Cornell-Michigan State game 1 postmortem

Thoughts on the first MSU-Cornell game and the 1-1 tie. Seems as if a 1-1 tie in game 1 of the series, seeing how strong Michigan State turned out to be, is a passable outcome. Other thoughts, like from people who saw it with their own two eyes?

GOOD

David McKee is for real. 1 goal allowed in 37 shots (.973 save percentage) is sensational. Got to feel better about 1GA here than the average of 1 apiece allowed to Harvard, Brown, or the opening weekend special olympics teams. (Note the USCHO game story making it look like McKee’s just a kid in his second season as opposed to already being a seasoned veteran: “McKee, only a sophomore, played with the composure of a seasoned veteran on the way to career highs in shots faced at 37 and saves with 36.”)

Penalty kill defense. Okay, it would have been better if Cornell allowed 0x8 power plays to MSU instead of 1x8. And almost another man-short goal late in the third. Cornell goes from scoring a man short goal every lunar eclipse to almost one every weekend.

Didn’t lose on the road.

Got stronger as the game wore on. Outshot MSU in the third period.


BAD

No offense. Sorry, 1 goal worth of offense. It will have people wondering: Is this 2002-2003 all over again?

Cornell looked like goons. Cornell took 8 penalties including Pokoluk’s major in OT to 3 for MSU. And the second hitting from behind ejection in two games for Cornell. Ouch.

Carefoot's injury.


WISHFUL THINKING

Cam Abbott misses chance to be part of Cornell (regular season) legend. If he’d made something out of the man-short opportunities late in the third period, Cornell would look like wizards, the streak would be intact (well, 5 wins in a row), and Cornell wouldn’t go to OT where Pokoluk would make Cornell look bad drawing that major.

Does anyone have a sense of the severity of Carefoot's injury?

[Q]redredux Wrote:

Does anyone have a sense of the severity of Carefoot's injury?[/q]

If they do let's hope the don't discuss it on the Forum. Let any possible injury reports come from the team.

As everyone has noted, McKee really stood on his head last night and kept us from losing. From the Lansing paper:[q](McKee played a great game. We peppered him and had a lot of great chances." (MSU player Ash) Goldie said. "I don't know how he made that save on Booth. It hit the post, then (his) back and came around and I don't know how it ended up in his glove.
"I started laughing out there. I couldn't believe it."[/q]Simply put, he was amazing.
MSU outhustled, outskated and outplayed us completely in the first period. It was a little less tilted in the second and then we did get a lot of good pressure in the third. Every time we tried to clear the puck out from behind the net it seemed there were two white shirts surrounding the red one. MSU was reading the play quickly and we weren't reacting or passing quickly. There was very little hitting, probably because we were afriad of their spedd and getting out of posiiton. Not a good performance, but I'll take the point. If the team comes out with better intensity on Sunday I think we can certainly win.

Carefoot's injury is what it is. I think if MSU saw him get hurt, they're thinking maybe he's not going to play Sunday, and if he is playing hurt, they're going to try to skate around him, check him harder, whatever. If they try to re-injure his injury, that goes beyond the bounds of fair play, at least when it's our player who's hurt. Would we have the same decent feelings toward an injuried Noah Welch?

In the pros there's an injury reporting requirement so that gamblers with inside information don't have an advantage. I think that makes sense for college hoops and football because there's gambling, too, although you've got a balancing test between a (highly publicized) student's right to privacy and the public good. For hockey, I don't recall seeing a morning line on Cornell-Princeton last time I was in Vegas.

There are no injury reporting requirements in the pros - except for football.

God damn, I love McKee!

[Q]billhoward Wrote:




BAD

No offense. Sorry, 1 goal worth of offense. It will have people wondering: Is this 2002-2003 all over again?




Edited 1 times. Last edit at 11/13/04 07:05AM by billhoward.[/q]

While scoring only 1 goal and the team's overall play (except McKee) was disappointing, I wouldn't associate 02-03 with much of anything bad. If Cornell goes to the Frozen Four again this year I will be extremely happy. Barring any big name players going pro, I'll be surprised if next season isn't better than this one.

Perhaps the reference to the 2002-03 season was cryptic, even in light of the "no offense" lead-in. In that almost-championship season, Cornell was scary good on defense and you could pretty much count on holding any team in the nation to 2, maybe 3 goals, and odds were Cornell could net N+1 goals at the other end. Except you knew somewhere along the way there'd be a couple times you'd give up 4 and it would be a crucial game, say the national semifinals, and it was uncertain if you could get 4 as well and force the game to OT, or maybe even put in 5.

Making the Final Four is awesome when you haven't done it for a while - a long while. But making the title game and winning is a different plateau altogether. There was one of those USCHO quickie polls last year which asked what you'd rather have your team do, and I believe the winner was "Win it all one year, not even make the playoffs next year," over a bunch of other choices including "be great every year but never win it all." The former being the RPI / Adam Oates metaphor. There was no "return to the era of Ken Dryden / Brian Cropper" choice to vote on.

MSU is killing Wisconsin, undefeated and the 5th ranked team in college football. A let down tomorrow?

[Q]atb9 Wrote:

MSU is killing Wisconsin, undefeated and the 5th ranked team in college football. A let down tomorrow?[/q]Yeah, all we have to do is get their football team on skates.

Game is at 2pm...students will be going crazy tonight...do you expect all of them to make it? A State fan posted on USCHO that the crowd was terrible for the friday game. I can't imagine it will get any better.

[Q]atb9 Wrote:

MSU is killing Wisconsin, undefeated and the 5th ranked team in college football. A let down tomorrow?[/q]

And Cornell made an amazing come from behind aginst the seventh or eighth-rated (in the Ivies) Columbia Lions football squad.

An omen also?

I see where you're coming from. I hope I'm wrong, but I would say after last year's disappointing season, winning it all this year is well beyond realistic expectations. I'm hoping that this year's team can do as well as the 01-02 squad. Get to the NCAAs and win a game, giving the freshmen and sophomores some solid NCAA experience. If Cornell can pull that off, with such a small graduating class, we'll have a good shot at winning a title next year.

Patience, folks. Let's get this game in perspective. Cornell played in their house, and MSU had how many more games under their belts against quality opponents, losing a few along the way? In the long run, it's good strategy to schedule a game or two at this point of the season against a quality opponent to help expose shortcomings on the team. If the team showed less than their best last night, but still ended up with a point, this is not a bad outcome, if it helps them fine-tune their game and come back later in the season sharper for the experience. Let's see how Sunday's game goes before we start looking at this season as another rebuilding year.

Well put. The season is yet young, it's on the road, it's against a team with twice as many games played. In one sense, being tied by MSU (or Cornell gaining a tie vs. MSU) is the best possible outcome. A lesson learned without the pain of a loss. Schafer has a day and a half to tell the team what miserable, rotten worms they are ... that that 4-0 record going in to MSU was a fluke provided by the quality of the early opponents ... a team with Cornell's god-given talents could knock out MSU but it also could get blown out by MSU because MSU has shown what a hard-working team can do to Cornell in shutting down the Cornell "nation-leading" offense [while at the other end, um, put up one goal in 37 tries?] ... Cornell was lucky to escape ... lucky thing McKee has the best game of his life and bails out the other 18 of you ... yada yada yada. Let's just hope he doesn't punch a cinderblock dressing room wall to make his point again.

Still, T/W for the weekend is going to be huge vs. T/L given that the only other non-conference pair of games starts off against (currently) No. 1 BC. There is the very real chance that we could be a good team and yet, in our final four non-conf games, be 0-3-1.

I'm also thinking if eLynah existed in that 1969-70 season, we'd be griping about all the close escapes, how horrible things were with Dryden gone, etcetera.

Last season wasn't disappointing. Finishing second with a 15-8-6 record after losing the largest and most talented senior class in the last 30 years was extraordinarily successful. It ended with a bummer weekend, but let's not let that color an otherwise above-expectations season.

OTOH, it shows how far Schafer has taken the program that a finish better than 25 of the previous 30 years [www.tbrw.info] is in retrospect deemed disappointing.

I'm not asking for a medical analysis of his condition or for anyone to violate medical privacy statutes, just a sense of whether he's out for Sunday, out for the season, or what. I thought someone who was there or listened on the radio might have a sense of the severity. Carefoot is a key player -- I'm curious how long we'll be without him.

I read an interview with Brian Cropper not too long ago - I believe the link was posted on the forum - in which he described his experience in 69-70 as very similar to what McKee's going through. Not every game was a blowout. There were some nights in which Cropper had virtually nothing to do but others in which the rest of the Cornell game wasn't clicking at all, and the outcome was pretty much up to him. Good teams can win ugly, if they have to.

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:
OTOH, it shows how far Schafer has taken the program that a finish better than all but 2 of the previous 30 years is in retrospect deemed disappointing.[/q]

The last 30 years overall was disappointing for Cornell fans after, what, six final fours in seven years. The letdown was so gradual. Post-1970, the Harkness-recruited, Bertrand-coached teams made the final four two of the next three years and so no one knew at the time (1974 and on) if it was just the law of averages swinging the other way when there were no final fours year after year until 1980. By the end of that time when it became clearer that Dick Bertrand was not possessed of the Harkness magic, it was hard, perhaps too hard, to reverse things. Through the late 1970s, Cornell was putting up 20-9 kinds of seasons (hard to fire a coach for that) and getting great individual players ... but not winning the ECACs or making the NCAAs (until 1980). You can play so many what-ifs: What if Bertrand had stepped out say in 1975 ... or what if Cornell had turned to the almost-as-youthful wizard of the North Country, Clarkson's Len Ceglarski, to directly succeed Harkness ... etcetera.

In that 30-year interim, Harvard has played for the title three times and RPI and Colgate and St. Lawrence have also been there. Others such as Dartmouth have made final fours. OK, Cornell also, but not the almost-every-year kind of thing of 1967-73.

It really feels as if Cornell is once again on the cusp of greatness. We'll see. We're not alone in wondering what happened to our long-ago years of greatness. Imagine being an Alabama football fan post Bear Bryant, UCLA fan post John Wooden ... or a Penn State fan the last five years. (Joe Pa has to hang it up.)

One's satisfaction with the current level of Cornell hockey (or football or lacrosse) depends on when you came on the scene. A grizzled veteran is going to think back to Dryden and Harkness. If your baseline is Cornell hockey of the mid- to late-1990s, then the last two years have been quite good. Better still, if you're a junior now, what you know is a ECAC title / Final Four and an ECAC playoff with home ice, plus what is likely to be a good year this year, and probably a final four contender the year after.

For someone under 25, history seems to be so, like, ancient. A Cornellian at the tail end of the Harkness era would never have thought back 20 years to the Cornell football era when we played and beat Michigan - in football! So, too, it probably seems as if Dryden is ancient history. Ah, well.

[q] Game is at 2pm[/q]

It's at 1pm. (Not trying to be anal, I just wanted to mention this in case folks weren't looking at the schedule themselves.)

Oops! Great catch! Game is indeed at 1pm...one hour from now!

Wait, I'm a bit confused. USCHO lists the game as starting at 1pm, while both the CU website and CSTV lists the starting time at 2pm. Which one is it?

I was going off of USCHO...MSU athletics website says 2:05pm. Oy. Is MSU in the eastern time zone? I'm really confused. I would say ignore USCHO but who knows...

[msuspartans.collegesports.com]

Gametracker says start time TBA

fwiw, the MSU athletics site lists the game at 2:05pm EST

[msuspartans.collegesports.com]

There isn't a pregame show on WHCU right now, so 2:00 sounds like the correct start time.

Sorry about stirring things up; the three places I looked (USCHO, eLynah and printed schedule from the CHA) said 1pm.

Just fired up Gametracker and that's what it's showing.

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:

Last season wasn't disappointing. Finishing second with a 15-8-6 record after losing the largest and most talented senior class in the last 30 years was extraordinarily successful. It ended with a bummer weekend, but let's not let that color an otherwise above-expectations season.

OTOH, it shows how far Schafer has taken the program that a finish better than 25 of the previous 30 years is in retrospect deemed disappointing.



Edited 3 times. Last edit at 11/14/04 01:30PM by Greg Berge.[/q]

I agree with part of what you said. It's because Schafer has taken the program so far that last season was disappointing. Unless we can be satisfied with one Frozen Four appearance every 23 years, the team should have the goal to make the 16 team NCAA playoffs every year. A 16-10-6 record and a second place ECAC finish isn't nearly as successful as it would have been 25 years ago because the ECAC is nowhere near as good today as it was in the 70's and 80's.

You're right that expectations are so high with Mike Schafer. At least with the current Mike Schafer. We forget that after he won the ECACs in his first two years (meaning the team had a lot of Brian McCutcheon in it), Schafer then suffered through seasons of 15, 16, and 14 losses before the turnaround 16-12-5 season of 2001 and then the three great seasons leading up to this year.

I still think there's a lot of randomness to life. Losing the 2002 ECAC title to Harvard in 2002 in multiple overtimes, that could've gone either way. Losing the NCAA semis to UNH, that could have gone the either way in 2003. Losing a best-of-three series to Clarkson last year, what are the odds that'd happen again?

So let's see how randomness plays itself out at Vermont this coming Friday.