Thursday, March 4, 2010

NHL.com Article on Cornell Hockey

NHL.com writes about Cornell hockey.

Yes, there are the errors -- Ben Gallagher, Cornell at #9 and a lock for the NCAA tournament, Cornell playing 110 years of NCAA hockey -- but even though the author is their in-house NCAA guy, I was pretty impressed with the quality of the article.

Quotes from Scrivens, Schafer, and Byron Bitz '07. Scrivens has some nice comments about Ken Dryden and about not taking anything for granted. But here's something from Schafer which puzzled me:
"When the guys see him focused and ready to go, they know they'll get a real good performance out of him," said Big Red coach Mike Schafer, in his 15th year, about his stellar goalie. "We're not senior top-heavy, which is good. We've got three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie. If you could script it, that's what you'd want every year."
I would argue that Cornell is quite "senior top-heavy." Assuming Riley Nash leaves, Cornell loses 45 of its 91 goals scored this season. I think the team's defense and goaltending will be just fine next year, but it's tough to replace guys like Greening, Nash, and Gallagher.

The article certainly gets across the fact that Cornell tends to lose big games by failing to score. Ever. Consider that in Cornell's last three NCAA Elite Eight games, with the winner going to the Frozen Four, the Big Red have scored a total of two goals. No amount of quality defense and goaltending (see, for example, McKee stopping the first 59 shots against Wisconsin) is going to win you games when you can't get the puck in the net.

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen, but Cornell is still just two losses away from missing the NCAA tournament completely, and ending any hope of another Frozen Four, or some sort of Dryden-esque playoff performance by Scrivens. The team needs to win next weekend, hopefully in two games.

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