Welcome to the cellar, ladies and gentlemen.
For the first time in recent memory, the Rensselaer Engineers are dead last in the conference halfway through the season. It is time to step back and consider what brought about the 0-5-1 ECAC streak that has led RPI to this point.
If you ask the players, most of them will blame themselves, and rightly so. After all, they are the ones out there on the ice night after night. They are the ones drawing untimely penalties, blowing early leads, and choking in the important games while posting a 6-3-1 non-conference record.
If, on the other hand, you were to ask Head Coach Dan Fridgen, he would probably blame somebody else. He came down hard on his players in the papers after the fruitless North Country trip, and talked almost exclusively about one call by the officials after the team’s breakdown at Union last week. He is admittedly frustrated, but that is no excuse for failing to own up to serious problems with the Engineers that can be laid squarely at his feet.
RPI has been hurt in most of their recent conference games by penalties and defensive errors at inopportune moments—discpline has been lacking. Matt Murley said it himself last week: “We need to learn to not shoot ourselves in the foot.” Surely teaching things such as this is part of the role of coach; in any sport, an undisciplined team is a sign of poor coaching. At the end of the recent Union game, a fight broke out as the final horn sounded. Union’s head coach was out on the ice trying to break it up. Fridgen was nowhere to be seen—he didn’t even come out to shake hands with the opponents. Class is also something to be desired in a head coach.
(Side note: I find it unlikely to be a coincidence that as a player at Colgate, Fridgen picked up the school’s career record in penalty minutes, a mark he still holds.)
Another problem has been the letdown in the goaltending department. Nathan Marsters was simply outstanding last year, but after a rocky start, Fridgeon began platooning Marsters and Kevin Kurk. Kurk is another excellent keeper, and I certainly don’t begrudge him the ice time, but it can be difficult for an athlete to mentally get into the game as much when he’s sitting on the bench half the time. Fridgen should choose a starting goaltender and then stick with him.
The Engineers have also let several games slip away from them. In their six-game winless streak in ECAC contests, RPI has blown two-goal leads against Harvard and Union, as well as letting Brown tie the game in the last few minutes of regulation. In each of the other three matches, the opponents scored twice in the third period, putting the game out of reach—RPI has been unable to consistently maintain their intensity for the full sixty minutes, and again, this is at least in part the fault of the coaching staff for allowing the players to ease up late in the game.
Another telling quote from Murley: “When we put it all together, we’re going to be a scary team.” More than anything else, the Engineers’ problems have been caused by an inability to get all aspects of their game going at once. And, more than anything else, keeping the entire team in the game is the job of the coach.
The thing is, Murley’s right: He and Marc Cavosie are as good a scoring tandem as any in college hockey. We know the goaltending is there, and the defense is capable of holding off opposing scoring threats while contributing at the other end of the ice. Two tough overtime wins during the holiday tournament demonstrated that the players have the ability to keep the intensity level up for sixty minutes and more. In short, the Engineers have all of the components of a powerhouse team, save one: a coach who can take them to the top.
