The good news is that it’s early. The bad news is that in a year when the men’s hockey team was finally supposed to put it all together, everything has begun to fall apart. To put things in perspective: With its next defeat, Princeton will have lost six games. Last season, the team’s sixth loss didn’t come until Feb. 14.
While the 2009-10 campaign is still young, the Tigers have to be asking themselves, “What’s going on here?” Part of the problem is that it hasn’t just been one thing that’s gone wrong. There are a few aspects of the game that Princeton has struggled with in the early going. If they can remedy some of these problems, there’s no reason to believe the Tigers won’t quickly return to last season’s form.
Offensive creativity
Through their first nine games, the Tigers have scored just 19 goals, or just over two per game. Worse still, Princeton is outshooting its opponents by just four shots per game, down from 10 per game last year. Especially in head coach Guy Gadowsky’s “crash the net” offensive scheme, generating shots is crucial to the Tigers’ success.
For the previous three seasons, a large part of that success was the play of Lee Jubinville ’09 and Brett Wilson ’09. Though the efforts of Darrol Powe ’07, Mike Moore ’08 and senior goaltender Zane Kalemba, along with Gadowsky’s coaching, have been frequently credited with Princeton’s meteoric rise — and deservedly so — the impact of Jubinville and Wilson seems to have been undervalued.
Since joining the Tigers’ roster at the outset of the 2005-06 season, the pair served as the team’s top playmaking duo. Jubinville — named ECAC Hockey Player of the Year in his junior year — is ninth in the list of Princeton’s all-time assist leaders, while Wilson ended his career in 10th. Each player possessed the rare ability to create opportunities not only for himself, but also for his teammates. Thus far this season, Princeton has struggled to find players that are capable of filling those shoes, and it’s shown up on the scoreboard.
While Gadowsky’s offensive approach does not require tremendous creativity, and while the Tigers do have a number of offensively talented players, Princeton’s familiar offensive fluidity has been notably absent.
Goaltending
It’s not especially shocking that the Tigers have had a bit of trouble putting the puck in their opponent’s net, thanks to the departures of Jubinville and Wilson. What is rather surprising have been their struggles to keep it out of their own.
Princeton was supposed to be all set in goal with the return of Kalemba, the reigning ECAC Hockey Player of the Year and a Hobey Baker Award finalist. But after a season in which his play was otherworldly to the tune of a 1.82 goals-against average and a .932 save percentage, Kalemba has been unusually human.
Kalemba has allowed 20 goals in six games, recording just one win in that span. While some of those goals are attributable to a less-than-stellar backcheck and a high number of odd-man rushes, Kalemba has simply not been as impenetrable as in years past.
In what may be an unrelated move, Gadowsky has begun to give junior netminder Alan Reynolds — who played in just one game a year ago — more time in goal. Thus far, Reynolds has performed well, notching a win in each of his first two starts this season before allowing five goals to a talented Colgate team on Nov. 21.
Though Reynolds has performed admirably in net, Gadowsky’s strategy of alternating his goalies does not seem to be paying off thus far. By playing Kalemba in only four of Princeton’s seven league contests, Gadowsky has not allowed his All-American goalie to find the rhythm he established a year ago.
Penalties
Last season, princeton was one of the least-penalized teams in the nation, with just 10.6 penalty minutes per game. This year, the Tigers are hovering at 10.9 penalty minutes per game. The difference? The timing of and the situations surrounding those penalties. Nearly without fail, the penalties have seemed to kill any sort of momentum that Princeton manages to create, giving its opponents needless opportunities. Last Wednesday, a relentless Quinnipiac team turned all four of the Tigers’ second-period penalties into goals in a dominating 5-1 win over the Orange and Black.
After the Tigers squandered an early lead against Harvard on Nov. 14, Gadowsky noted that a touch of sloppiness had begun to creep into the team’s play. “For a team that was the most disciplined in the nation last year,” he said, “we’re taking some penalties that can easily be avoided.”
If the Tigers can start avoiding those penalties, it will go a long way toward re-establishing the consistency they attained last season.
Constant focus
Four of princeton’s five losses this season have come by three or more goals. Last season, the Tigers only lost by three or more three times. To some extent, these blowouts may be attributable to an occasional temporary loss in focus. After last Wednesday’s blowout loss to Quinnipiac, senior forward and active leading points scorer Mark Magnowski noted that the team occasionally struggles with maintaining its intensity for an entire game.
“Each day, we need to be ready to play a full 60-minute game,” he said. “We talk about a lull that we go through sometimes. We’ve got to play a full 60 minutes to compete in college hockey.”
In a 5-2 loss to Yale on Oct. 31, what had been a 2-1 lead turned into a decisive defeat when Princeton allowed four goals in under 15 minutes during the third period.
After scoring the first goal against St. Lawrence on Nov. 6, the Tigers allowed four goals in under 15 minutes on their way to their second consecutive 5-2 loss.
Against Cornell on Nov. 20, Princeton allowed four goals in the game’s opening 25 minutes, while the Big Red held the Tigers’ offense in check. Princeton ultimately lost, 5-2.
Finally, Quinnipiac’s high-octane offense put four power-play goals past Kalemba in the first seven minutes of the second period on Nov. 25 to take a 4-0 lead. The Bobcats never looked back on their way to a dominating 5-1 win.
As the season unfolds, these games will likely prove to be aberrations as the Tigers’ regain their usual composure and intensity. To make that shift, however, Princeton will need to maintain its focus for all 60 minutes, as Magnowski pointed out.
While the early returns haven’t been pretty, and while Princeton sits in the bottom half of the ECAC Hockey standings, there remains no reason to panic. The Tigers have had to overcome a handful of injuries in the season’s opening weeks, most notably to junior defenseman Matt Godlewski, who has been out of action since the start of the season.
At this point, the Tigers feel as though they’re right on the brink of regaining last season’s form. As long as they are able to make a few minor adjustments in a few crucial areas, another trip to Albany for the ECAC Hockey Final Four is certainly not beyond their reach.
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