Harvard struggled defensively last week, but its offense is still the most talented in the league. Despite a poor showing in the first period against Quinnipiac at Madison Square Garden, where they left trailing 4-0, the Crimson were able to come all the way back to force overtime. Quinnipiac got a goal from Derek Smith in a seeming fitting ending on the World’s Most Famous Stage. Struggles were abounded in non-league play, as SLU was swept by struggling Northeastern, while Colgate split with Maine in Orono.

This weekend marks the return of ECAC play for most league teams, while Quinnipiac and Princeton have the weekend off. Quinnipiac has a commanding lead in the standings, but it is not as large as it appears. Its lead over Cornell sits at nine points and it has a ten point lead on third place, RPI. But both the Big Red and Engineers have games in hand. Cornell has four games in hand, while RPI has three games on the Bobcats. Five points separate Harvard in fourth place and Union in tenth place. The battle for the last bye and home ice positioning looks to be as close as it usually is. but then again it is still early, with most teams yet to hit the halfway mark of the league slate.

Harvard’s defensive problems were expected

We all knew Harvard was going to score goals, but we also knew their defense and goaltending were going to go through growing pains. On Thursday night, I sat in the press box, as the Crimson defense and its goaltending just, for lack of a better word, crumbled in front of me. With under five minutes to go it led Boston University by two, at 5-3. But it all came back to earth, quickly, in a space of two minutes and 11 seconds. The Crimson gave it all up and lost it in regulation.

These problems have a bandaid, in that Harvard has by far the most talented forwards in the ECAC. The same defensive woes carried over to the Quinnipiac game as it gave up four early goals. The fact that Harvard was one of the better defensive teams for a while, was a shock to me at the time. The recent woes seem to be a retraction to the mean into what we expected. Harvard is inexperienced on the blueline, which also lacks firepower and superstars.

The goaltending was also supposed to be problematic for the Crimson, but Merrick Madsen like his team was probably overachieving in stopping opposing offenses. It is not to say he is talented, he just lacked experience coming into the season. All in all Harvard is still a great team and they are still a contender in a deep ECAC, but then again are they really? The problems that are here and now, were hardly unexpected.

You should also read CHN managing editor Adam Wodon’s piece on the MSG game where he brings up these same concerns

Cornell Quietly Positioning itself as a contender both nationally and in the league

A quick glance at the all important Pairwise rankings, and one would realize that Cornell is right on the heels of Harvard in fourth. If somebody would have told me before the season that Cornell would be fifth in the pairwise at this point in the season, I probably would have laughed at them. But everything that didn’t go right for the Big Red last season, has this year.

Sitting in second in the league standings and with four games in hand on league leaders Quinnipiac, Cornell has every chance to make some noise this season. With its continued consistency in its game, one should expect its skill and size to be a big advantage going forward.  If I am Cornell, I am beginning to wonder why people aren’t talking about them. I will admit, I was skeptical of its success but a recent win against Providence shows that it can compete with the big boys this year. Cornell has a tough schedule coming up, as it has Harvard twice, Quinnipiac once and Yale. For them staying the course, might be difficult but these games should help them in the pairwise because of strength of schedule.

Cornell has improved in every facet of the game mainly because it is scoring and doing so in bunches’. Its offense is more consistent, which has made everything better. We knew that Cornell would be good defensively and in net, the main questions centered around whether or not they could possess the puck and create offense. Ya the corsi and possession stats aren’t great but that is Cornell hockey. It has skill, it has young scorers and it is consistently getting scoring, which is a far cry from what some teams are getting in the ECAC right now.

I talked earlier in the season, about the impact of Anthony Angello and nothing has changed there. Last weekend the Angello, Jeff Kubiak and Mitch Vanderlaan line was hot. The three combined for four goals and eight assists in a two game series against Merrimack. This impact is becoming a large one, as the Red now have a legitimate scoring line to go along with its strong defensive system. This should scare opponents in the ECAC because offense mixed with great defense is often times deadly come tournament time.

Clarkson gets off the schneid in ECAC play

As we entered the second half, the biggest surprise to me wasn’t Quinnipiac or Cornell and the success they were having, but it was the lack of wins that Clarkson had in ECAC play. Despite a successful 8-4 non-league slate, the Golden Knights went 0-5-2 in league play entering Tuesday’s game against St. Lawrence. To me, the fact that Tech was struggling so bad is something that was unexpected and was unfathomable to me because well I thought it had all the tools necessary to surprise folks both in the ECAC and nationally. It seems as though I was wrong.

Confidence, and lack thereof, can be a funny thing. Teams can be at the highest of highs and the lowest of lows at multiple times during the year but Clarkson’s struggles seemed to be beyond struggling. It is one of the better corsi teams in the country, sitting in fifth nationally at 55.3% but its scoring is still rather low. Like Cornell, the Golden Knights have a great defensive system but there is one difference in the two teams. While Cornell has some movement and some skill from the point, Clarkson’s great defenders (I would be lying if I didn’t call them good to great) struggle to move the puck and be involved in the offense. Cornell also has a good mix of skill in its forwards lines, which its rival does not.

Whereas I felt that Clarkson’s offense could only get better, it has only struggled even more because despite getting shots, it just cannot score. That struggle has led to frustration throughout with the goaltending and defense also suffering because of it. Its ECAC numbers are unfathomable to me. It has scored one goal per game and its save percentage, among its goalies, is below .900. Because of its defense, Clarkson only allows 2.86 goals per game with a low save percentage, but scoring one goal a game probably won’t win many hockey games.

Tech looked like a team on Tuesday night, that came out with a mission. At times, it carried the play against its rival St. Lawrence. I haven’t watched the Golden Knights much in the last couple months, but the team I saw against SLU is the one I expected to see most of the season. I personally think Clarkson has a run in them, but they are certainly in a hole. That first win was indeed elusive and maybe it ends up being a huge monkey of their back.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2016 - 10:43 pm | Blogs, Commentary, ECAC, Notes, Thoughts, Ramblings