Playoff push picking up for Princeton

With the penultimate weekend of the men's hockey season looming just around the corner, fans from all around the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Hockey League (ECACHL) sit on tenterhooks, anxiously poring over the standings and schedules, trying to predict where their favorite teams will stand when the dust has settled.

All playoff seeds from one to 12 are yet to be determined, and all 12 teams still have a shot at a top-four finish and the first-round bye that comes with it.

"Our league is so close it's unbelievable," senior goaltender BJ Sklapsky said. "Right now it's very similar to the playoffs, where the intensity for both teams is jacked straight up."

Princeton (10-12-3 overall, 7-9-2 ECACHL) currently sits in eighth, four points out of fourth place. Parity in the standings, however, is a double-edged sword for a Tiger squad in the thick of the race: It is also four points from the bottom.

"Right now, it's really hard," freshman forward Mark Magnowski said. "We gotta battle for a home playoff position. It's so tight that it's already playoff hockey right now."

With two wins this weekend at Colgate (13-15-4, 7-8-3) and Cornell (12-9-4, 8-6-4), Princeton could potentially leapfrog over three teams, including the Raiders, to move into a fourth-place tie with the Big Red. The challenge for the Tigers will be to take out two consistently strong home teams in their own buildings.

"[Colgate and Cornell are] both good teams," senior forward Darroll Powe said. "They both have a history of doing well in our league, and they're both tough to play in their rinks."

The Raiders last faced off in Princeton this past Nov. 18 when goal keeper Mark Dekanich turned aside 49 Tiger shots to lead Colgate to a 4-2 victory. The previous night, the Big Red defeated the Orange and Black, 3-2, on the strength of three early goals and a staunch defensive effort.

Though the Tigers had no luck against either team earlier in the season, the players believe the team has found its groove and will be ready.

"After we lost [to Colgate and Cornell last November] we went on a good streak where we found our image, the way we want to play every game," Magnowski said. "We had a little skid there, but the way we're playing right now, I think we have a good shot."

The skid to which Magnowski referred was Princeton's disappointing 1-6-1 start to the season, with the fifth and sixth of those losses coming at the hands of the Raiders and the Big Red.

"Both of those games we had a chance to win, it's just a matter of burying chances," Powe said.

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After that weekend, the Tigers turned their season around with a 6-1-1 run. Since then they're only 3-5-1, but it's clear that the team has made great strides. It's currently on pace to increase its win total for the fourth straight season while scoring more goals than last year and giving up fewer.

Sklapsky cited the emergence of the freshmen, including Magnowski, who is 13th in ECACHL rookie scoring, as a key component of the team's progress throughout the season.

"Coming to the end of the season, the so-called 'freshmen' or so-called 'rookies' are no longer the freshmen of the team," Sklapsky said. "They've kind of earned their wings this year. They're just another part of the game plan, another part of the puzzle."

With the playoffs looming in the not-so-distant future, Magnowski will look to ensure that all the pieces of Princeton's game plan fit together this weekend.