Cornell at Union 2/28

[Dafatone]

I finally agree with BL on one thing -- I don't believe injuries are the *main* reason for this year's (relative) struggles.

What do you think it is, out of curiosity?

I'm split between injuries, Shane's bad year, the hilariously bad PP, bad luck, and Seger singlehandedly being the difference between this team being okay and being very good.

I tend to lean towards Shane, bad luck, and Seger.

[adamw]

I finally agree with BL on one thing -- I don't believe injuries are the *main* reason for this year's (relative) struggles.

What do you think it is, out of curiosity?

I'm split between injuries, Shane's bad year, the hilariously bad PP, bad luck, and Seger singlehandedly being the difference between this team being okay and being very good.

I tend to lean towards Shane, bad luck, and Seger.

The only thing I'm sure that it's not, is the abilities of the coaches (particularly vis-a-vis who else came and went, see: Clarkson, etc...)

Otherwise - "all of the above" and then some, including some portion of randomness/luck. But since I'm not there every day in practice, I couldn't even begin to speculate what intangible factors may be a part as well.

[Tom Lento]

I mentioned in the game thread the last time Cornell played Quinnipiac that they appear to have had almost no injuries the entire season. So, yeah, if you compare the team with the ~best injury luck in all of D-1 hockey agains a team with very bad injury luck, you're going to see some differences. But I don't think Cornell's injury luck is uniquely bad. By the time NoDak came into Lynah this season, they couldn't even put out a full lineup, and that was only a few weeks into their season. Harvard has been decimated by injuries. These are just some examples off the top of my head.

The thought that Cornell might have unique injury situation never crossed my mind. Since I started following college hockey there have always been a few teams with a bunch of injury trouble - it's the nature of the game - and in the dominant majority of cases that I can recall they ended up having disappointing seasons.

My point is that teams that struggle to field stable lineups tend to struggle in general. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe NoDak was a consensus top 5 team in pre-season and at the end of the RS they're 18th in PWR. Harvard was a pre-season top 4 ECAC contender with an outside shot at national relevance, and they sit in 7th and are well below .500.

This is ultimately an empirical question of some idle interest to me, so I'll start a new thread with some data if I get motivated enough to compile it. From a cursory look it seems most of the teams in the top 10-15 in PWR had tremendous stability amongst their top 9 scoring forwards and top 5 scoring D - that is to say, they look a heck of a lot more like Quinnipiac or Denver (I checked them out too just because defending champs) than Cornell or NoDak.

The best argument that injuries don't explain even half of Cornell's struggles is: the two weakest points of this team, by far, have been goaltending and PP. Shane has apparently been healthy the entire season. The PP was also very healthy for the first half of the season, by which time it was already among the absolute worst in the country. It did see injuries to players like Major and Castagna later on, but it has actually improved since then.

I've talked about the PP a lot already, and I don't think it's much of an argument. Improving a struggling PP requires one of three things - the PP unit to figure it out given whatever ordinary practice time they get, a change of personnel, or an increase in practice time dedicated to improving the PP. Injuries at the level Cornell has experienced make it very difficult to switch personnel or devote enough quality practice time, to say nothing of allocating additional practice time, to PP improvement. That leaves the first option, which also happens to be the option that's least likely to work once a unit has shown that it's just fundamentally struggling to generate offense.

The goaltending is also interesting to me. It's not clear how much of Shane's struggles are Shane and how much are due to defensive breakdowns, the latter of which, again, are attributable to some extent to the constant shuffling forced by the injuries. But the former.... I dunno. I'm curious about these advanced goaltending stats CHN has up now, maybe I'll dig into those a bit more.

On the other hand, our 5x5 metrics are actually quite good. Our possession numbers are strong. If injuries were having a major effect on depth and practice bodies, then it seems to me that we'd see the effects of this on team-wide metrics rather than on goaltending and PP numbers whose units have been largely (or entirely) healthy.

This is a great point, although I think it points towards bad luck as much as anything - Cornell has, after all, outscored opponents by 22 goals at even strength this season. More evenly distributed scoring is maybe good enough for 2-3 extra wins, right?

My general impression of this season is that outside the PP (which is consistently poor) the team has mostly been wildly inconsistent. The games I've followed all seem to feature 2 to 2.5 periods of solid to excellent hockey and 10-20 minutes of bad giveaways and guys standing around puck watching. In some cases it was clearly late game fatigue but I've also seen it happen like the first or second period (think all the way back to that second NoDak game - super weird to look gassed and terrible in period 2 and come out guns blazing like a different team in period 3).

Personally, my take on all of this is what I said earlier - Cornell has had a ton of injuries, and the rest of the variance from expectations (goaltending struggles, worse-than-expected scoring luck, etc.) fit into the ordinary "shit happens" bucket that every hockey team deals with. I agree with Adam here that it's a mixture of factors, and I'm starting to really think bad luck is more important than I'd originally considered. I don't agree with Adam that injuries aren't the dominant consideration - the numbers I've seen and the experience I've had in other team sports context nearly all point in the same direction, which is that injuries really dropped both the floor and ceiling on this team's expected range. It would've taken an incredible performance for them to pull off a top 2 league finish and top 10 PWR RS, which I think was a pretty reasonable pre-season projection, and it wouldn't take that much to dump them down to where they ended up.

I'll add one other point to consider, which, again, I think of as "shit happens" but it's more us as fans than anything to do with the team - any pre-season projection of a top 10 finish is an assertion that the team is close enough to a "finished product" that they can find sustained success over the course of the season. What we saw in the first two weekends, and what we've seen in how the team is dealing with the injuries, is that that this group was still more of a work in progress. They could have - and I think would have - gotten close enough to pre-season expectations for most fans to feel at least satisfied with a strong season (if disappointed that this once again wasn't our year), but a team that's a work in progress at season open isn't likely to realize its potential if the roster is changing every week.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that they can salvage something in the playoffs. I'll be happy with every additional game at this point, because my expectations are not high.

[Chris '03]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

[Tcl123]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

[RichH]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Yes. One of 2 wins the entire season for them. They've always had some sort of voodoo over us.

[Trotsky]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Their first D-1 year we destroyed them at Achilles and then lost to them at Lynah.

(One of the very few games I do not have the box for; it is not deliberate.)

Thankfully, we were their second league win.  They won in Hanover 2-1 a month before. They also tied at Yale, so the first season they were 2-8-1 away and 0-11 home.

[Give My Regards]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Yes. One of 2 wins the entire season for them. They've always had some sort of voodoo over us.

It was actually their second league win; they had beaten Dartmouth a few weeks earlier.

[RichH]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Their first D-1 year we destroyed them at Achilles and then lost to them at Lynah.

(One of the very few games I do not have the box for; it is not deliberate.)

Thankfully, we were their second league win.  They won in Hanover 2-1 a month before. They also tied at Yale, so the first season they were 2-8-1 away and 0-11 home.

Beat me to the correction. I had always heard it was their first full-fledged D1 win.

https://www.collegehockeynews.com/schedules/team/Union/54/19911992

And of course the following year, THAT year, we were one of their THREE wins.

[Tcl123]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Their first D-1 year we destroyed them at Achilles and then lost to them at Lynah.

(One of the very few games I do not have the box for; it is not deliberate.)

Thankfully, we were their second league win.  They won in Hanover 2-1 a month before. They also tied at Yale, so the first season they were 2-8-1 away and 0-11 home.

Beat me to the correction. I had always heard it was their first full-fledged D1 win.

https://www.collegehockeynews.com/schedules/team/Union/54/19911992

God, that was an awful in game experience either way.

[adamw]

With Dartmouth's sweep, this game is officially Union's last win at Messa/Achilles.

Wasn't their first ecac league win at lynah? I could be imagining this.

Their first D-1 year we destroyed them at Achilles and then lost to them at Lynah.

(One of the very few games I do not have the box for; it is not deliberate.)

Thankfully, we were their second league win.  They won in Hanover 2-1 a month before. They also tied at Yale, so the first season they were 2-8-1 away and 0-11 home.

Beat me to the correction. I had always heard it was their first full-fledged D1 win.

https://www.collegehockeynews.com/schedules/team/Union/54/19911992

And of course the following year, THAT year, we were one of their THREE wins.

Well, I'll never forget their coach Bruce Delventhal crying while I was interviewing him post-game. I think the Dartmouth win was more insignificant, because they were hideous then. To win at Lynah for the first time, made him very emotional.

[Trotsky]

That is actually a very sweet story.  Thank you.