With both captains and numerous other players out due to injury, the RPI men’s hockey team dug deep and gutted out a tough 3-1 win over Brown on Friday, but came up short the next day in a 5-0 drubbing at the hands of Yale. The games marked the first weekend of a five-game road trip, and the Engineers only dressed 17 skaters—12 forwards and five defensemen—one below the typical amount.
Injuries all over the team forced Head Coach Dan Fridgen’s hand in making the lineups for the weekend. Senior captains Brad Farynuk and Kevin Croxton were out, as were sophomore Tyler Eaves, junior Kevin Broad, and senior Alexander Valentin. Valentin is out for the season, but the others could be back next week.
Freshman Kurt Colling scored for the second consecutive game, and senior Keith MCWilliams added his fourth goal in the last seven games to pace the Engineers against the last-place Brown Bears. After a scoreless first period in which the Engineers took and killed off three penalties, Colling got things started 2:33 into the second on a power play. A shot from junior Jake Luthi missed the net, but the puck bounced back in front. Freshman Matt Angers-Goulet and Colling both swiped at it, and Colling eventually sent it past a sprawling Adam D’Alba.
MCWilliams doubled the lead later in the period at the end of an odd-man rush. He came up the ice with junior Tommy Green, whose initial shot was saved by D’Alba. MCWilliams, though, slammed the rebound into a wide-open net with D’Alba down on the ice. “Things are going my way, and I’m thankful for it,” said MCWilliams.
Brown got back within one when they caught RPI’s penalty killers in transition. An odd-man rush developed and they quickly one-timed a shot past freshman goalie Mathias Lange. “Our defenseman got caught halfway there in no-man’s land,” said Fridgen. “I thought if he had been a little more aggressive, he probably could have negated the play, but he got caught and they made a nice play.”
Sophomore Jonathan Ornelas added his 13th goal of the season later in the second. The Engineers also survived a scary moment in the third when Lange collided with Bear Jeff Prough while playing the puck. He was down on the ice for a few minutes, but got back up and finished the game. “I just threw it to the corner where one of our guys was standing, and next thing I saw was the ceiling,” Lange said.
Fridgen was upbeat about the team’s performance and its ability to adjust between periods. “We played a much better second period than we did the first, and even though we didn’t score any goals in the third, I thought we played very, very well,” he said. “We kept our heads, played discipline, and played a real smart road game.”
On Saturday, though, nothing went right for the Engineers. Despite taking three penalties in the first period, the Bulldogs dominated the pace of the game right from the start. They were beating the Engineers to loose pucks and playing a much more physical game. Matt Nelson came up the left side and sent a quick wrist shot on net that beat Lange for the 1-0 lead at the 10:26 mark of the first.
Yale added to the lead in the second with goals by Joe Zappala and scoring leader Jeff Hristovski. Though RPI came out strong in the third period—“We came out and put a lot of pressure on them,” said Fridgen—junior Oren Eizenman was given a five-minute major penalty and a game misconduct for a hit from behind in the offensive zone on Yale defenseman Bill LeClerc. RPI had to kill off the major and had difficulty generating any offense while shorthanded. “We came close on a couple of occasions,” said Fridgen, “But that was a situation where we needed to be real disciplined since we were on the penalty to begin with.”
Things only got worse for the Engineers after Eizenman’s penalty ended. Will Engasser scored at the 14:49 mark of the third and Brad Mills tipped in a point shot by defenseman Matthew Craig with 1:43 left to bring the Bulldogs’ lead to 5-0. The Engineers could not manage a goal in the waning seconds and dropped the game by that final margin.
“I thought they played a much more physical game than we did,” said Fridgen. “There’s no question about that. … We basically needed to do to them what they did to us.”
With the split, the Engineers sit in a three-way tie for fifth place in the ECACHL. Their 5-4-3 record is tied with Yale (6-6-1) and Dartmouth (6-5-1). Clarkson and Union are tied for eighth with 11 points, and Colgate leads the pack with 19.
RPI hits the road again this weekend with games against Harvard on Friday and Dartmouth on Saturday. In the previous meetings this season, RPI beat the Crimson 3-2, but fell 4-1 to the Big Green.
