with the high-flying Eagles.
What will it take to beat BC? Maybe replacing the skate blades with wheels before the Eagles take the ice. BC is just ridiculously fast on almost every line, and the top line with Alex Carpenter and Haley Skarupa may end up with two players leading the country in scoring. It’s really hard to keep them in check in for 60 minutes. BC hasn’t been held to under four goals since St. Lawrence did it back in early October, and looking at the schedule, I don’t know if that will happen before the Eagles face Quinnipiac, a game that at the moment looks like a classic case of the unstoppable force meets the immovable object. I’m not sure how that one will play out.
Before that game, the Eagles will face a Harvard team that has the potential to shut down an offense, and Boston University has played tight defensively as well, and the game on Jan. 7 could be very interesting that way. However, it has to be demoralizing for a team to know that you may have to score five or more goals to win. I’ve heard that BC has looked bored at times in the last weeks, so the game against Harvard is really important.
Getting back to Minnesota, the Gophers are in a funny position, sporting a 12-1-2 record but with some people considering it a down year so far. Do you think that maybe a little less pressure on the Gophers will help them come playoff time?
Arlan: Is there less pressure? Less attention, I’d say, but the pressure is a different kind of pressure. They’ve been able to open up sizable leads in the conference race the previous two years. This year, Wisconsin has been a week ahead in WCHA games played all season, so the Gophers have trailed in the standings in terms of points the whole way, despite having the better league winning percentage. I think that the focus of a tight conference race will help whatever team emerges from the WCHA wars, be it the Badgers, Gophers, Bulldogs, or some dark horse. Minnesota had a stronger team for the 2013 NCAA tournament than it put on the ice in 2012, but the 2012 unit had been pushed hard during the season so many times that it rose to its potential and had a slightly easier time of it in the national tournament, not needing to face the perils of sudden death in overtime.
The Gophers are still trying to fine tune their lineup, finding the right mix of six on the blue line and deciding who will line up at center. Kelly Pannek had her first hat trick on Monday. She currently has the team’s two senior forwards, Rachael Bona and Meghan Lorence, on her wings. That unit has shown signs of heating up, and if it can stay productive, that takes some burden off of Hannah Brandt’s line with Dani Cameranesi and Maryanne Menefee. With all the key freshmen in the Wisconsin lineup, the Badgers will continue to grow. The effort that was good enough to sweep them a month ago won’t be enough when the teams next meet in January. UMD, with so many new faces on the roster, continues to gel as well.
If I’m Katie King Crowley, I want somebody to give the Eagles a game over the next couple of months, no matter the outcome. Constant leads of two, three, or even more goals heading into the third period is not optimal for development. I am convinced that their speed and depth make them the best team in the country right now. I don’t see BC as being on a totally different level, however. The team that will emerge in March is the one that makes the most improvement in the coming months, and that’s a pressure that all of the contenders share.
TJ Sarcona returned to the Niagara lineup last weekend after missing the start of the season with a broken wrist (photo: Omar Phillips).
The Niagara Purple Eagles were picked to finish fourth in Atlantic Hockey this season, coming off an appearance in last year’s semifinals that saw them fall to eventual champion Robert Morris in overtime.
There was a lot for coach Dave Burkholder to be optimistic about heading into the 2014-15 campaign. His team returned two of its top three scorers in Hugo Turcotte and Isaac Kohls, as well as TJ Sarcona, who turned heads as a rookie (11 goals and 11 assists).
Another freshman, defenseman Vince Muto, was named to the league’s all-rookie team, while a pair of first-year goaltenders came into their own. After platooning Adrian Ignagni and Jackson Teichroeb for the first half of the season, Burkholder went with Teichroeb down the stretch as the Purple Eagles upset Air Force in Colorado Springs in the playoff quarterfinals to advance to Rochester.
So a top-four finished seemed not only possible, but probable.
But the injury bug hit hard, beginning with Sarcona, who broke his wrist in dryland training. Then Teichroeb injured his hamstring in an intrasquad scrimmage right before the season started. Senior defenseman Kevin Albers started the season on the sidelines (offseason shoulder surgery).
With player after player missing games due to injury, capped by Muto breaking his arm in Niagara’s second game, the Purps were literally limping into the season, starting 0-9.
“It certainly was a factor,” said Burkholder. “So many guys have missed time. When you lose the guys we did, like TJ Sarcona, who is one of our captains as a sophomore, it puts you back on your heels.”
Only three Niagara players have appeared in all 12 games so far: Turcotte and fellow forward Matt Chartrain as well as senior defenseman Nick Cecere.
But things are looking up in Lewiston. Sarcona returned to action last weekend and just about everyone (with the exception of Muto, who isn’t expected to return to the lineup until after Christmas) is back and reasonably healthy.
The result? Niagara won its first game of the season on Nov. 8 at Bentley, in overtime, and after a weekend off returned home to Dwyer Arena and swept Army in convincing fashion, 3-1 and 6-1.
“It’s really just been since last weekend that we’ve had a healthy roster,” said Burkholder. “And our goaltending was great.”
Teichroeb was pressed into action on Oct. 31 after, you guessed it, Ignagni was hurt the weekend before at Notre Dame. It took Teichroeb a couple of games to shake off the rust (a pair of losses to American International and a loss to Bentley), but he was outstanding last weekend against Army, allowing just two goals on 51 shots.
“[Teichroeb] was medically ready [at Notre Dame] but he probably should have had a little more time,” said Burkholder. “But that’s the way it’s been with injuries. It took him a while to get his timing and fitness to where it needed to be.”
Sarcona provided an immediate boost with a goal and an assist last weekend. And rookie Stanislav Dzakhov made his debut with a pair of assists. Dzakhov, a Moscow native, came in highly touted after a career in juniors that saw him spend time with Fargo in the USHL and more recently Bismarck in the NAHL, where he led the Bobcats in scoring.
Dzakhov was certified by the NCAA “with conditions” requiring him to miss the first 10 games of the season.
“It’s great to have [Dzakhov] as well,” said Burkholder. “It’s a real bonus on top of everything we’ve had to deal with so far to have him in the lineup now.”
Burkholder credits his players and staff with sticking through the hard times, which he hopes will make his team stronger.
“On top of the injuries, we just weren’t playing well,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty positive group and they didn’t get down on themselves. It starts with the belief that we know we’re going to be a good hockey team. You can’t put it all on injuries.”
When a team is short-handed, a silver lining is having role players move into the spotlight and gain valuable experience. Burkholder said he’s seen that with his squad.
“[Freshman] Rob Angiolella is a good example,” he said. “If you asked the coaching staff in the summer that, starting at full strength, what his role would be, we were unsure. He could have been on the fourth line or maybe in and out of the lineup.
“But he’s been outstanding for us. He’s got seven points in nine games and is a complete 200-feet player. He’s done it all.”
Another surprise is Cecere, who transferred from Michigan Tech after the 2011-12 season. He had to sit out the 2012-13 campaign and then played only four games last season due to injury.
“He’s been out of hockey for essentially two years and we were wondering if he’d still have the drive,” said Burkholder. “But he’s been a leader for us.”
Niagara’s schedule hasn’t been kind — now getting healthy after a grueling start to the season, the Purple Eagles are in the midst of a 33-day stretch where they play just twice. Niagara was off the weekend of Nov. 14-15 and is also idle this weekend, with its next games at home against Holy Cross on Dec. 5-6.
“Yeah, we could have used those breaks earlier this season,” said Burkholder. “And after getting our first win at Bentley (on Nov. 8) we wanted to play again right away. It kind of feels that way again now.
“But we still have some guys dinged up a bit, and with finals approaching we’ll use the time to our advantage.”
Rochester Institute of Technology’s Matt Garbowsky leads the nation with 11 goals (photo: Omar Phillips).
Top of the heap
We’re about one-third of the way through the 2014-15 season, and players from Atlantic Hockey are near or at the top of many offensive categories:
• Rochester Institute of Technology’s Matt Garbowsky leads the nation in goals with 11. Bentley forward Max French is tied for second with 10.
• Garbowsky is tied with Boston University’s Jack Eichel for overall points with 19. Next in line is Robert Morris senior Cody Wydo, who has 18.
• Wydo is tied for fourth in the nation in points per game with 1.50.
• RIT’s Josh Mitchell is tied for the lead nationally in assists with 13. Also with 13 assists is Penn State (and former Mercyhurst) defenseman Taylor Holstrom.
• French is second in the nation in power-play goals with five.
• Robert Morris freshman Brady Ferguson is tied for fourth in points by a rookie with 12.
• Robert Morris has the top-rated offense in Division I, averaging 3.83 goals scored per game.
• Bentley has the nation’s top power play, converting at 34.7 percent (17-for-49).
Tying history
On Friday, American International lost three leads and had to settle for a 5-5 tie with then-No. 20 Robert Morris. It marked the second time the Yellow Jackets have tied at nationally ranked team.
It happened before on Nov. 23, 2007, in the first round of the Rensselaer Hockey Tournament, which saw the host Engineers advance via a shootout win.
AIC is still looking for that elusive victory over a ranked team.
Snowed out
Thanks to the snowpocalypse that hit Western New York last week, last Friday’s game between host Mercyhurst and Canisius had to be postponed. The game will be played on Tuesday, Jan. 13.
The teams were able to meet last Saturday in Buffalo, skating to a 3-3 tie. Canisius is now 0-2-3 in its new home, the HarborCenter. The Golden Griffins will be looking for that first win in their new barn again this weekend when they host Air Force for a pair of games.
Father vs. son
Jack Riley, the son of Army coach Brian Riley, is a redshirt freshman forward at Mercyhurst. We’ve already seen the teams square off this season (Mercyhurst swept the Black Knights in Erie on Nov. 7-8) and they will play at least two more times this season and likely have many more meetings over Jack’s career.
Saturday’s RIT game at Yale is the first and most likely the only time Tigers coach Wayne Wilson will match up against his son Stu, a junior forward for the Bulldogs.
“It’s for bragging rights,” said Wilson. “Unless we meet in the NCAA tournament, this is the last time it’s going to happen, and having that one-up on each other is going to last a long time.”
Both Wilsons sport national championship rings: Wayne won the title in 1984 as a senior with Bowling Green and Stu’s Bulldogs won it all in 2013, his freshman season.
Weekly awards
I’m going with the same honorees as the league, which has started a new award: defensive player of the week. Defensive prowess is often hard to quantify, so I’m not going to second-guess the league on that one.
Player of the week — David Friedmann, Robert Morris: The junior forward had three goals and an assist to lead the Colonials to a three-point weekend against AIC.
Goalie of the week — Terry Shafer, Robert Morris: Shafer recorded his fourth career shutout in a 6-0 win over AIC on Saturday.
Rookie of the week — Robert Angiolella, Niagara: The freshman scored three goals, including a game-winner, in a weekend sweep of Army.
Defensive player of the week — Rob Mann, Robert Morris: The sophomore blueliner had a goal and an assist and was plus-3 on the weekend.
Michigan Tech drew capacity crowds to the MacInnes Student Ice Arena for a rare home series against Michigan (photo: Devin C Miller/Michigan Tech Athletics).
HOUGHTON, Mich. — While the nation’s longest winning streak came to an end over the weekend, the Michigan Tech Huskies won something important in a series against Minnesota State: the attendance at both games.
On a weekend when students normally head home, the Huskies played before a combined total in excess of 7,000 fans.
“Overall, I think the community is ecstatic,” Michigan Tech coach Mel Pearson. “They know we are going to have some hiccups here and there, but we have had a rich and proud history in the past here. Most people are just happy to see us back on the map in college hockey.”
With the pair of one-goal losses to Minnesota State, the Huskies saw their season-opening winning streak end at 10 games and fell from No. 1 in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll — a program first — to sixth.
Still, they have already racked up 16 points in the WCHA, more than they amassed in the entire 28-game schedule in three of the previous six seasons.
When Pearson was brought in to replace Jamie Russell as head coach three seasons ago, there was a sense that maybe this was the right move, but maybe it was six years too late. There was no way to be sure.
In his first season at the helm, Pearson’s Huskies came into their final regular season series against Colorado College with the potential to finish anywhere from fourth to eighth in the WCHA standings. They dropped both games but swept the Tigers in the playoffs the next weekend.
In his second season, the Huskies won the Great Lakes Invitational for the first time since 1981. In year three, they finished just a point out of a home playoff spot.
The winds of change are evident for the Huskies, who have gone from playing in front of crowds of 1,600 to those of 3,200 and up.
Crowd size is not the way to determine how things are changing in the local community. For the past four weeks, Pearson has been mentioning in postgame interviews that his staff and the team have been receiving emails and phone calls of support for the things they are doing.
“The big thing is keep it going,” said Pearson. “Everyone says, ‘Just keep it going.’ Which is great and of course we want to do that. It’s nice to see people feel good about their team and the team they support. We have had outstanding support since I’ve been coach.”
With their 10-0 start, this iteration of the Huskies has done something no team in the history of the program has done: win nine or more straight games to start a season. After sweeping Bemidji State on Nov. 14 and 15, they became the only remaining team with no losses.
That slipped away last weekend, but that the honor belonged to the Huskies has not been lost on Pearson.
The players have been hearing from their friends and classmates both on campus and through social media.
“We did not sweep it under the rug because you can’t,” said Pearson. “Our players are getting emails and they can read papers and the Internet, but good for them. I told them it is good to be recognized for your hard work.”
Pearson is quick to share the credit for this group’s success with the players, who have learned to play the style that his staff has been working to instill for three years.
“We have a real educated hockey community,” said Pearson. “They can see it. I think they have seen it in the last couple of years, the game and the style we are trying to incorporate. Now we are just learning how to win in that style.”
Michigan Tech’s Blake Pietila has four goals through 12 games (photo: Tim Brule).
Several upperclassmen have had a major impact in the way this group plays. It all starts with junior goaltender Jamie Phillips, who Pearson believes has been a strong candidate for WCHA defensive player of the week every weekend he has played.
The numbers for Phillips bore that out. In 12 games played, he has a 1.42 GAA and his 10 wins more than double his career high of four.
Part of the reason for his success comes from having assistant coach Joe Shawhan on the staff this season. Phillips has learned much from working with the former goalie.
The resurgence of co-captain Blake Pietila has also helped the Huskies get off to a strong start. Last season, while battling a nagging injury that did not keep him out of the lineup but affected the way he played, Pietila scored just one goal before Dec. 26. This season, he already has four.
Local product Tanner Kero, who graduated from Hancock High School, located just across the canal from Houghton, is also off to a great start.
Through 12 games, Kero has 14 points. More impressive, however, is how he is doing it. He has had three multi-point games and two where he has not scored at all. However, even when he is not scoring, he has an effect on what happens night in and night out.
“I think if you are happy, you are in a better spot to have success,” said Pearson. “I think our players enjoy coming to the rink. That has helped fuel them to have success. … You are trying to create that culture that they want to be here.”
Regardless of what happens moving forward, the Huskies have done plenty both before and during this season to get the local community back on their side. Moving forward, it seems that the culture around the program is changing for the better as well.
Our scheduled guests on the Nov. 25 edition of USCHO Live! are Massachusetts-Lowell coach Norm Bazin, whose No. 4 River Hawks stand at 8-2-3 heading into Thanksgiving, and Minnesota State coach Mike Hastings, whose No. 7 Mavericks swept then-No.-1 Michigan Tech on the road last weekend, and garnered three first-place votes in this week’s USCHO.com poll in the process.
Join us for the conversation and information, Tuesday, Nov. 25, from 8 to 9 p.m. EST at blogtalkradio.com/uscholive. If you can’t listen live, check out the podcast of USCHO Live! available on the player at the right (click through if you’re reading this via RSS.)
Be part of the conversation! Call (657) 383-1910, send your tweets to @USCHO, or your emails to [email protected]. Each episode of USCHO Live! features a look at news around NCAA hockey, a look ahead at upcoming games and events, and conversation with people who coach, administer and play college hockey, and journalists who cover the sport.
About the hosts
Jim Connelly is a senior writer at USCHO.com and has been with the site since 1999. He is based in Boston and regularly covers Hockey East. He began with USCHO.com as the correspondent covering the MAAC, which nowadays is known as Atlantic Hockey. Each week during the season, he co-writes “Tuesday Morning Quarterback.” Jim is the winner of the 2012 Joe Concannon award, and is a studio analyst for NESN.
Ed Trefzger has been part of USCHO since 1999 and now serves as a senior writer and director of technology. He has been a part of the radio broadcasts of Rochester Institute of Technology hockey since their inception — serving as a producer, studio host, color commentator and as RIT’s play-by-play voice for eight seasons. Ed is VP and general manager of CBS Sports Radio affiliate 105.5 The Team in Rochester, N.Y.
Boston University is 8-1-1 heading into a Tuesday night games against Harvard (photo: Melissa Wade).
Matthew: Welcome to this week’s edition of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, USCHO’s weekly column in which we go over some of the biggest talking points from the weekend that was in college hockey. Normally Jim Connelly and Todd Milewski are the masters of ceremonies in this space, but I’ve been asked to step in and wag chins with Jim about last weekend.
We’ve got a lot to talk about here between things that happened on the ice and even some things that happened away from it. One of perhaps college hockey’s smaller schools in Michigan Tech fell from the top of the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll, while D-I hockey will soon be picking up a very big name in Arizona State.
We’ll get to both of these topics, but let’s stay balanced nationally. Jim, what’s the biggest thing that caught your eye out further east last week?
Jim: Well, what caught my eye also caught the eye of many of the voters in this week’s poll, and that’s Boston University. The Terriers’ come-from-behind win on Friday against Maine was a memorable one, scoring twice in the third to tie the game before rookie extraordinaire Jack Eichel scored the OT winner on a stunning end-to-end rush.
Now the Terriers become the team with the target, taking the top spot in the poll. And that target will be worn Tuesday night as BU takes on an upstart Harvard team in a pre-Thanksgiving game. Pretty compelling for a midweek game.
Matthew: “Extraordinaire” almost seems to be putting it mildly with the attention he’s already been getting in his short time with the Terriers. BU intrigues me, though, and it seems like it’s been a long time since the Terriers have been in the top spot.
Michigan Tech was there last week but fell twice to Minnesota State and also dropped in our poll. Tech was and remains a great story early on this season, but how much more staying power do you think BU might have in terms of staying on top?
Jim: I think that experience usually breeds staying power atop the polls. And while BU has plenty of hockey tradition, none of its current roster has enjoyed any significant success. Second-year coach David Quinn has a winning resume and was a part of the 2009 NCAA championship team as an assistant. But it’s hard to get a feel for whether BU has a staying power at the top.
Back out west, what do you think we should make of Minnesota State? A great two-game road sweep of No. 1 Michigan Tech seems noteworthy but didn’t create a huge jump in the poll. Are the Mavs underappreciated?
Matthew: I think the whole WCHA is. Mike Hastings has turned Minnesota State into a perennial contender since he moved up there after his time as an assistant at Omaha, and I think people tend to forget North Dakota’s goaltender Zane McIntyre stole an NCAA tournament regional final against Ferris State and robbed the Bulldogs of what would’ve been a deserved place in the Frozen Four.
As for Michigan Tech, Mel Pearson has done a brilliant job with the Huskies ever since leaving Michigan. One wonders whether he, like Hastings in Omaha, saw the writing on the wall that head coaching jobs would have to be found elsewhere.
At 5-6 right now, Michigan must wish it could’ve done more to keep Pearson around. Minnesota and Penn State have both done pretty well so far, but after that, the Big Ten has been a big mess. What do you think is going on in that league?
Jim: The only Big Ten team I am seriously concerned about is Wisconsin. The Badgers might just be one of the three worst teams in the country. Losing to a struggling Colorado College team on Friday further cemented my extreme concerns for Wisco.
I think Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State all have a ton of potential in the Big Ten but Wisconsin may already be in the middle of a lost season.
Another big story last week was the elevation of Arizona State from club to Division I beginning next season. A lot to be discussed there, including what conference the Sun Devils will play in. But what are your initial thoughts?
Matthew: Regardless of where the Sun Devils eventually slot into, I think the fact that ASU is starting a Division I program is fantastic for college hockey. It further allays many people’s fears that conference expansion was going to hurt college hockey, because so far it feels as though quite the opposite has been taking place.
I have to think that the NCHC would be the best fit for ASU, or at least early on. I believe it’s the best geographic fit for as long as the Sun Devils are the only Pac-12 school with a D-I hockey program. I know ASU hopes that making this move will tip the dominoes with some of their Pac-12 brethren, though, and I’m curious to get your thoughts as to whether or not that’s doable.
Jim: I will admit I have tempered optimism, not for Arizona State but rather to believe you can find five other Pac-12 schools to pony up a minimum of $30 million to invest in hockey.
Just because there are some of the nation’s strongest financial athletic programs in that conference doesn’t mean that there will suddenly be a financial dump into college hockey programs. And angel donors, while now responsible for the two newest D-I programs, are still rare.
Trust me, I am excited for more college hockey expansion, but thinking this is the dawn of a new era may be a bit of a pipe dream at this point.
Thumbs up
If anyone wonders how good this Jack Eichel kid is, here is a video of his end-to-end rush in overtime that won the game against Maine on Friday. The video is about two-and-a-half minutes long, but you only need to watch 15 seconds to see Eichel’s brilliance.
Omaha knocked off Minnesota-Duluth 4-1 on Saturday to end what had been a no-loss November for the Bulldogs. The night before, UNO hosted UMD in a 3-2 win for the Bulldogs that ruined UNO’s first home game since Oct. 11. That means the Mavericks went nearly a month and a half between games early on this season at CenturyLink Center. Road wins mean a lot, and UNO went 5-0-1 on its six-game road trip, but UNO fans certainly had to sit tight for a while before getting their fix again.
Coming up
As mentioned earlier, new No. 1 Boston University gets a Tuesday night test against No. 18 Harvard before hosting No. 9 Colgate on Saturday.
No. 2 North Dakota hosts No. 11 Omaha in a two-game NCHC series Friday and Saturday, and there are three other games between ranked teams this week:
• No. 3 Minnesota plays at No. 12 Boston College on Friday.
• The Eagles then play at No. 20 Providence on Saturday.
• Harvard plays at No. 4 Massachusetts-Lowell on Saturday.
Nazareth goaltender Ed Zdolshek pitched a shutout and added an assist in two wins last weekend (photo: Dan Hickling).
Taking a quick glance back on the goings on in the world of Division III hockey last weekend. ECAC EAST – When the first puck dropped at the start of the weekend, three ECACE powerhouses – Babson, Norwich and Massachusetts-Boston – all sported unblemished records. The weekend changed nothing. All three powerhouses came through the weekend unscathed, Babson (5-0-0, 4-0-0) in a breeze with strong wins over Skidmore (6-1) and Castleton (3-0). … Norwich (6-0-0, 5-0-0) walked over St. Anselm 5-1, then eked out a 4-3 win over New England college, with Dean Niezgoda third period goal holding up as the game-winner. … Idle the weekend before, Mass-Boston (6-0-0, 4-0-0) returned with wins over Castleton (2-0) and Skidmore (6-1). ECAC NORTHEAST – Weekend action was light – just four tilts on Saturday – but provoked some eyebrow arching. Upstart Suffolk (5-0-1, 4-0-1) slipped into sole possession of first place with a strong 7-2 rout of Becker. Stanton Turner fired in three goals for the Rams … Meanwhile Nichols (5-1-1, 3-1-1) suffered its first loss, 3-2 to Salve Regina. Alan Boozer netted the game-winner at 8:44 of the third, his second goal of the game. ECAC WEST – The weekend was a mixed bag for everybody in the West, everybody except for Nazareth. The Golden Flyers took wins over Manhattanville (5-0) and Neumann (3-2). Junior goalie Ed Zdolshek stopped 31 shots for the shutout on Friday, then garnered an assist on James Redman’s go-ahead goal Saturday … Elmira and Hobart split their two-game set in Geneva, both by twin 4-2 counts. … Then there was last-place Utica (1-4-2, 0-4-1), who was thumped at home by Neumann, 4-1. The Pioneers, an early season disappointment, followed by battling No. 2 ranked Oswego to a 4-4 tie before a D-III record crowd of 7,047 at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse. Louie Educate’s power play goal at 12:34 of the third – his second of the game – served as the game-tying tally. MASCAC – A trio of tilts on Saturday, including first-place Plymouth’s (3-2-1, 3-0-1) 5-1 waxing of Worcester. Dan Dupell netted a pair of goals. … Massachusetts-Darmouth and Fitchburg State both racked up their first wins of the season. Five different marksmen connected to give UMD a 5-4 win over Westfield, while Fitchburg goalie Ryan Wysocki stopped all 38 Framingham shots to lift the Falcons to a 4-0 triumph. MIAC – Concordia (Minn.) completed a sweep of Bethel with a 4-1 win over the Royals on Saturday. The Cobbers continue a streak where they have lost only once in their last five games. Garrett Hendrickson scored a goal and dished out two assists in the win, pushing his point total to 12. Goalie Alex Reichie stepped up as he stopped 30 shots for his third win. He stopped 59 of 62 shots overall on the weekend as CU improved to 4-3-1 overall and 2-1-1 in the MIAC. The Cobbers won 5-2 on opening night….Hamline proved once again that it has made significant strides since last season, playing Gustavus Adolphus to a tie on both nights of their weekend series. The Pipers skated to a 3-3 tie on Friday and to a 2-2 tie the following night. Charlie Adams scored twice for Hamline on Friday. Tyler Lapic struck for a pair of goals for the Gusties in Saturday’s win. Hamline was outshot 37-31 on Friday and by a 45-20 count on Saturday. Hamline goalie John Sellie-Hanson racked up 77 saves for Hamline in the two games. Hamline is now 3-3-2 overall and 0-0-2 in the MIAC. Gustavus is 3-2-3 overall and 1-0-3 in the league. NCHA – Adrian went on the road over the weekend and picked up a pair of pivotal nonconference wins over nationally-ranked opponents. The No. 6 Bulldogs (8-0) topped No. 9 Wisconsin-Eau Claire 5-2 and finished off the weekend with a 6-4 win over No. 6 Wisconsin-Stevens Point. The win over the Blugolds was the first ever for the Bulldogs in three meetings. Scott Shackell earned the win in goal against Eau Claire, racking up 27 saves. He made 11 of those stops in the third period. Adrian scored the final two goals in the battle with the Pointers, notching their fourth road win of the season in the process. Adrian converted on its first three power-play attempts of the game en route to the victory. Josh Ranalli scored twice to pace the Bulldogs. Taylor McCloy came through with three assists. Stevens Point held a 37-21 edge in shots on goal, but Shackell stepped up and tallied 33 saves…Lake Forest has been battled tested this season, and Saturday night marked the fourth consecutive game where it played a nationally-ranked opponent. The Foresters were coming off a 5-1 loss to Stevens Point on Friday but gave Eau Claire all it could handle in a 1-1 tie. Goalie Leo Podolsky helped secure the tie as he racked up a career-high 43 saves. Podolsky’s old career high was 42 in a game against St. Norbert last weekend. He owns a 1.99 goals against average on the year. Jordan Bruce scored the lone goal for Lake Forest (2-3-2), which is still looking for its first win since Nov. 7. NESCAC – Bowdoin, Trinity and Williams all emerged from the weekend with 3-0-1 conference records and a share of first place. Bowdoin took both ends of its home-and-home set with rivals Colby, 5-3 and 6-3. Senior John McGinnis racked up five points, two goals and three assists, to up his league-leading scoring total (11 points), while linemate Connor Quinn netted a three-goal hat trick. … Williams took twin wins, a 2-1 squeaker over Connecticut College followed by a 9-0 blasting of Tufts. David Jarrett’s third period tally was the game-winner against CC, while Luke Stickel’s big night – three goals and an assist – fueled the rout of the Jumbos. … Behind Ryan Cole’s hat-trick, Trinity began the weekend with a 7-2 hammering of Amherst – its third consecutive win by that hefty score, then had to settle for a 1-1 tie with visiting Hamilton the next night. John Hawkrigg’s second period goal allowed the Bantams to salvage the point, and was the only one of Trinity’s 46 shots to elude Hamiton goalie Buitenhuis. SUNYAC – What was the big story of the weekend? Perhaps it was the twin wins put up by Cortland – 4-2 over No. 13 Geneseo and 5-4 over Brockport. The Red Dragons upended Genny with four unanswered goals to give rookie head coach Joe Cardarelli his first-ever win. Dan Broderick (7), and Nick Zappia (6) both scored three times during the weekend and sit atop the SUNYAC’s goal-scoring ladder. … Meanwhile, Oswego, which began the week ranked second in the nation, were held to a pair of 4-4 deadlocks by unranked Brockport and Utica (see ECAC West). The Brockport tilt featured late third-period goals by Golden Eagles’ James Ryan and Jake Taylor wrapped around one by Oswego’s Krystian Yorke, all in a white-knuckling span of just 26 seconds. … Then there is first-place Plattsburgh, which ran its mark to 7-0-0 with a pair of wins over Morrisville, 5-3 and 5-2. WIAC – Wisconsin-River Falls is still unbeaten after a weekend sweep of non-conference opponents. The Falcons stopped Lawrence 4-1 and blanked Northland 3-0 to improve to 6-0 on the season. In the series opener, the No. 10 Falcons were outshot 29-28, but Mike Fazio helped propel River Falls to the win as he scored twice. Tanner Milliron made 28 saves in the win. On Saturday, Milliron came through with his first shutout of the season, making 19 saves. River Falls held a 28-19 edge in shots, with Ryan Doner, Terry Leabo and Jeff Bergh all scoring goals … Wisconsin-Superior capped a perfect weekend on Saturday with a 4-1 win over Finlandia. The Yellow Jackets defeated Northland 4-3 on Friday night to snap a four-game losing streak. In Saturday’s win, Superior (4-4) scored four times in the second period for the third time this season. Of the 24 goals it has scored this season, 19 have have come in the second period. Anton Svensson, Jake Johnson, Tanner Dion and Jordan Shockey all scored goals in period. The Yellow Jackets held a 47-28 edge in shots. Against Northland, Superior got itself back on track, scoring three times in the second and then hanging on for a close win. Four different players scored in the victory and Corey Simons earned his first collegiate victory, racking up 31 saves. He made 27 of those saves in the final two periods.
ECAC Hockey announced Monday that Colgate junior forward Darcy Murphy has given been a one-game suspension as the result of his actions in the Raiders’ game against Brown last Friday (Nov. 21).
The league action was taken after review of an incident that occurred at the 15:39 mark of the second period when Murphy was assessed a major penalty for contact to the head and a game disqualification penalty.
Murphy is not eligible to compete in Colgate’s next game this Saturday, Nov. 29, at Boston University.
The weekend that was in Division III women’s hockey…
ECAC EAST
Massachusetts-Boston played a pair of overtime games last weekend, setting for a 1-1 tie Friday at St. Anselm and then another 1-1 stalemate Saturday at home against Southern Maine. … Castleton and Manhattanville went to a scoreless tie Friday night. Paula Stephens made 26 saves for Castleton, while Kirsten Shaughnessy stopped 29 for Manhattanville. … Katie Couture’s second goal of the game 47 seconds into overtime lifted Southern Maine to a 3-2 win Friday night over the University of New England. … Third-ranked Norwich won two more games with a 3-0 shutout at Salve Regina Friday night and then a 5-3 win at Manhattanville on Saturday. Celeste Robert finished with 28 saves in the shutout. … Seven different players scored in St. Anselm’s 7-0 win over Nichols Saturday night, and Hannah Synnott earned the shutout, making just 11 saves. … Kara Violette scored the tying goal at 15:36 and then the winner at 19:34 as Holy Cross rallied to beat St. Michael’s 4-3 Saturday night. … Franklin Pierce took two in a row, beating St. Michael’s 1-0 Friday and then U of New England 4-1 Saturday.
ECAC WEST
Oswego and goalie Bridget Smith posted back-to-back shutouts over Potsdam, winning 4-0 Friday and 3-0 Saturday. Smith made 29 saves in the first game, 28 in the second. … Buffalo State took two straight 3-1 wins on the road against Chatham. … No. 2 Elmira won both ends of a home-and-home with Utica. Ashton Hogan recorded two goals and an assist in Saturday’s 4-1 win and then added three more, including the game-winner at 17:41 of the third period, and an assist in a 7-5 win on Saturday. … Catherine Linehan’s overtime power-play goal at the 57-second mark gave William Smith a 3-2 win over Neumann Saturday night. Neumann came back with a 2-1 win Sunday, as Megan Russelo netted both goals.
MIAC
No. 7 Gustavus Adolphus swept a home-and-home with Hamline with a 6-3 win Friday and a 4-0 shutout Saturday on the strength of 19 saves from Lindsey Hibbard. … Ninth-ranked St. Thomas also won a home-and-home, beating St. Olaf 7-0 Friday on the road and then 2-1 on home ice Saturday. Friday’s win featured a hat trick from Nuala Flood and 10 saves from goalie Paige Kittelson. … Bethel and Concordia (Minn.) played a couple of tight games as Concordia won 3-2 on Friday and Bethel defeated Concordia 4-2 the following afternoon. Tori Davis’ goal with 4:24 to play in the third period was the game-winner in the opener. … Augsburg swept a home-and-home with St. Catherine, winning both by a goal (3-2 and 2-1) … St. Mary’s swept St. Benedict, with Marah Shields’ 19 saves enough for the 2-0 shutout on Saturday.
NCHA
St. Scholastica and Lake Forest played two competitive games as the two teams battled to a 2-2 tie Friday and then Lake Forest took a 3-1 win Saturday. … No. 10 Adrian battled St. Norbert to a 1-1 tie on Friday and then Jade Walsh made 33 saves in a 2-0 shutout for the Bulldogs on Saturday. … Amanda Waigand scored two goals in Marian’s 5-1 win at home over Concordia (Wis.) on Friday night.
NESCAC
No. 4 Middlebury used a two-goal, three-assist game from Emily Fluke in a 7-2 win at Trinity Sunday afternoon. This was just one day after dropping a 4-3 decision to Trinity. … After beating Wesleyan 4-1 Friday night, Amherst needed overtime Saturday and Lynddy Smith was the hero on a power play 2:17 into the extra frame. … Bowdoin swept a home-and-home from Colby, winning 6-1 Friday as Miranda Bell popped three goals and then taking a 1-0 shutout Saturday on the back of Lan Crofton’s 30-save performance. … Connecticut College tied Hamilton 3-3 Friday and rebounded for a 4-0 win Saturday as Katherine Chester finished with 24 saves for the shutout.
WIAC
No. 6 Wisconsin-River Falls won both ends of a home-and-home with Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 7-1 Friday and then 3-2 Saturday in a game that saw UWRF take a 3-0 lead into the third period and UWEC score twice to close the gap, but couldn’t find the equalizer. … No. 5 Wisconsin-Stevens Point split with No. 8 Wisconsin-Superior in games that were decided late. Wis.-Stevens Point posted a 3-2 win Friday night with two third-period goals. Wis.-Superior won 3-1 the next afternoon with three unanswered goals.
NONCONFERENCE
Stevenson and Canton split their weekend series, with Canton winning 2-0 Friday and then Stevenson coming back for a big 7-1 win Saturday. Rebecca DiNardo pitched a 40-save shutout Friday night. … Concordia (Wis.) blanked Finlandia 4-0 Saturday as Brittany Sticha scored twice and Andrea Mizanskey turned aside all 31 shots between the pipes.
