Clarkson and St. Lawrence

Ah, the first road trip of the spring semester. Thankfully the weather looks like it'll cooperate for this year's trip to the North Country.

This weekend last year was... pretty bad. Lots of snow on the trip, and the temperature was around 10 F the whole time. I was staying at a friend's house, which was supposedly in Canton but required driving for several miles through back roads to get there. These were the kinds of roads which are flanked by farmland, and the snow drifts on either side of the road kept blowing powder back at the car. The roads hadn't been plowed for a few days, so every so often we'd drive through drifts of a few inches. It's a different world up there.

On the hockey ice, Cornell suffered one of its worst defeats in recent memory: an 8-1 disaster at Canton. It was the kind of game which just made you laugh after a while. Scrivens was pulled in the second period, and Schafer pulled Garman early in the third to try to get some offense; SLU scored an empty netter. After the game, I was struck by how much nicer the SLU fans are than the Lynah Faithful. At Lynah, students would have been jumping all over themselves to taunt the hopeless opposition and their fans. At St. Lawrence, multiple strangers came up to me and expressed their condolences on the game, saying "we've been in that situation before; hope you rebound tomorrow night."

The 8-1 game was only Cornell's third loss of the season, but it exposed some glaring weaknesses (i.e. can't handle a two-man forecheck). Cornell won only one of its next five games, and thus began the slide from atop the ECAC and Pairwise rankings. Cornell recovered defensively, but couldn't get any offense in a 0-0 tie against Clarkson the following night.

On paper, this year's North Country weekend should be manageable. Clarkson has a pathetic record of 5-12-3 (1-5-2 ECAC), and has only won twice since late October. St. Lawrence (10-8-3) has had an up-and-down season, losing to Maine 10-1 over Thanksgiving but having some other strong non-conference results (beating Boston College). They've only lost once at home all season.

As has been the case in recent seasons, this is one of those weekends in which everything depends on Cornell. The Big Red have the talent to win both of these games, and win them easily. But many questions remain.

Will the team have recovered from the stomach bug? Even if they are recovered, has the lack of practice this week hurt them?

Will they be able to carry forward their momentum from UNH, or will the lethargic squad which showed up in Florida show up once again this weekend?

This was right around the time when Ben Scrivens began to crack last season. Will he be able to avoid another second-half letdown?

Having missed the UNH game, I feel a little out of the loop, as it's been a couple of very long weeks since I saw the team play. I've heard that some guys who were struggling earlier (Riley and Brendon Nash, Locke Jillson) had an excellent game up in New Hampshire, so we'll see if they can continue this strong play.

What may help Cornell is that both Clarkson and St. Lawrence have terrible penalty kills; combined with Cornell's high rate of success, this means we're likely to see some good chances for the Big Red on the powerplay.

Still, plenty of factors point towards doom.

In each of his three trips to Canton, Scrivens has been pulled by the second period. Supposedly the awful siren was donated by the local fire department; we've been hearing a lot of it recently.

Cornell last earned a sweep in the North Country in 2005, and is 0-5-3 since then.

I think the Big Red will pull out a win tomorrow against Clarkson, 3-2 or something close. Then another loss in Canton, 4-1. Cornell has only earned one four-point weekend all season, and there's no reason to expect that to happen this time.

Clarkson students are back, so that should be exciting. St. Lawrence resumes on Monday, but I expect a lot of people to be back by Saturday.