Friday, May 26, 2017

Conn College Men's Hockey 2016-17 Season in Review

As we languish in the oblivion of the offseason, we will recap each team's season, as we are wont to do, from last to first. Next up are the Camels of Connecticut College, who made slight improvements from the worst season in NESCAC history in 2015-16.
It was another tough season for the Camels, who missed
their co-captain Greg Liataud (#4 above) for the entire season

9. Conn College Camels         

    

2015-2016 Record:
2-13-3 Conference (9th in NESCAC)
4-16-3 Overall 

Stats:
Overall  (Conference Rank)                       Conference Games (conf. rank)
Offense: 2.13 G/Gm (9th)                             Offense: 1.78 G/GM (9th)
Defense: 3.22 G/GM (8th)                            Defense: 3.18G/GM (7th)
Power Play: 13/94 -13.8% (10th)                     Power Play: 8/69 -11.6% (10th) 
Penalty Kill: 80/97 - 82.5% (7th)                   Penalty Kill: 63/77 - 81.8% (6th)
Penalty Minutes per game - 14.4 (10th)            Penalty Minutes per game - 14.6(10th) 

Season Review 
When you reach rock bottom, there is nowhere to go but up.

...or something to that effect. Conn College did not make a phoenix like rise from the ashes of a 2015-16 campaign, which saw the Camels becomes the first NESCAC team to never win a conference game all season. They did however, improve, moving out of the basement one spot to ninth and actually winning not one, but two! conference games, albeit both against last place Middlebury. The home win against the Panthers was the first win of any kind in New London since the Camels won their first ever home NESCAC Quarterfinal in overtime against Hamilton in 2015.

Out of conference, the Camels scored a win in their only non-tournament game at home against Manhattanville. In the Skidmore Invitational Thanksgiving weekend, they dropped a pair against the host Thuroughbreds in the opening round and then in the consolation game to Fitchburg State  They closed out 2016 in the Codfish Bowl, first losing to the host Beacons of UMass-Boston in the opening round, then vanquishing the Ravens of Franklin Pierce, named after the Bowdoin alum and widely maligned former President of the United States.

The Camels were in most games, losing eight contests by one goal and another two by two goals. The largest gain statistically came on the defensive end with Jim Ward's crew giving up nearly a goal game less than in the 2015-16 season. Four goalies saw action with the two frosh, Avery Gobbo and Connor Rodericks, solidying themselves as the netminders of choice. In all, eleven freshmen played at least on game during the season.

Despite contributions from neophytes like Jeff Thompson and Jacob Moreau, the top of the scoring board belonged to the seniors as it did in the previous season. Brian Belisle (grandson of legendary Mount Saint Charles coach), who had his first three seasons in New London hampered by concussions , fought back his senior year to lead the Camels in scoring with 19 points (11-8-19). Captain Joe Giordano served as assist master in the number two spot, netting 17 points (2-15-17) to close out his career.

Senior co-captain and blueliner Greg Liautaud missed the entire season and was listed as an assistant coach instead of a captain. I should know why, but at this current moment it escapes me.

High Point
The 3-1 win over Middlebury in late January was the first at Dayton Rink in nearly two years for the Camels. Conn College controlled play throughout, doubling the Panthers in shots and jumping out to a 3-0 lead in the second period. Belisle, who had scored the tying goal to force OT against Hamilton in the 2015 quarterfinals, scored what proved to be the game winning goal. Gobbo made 19 saves to pick up the win. Two NESCAC home games earlier the Camels also earned a hard fought 1-1 tie against nationally ranked Colby.

Low Point
The Camels followed up that win over Middlebury to stay in playoff contention with six losses, including four straight 2-1 decisions, which must have been demoralizing. One of those 2-1 losses must have been particularly hard to swallow: a Hamilton goal with two-tenths of a second left in regulation lifted the Continentals past the Camels.


MVP
Brian Belisle - No relation to SPHL defensemen of the Year and Middlebury alum Louis Belisle, this Belisle of the Mount Saint Charles Academy gang could have retired from hockey after missing the entire 2015-16 due to post-concussive syndromes. He didn't and he fought back to lead the Camels in scoring and he recently won the  Camel Athletics' version of a  perseverance award. I'm sure his grandfather, Bill Belisle, who was inducted into the USA Hockey 'Hall of Fame last fall, is proud.
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Thursday, May 25, 2017

Offseason News and Notes

It's 158 days until the start of NESCAC men's hockey team activities and it's currently graduation season, so let's catch up on some news and notes while we wait. We'll throw together some recruiting items in a separate post later on this summer, but for now, here are some tidbits to mull over for the time being. 

 Bill Kangas to Take Sabbatical for 2017-18 Season
Next season would have been Williams coach Bill Kangas' 29th as Ephs bench boss, but it will also be his son Ryan's senior season at SUNY Brockport. Kangas is taking a sabbatical in 2017-18 to both watch his son's senior season and to travel the country and study other hockey programs. Now retired Middlebury coach Bill Beaney took a sabbatical in 2002-03 to watch his son Trevor play his senior season at Princeton, so this isn't unprecedented. Current Panther coach and then Panther assistant Neil Sinclair coached Middlebury that season.

Like Sinclair, Williams assistant coach Mike Monti will take over behind the bench for a season. Monti is in his second stint as a Williams assistant. He was with Kangas in 2011-12, before leaving to join the staff of DI University of Vermont for three season until returning to Williamstown for the 2015-16 season. He'll take over a team that is losing eight seniors, including NESCAC first team blueliner Frankie Mork, and gaining nine recruits.

Williams is in the market for a new assistant coach for the 2017-18, so if you are interested, you can find out more and apply here.

 Tufts Hockey Documentary
Tufts graduating senior and men's hockey player Pat Lackey released a documentary (broken up into 16 episodes of about four minutes each) covering the 2016-17 Tufts Jumbos season entitled "Inside Tufts Hockey 2017" by Penalty Kill Productions. We got a glimpse of Lackey's production skills with his preseason Game of Thrones "Winter is Coming" preview for Tufts hockey, which you can watch here.

The doc series covers the season from preseason stairs workouts at Harvard Stadium until the aftermath of the NESCAC Quaterfinal  loss to Trinity. The series features interviews with players and coach Pat Norton, game and locker room footage, as well as some footage from around campus.

It captures the a capella talent of frosh blueliner Evan Haney, the chronic hip struggles of goalie Nik Nugnes, the career ending injury of Mason Pulde and more. A particularly poignant moment comes in Episode 15 with a candid soundbite from coach Norton talking about how players ending their careers have lost something they'll never get back again. Coach Norton, a D1 player at UNH himself (there's some old footage of his college days early in the season), admits that even coaching does not completely fill that void of  completing a collegiate playing career.

The final episode has some encouraging news for the Jumbos as Norton hints that an on-campus rink might be in the works. The lack of rink is one of the biggest hindrances for the Jumbos program, which has traditionally been weak in hockey but strong in other sports.

You can watch episode 1 below, and find all episodes here.



NESCAC in the Pros
In the North American pro ranks, the only postseason play for NESCAC alums came at the SPHL level.  Jon Landry's Bridgeport Sound Tigers failed to make the AHL playoffs. The 34 year old former Bowdoin star finished with 18 points (4-14-18) in 53 games for the New York Islanders' AAA affiliate. If Landry is back with the Islanders farm team next year, I still stand by my offer to the Islanders to pay top dollar for the god awful obstructed seats in Barclays if they call up Landry for just one game. No NESCAC players has graced an NHL sheet of ice since Guy Hebert last played for the organization that fleeces an obscene amount of money from me on a yearly basis come playoff time, the New York Rangers, in 2001.

Way down south in single A, several CACers plied their trade in the playoffs. Middlebury alum Louis Belisle ('14) made it to the SPHL semifinals with the Pensacola Ice Flyers before being ousted by the eventual champion Macon Mayhem. Belisle had a cup of coffee in the ECHL with the Florida Everblades, but spent the vast majority of the season with the pan-handle puckers of Pensacola. The former Panther had 50 points (18-32-50) in 52 games for the Ice Flyers en route to SPHL Defensemen of the Year.

Former Belisle teammate Evan Neugold ('16) spent 48 games with the Columbus Cottonmouths, Belisle's first pro team and now a defunct franchise, before finishing off the season with the Knoxville Ice Bears, where he joined another former Panther in Robbie Donahoe ('14). Donahoe began the year in the ECHL with the Manchester Monarchs and Utah Grizzlies, before spending the final 33 regular season games with the Ice Bears, a team with which he won an SPHL title in his first pro season back in 2014-15. The two former Middlebury stars went down in the first round of the playoffs.

Trinity alum Jackson Brewer ('15) spent the 2016-17 campaign with the Roanoake Rail Yard Dawgs for their inaugral SPHL campaign. They failed to make the playoffs but Brewer put up a 41 spot (  16-25-41) for the season. He had a welcome reunion with Sean Orlando, who spent a few games with the Virginia club on an ATO after he wrapped up his career at Trinity with a loss in the national title game against Norwich. The Cadet goalie in that game? None other than Ty Reichenbach, who joined both Brewer and Orlando on Roanoke for those final games of the season.

Colby's Jack Burton had the highest level of ATO experience spending four games with the ECHL's Indy Fuel during spring break.

New Rink for Colby in 2020
The NESCAC has a variety of shelf lives on their rinks, from Hamilton's Sage Rink - the oldest rink in all of D-III - to Bowdoin's Sid Watson Arena, opened in 2009 and the first rink to earn a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. Colby will have the newest rink in the conference come 2020 when a new,$200 million multi-sport athletic complex will be completed.  Unclear if Joe Biden made any hockey references in his commencement speech at Colby this past weekend.


Upwards and Onwards
The end of the year means picking new captains for the upcoming season and saying goodbye to former captains. I could tell you who some of these graduates or new captains are, but let's be lazy and let the NESCAC team twitter feeds (most have them now in #2017) tell us.











 As NESCAC seniors prepped last week for the next stage of their lives post hockey and college, the world tragically lost Chris Cornell on May 17th. I never saw Cornell with Soundgarden, but I did see him with Audioslave on Halloween 2005 - one day before Jon Landry officially began his final year of Bowdoin hockey - at the Tsongas Center, the current home of now UMass-Lowell coach and former Hamilton coach Norm Bazin. 

 In honor of the NESCAC seniors moving on and in remembrance of Chris Cornell and his legendary pipes, here's Audioslave with "Your Time Has Come" 
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Saturday, May 6, 2017

2016-17 Middlebury Panthers Year in Review

As we languish in the oblivion of the offseason, we will recap each team's season, as we are wont to do, from last to first. First up are the once mighty Panthers of Middlebury, who failed to make the NESCAC playoffs for the first time in program history. 
Stephen Klein hopes
his senior year will
be better than his junior campaign 
10. Middlebury
2015-16 Reccord

3-15-0 (10th in NESCAC)
3-19-2 Overall

Stats:
Overall (Conf. Rank)                                     Conference Games (Conf. Ranks)
Offense - 1.83 G/GM (10th)                                                       Offense - 1.78 G/GM (10th)
Defense - 3.58 G/GM (9th)                                                       Defense - 3.67 G/GM (10th)
Power Play - 14/79 17.9% (7th)                                              Power Play - 9/54 16.4% (7th)
Penalty Kill - 93/121 77% (10th)                                              Penalty Kill - 71/93  76% (10th) 
Penalty Minutes - 12.9/Gm (2nd)                                             Penalty Minutes - 13.3/Gm (2nd) 
Season Review
Year two of the Neil Sinclair regime saw the Panthers take a precipitous drop from a less than auspicious inaugral season for the coach. Middlebury could only dream of the mediocrity of the 2015-16 campaign in 2016-17 as the Panthers fell from fifth to last in the NESCAC standings.

The Panthers put up the worst win-loss percentage of any season for a program that began under the short Warren G Harding presidency in the 1920s. They also, however, featured a rookie laden lineup with all ten freshman on the roster receiving significant action and only two seniors (Andrew Neary and All-NESCAC soccer player Greg Conrad) lacin them up. Trevor Turnbull, one of said frosh, finished second on the team with 12 points (5-7-12).

The Panthers had problems in all facets of the game, finishing last in the conference in both scoring categories and  at or near the bottom in all special team categories, as well as outshooting opponents in only two contests all season.   In net, junior Stephen Klein received the bulk of the minutes as he did in his first two seasons in Vermont. The Saskatoon, Saskatchewan native finished last in GAA at 3.44 and 11th of 14 in save percentage (.907) for qualified goaltenders.

The Panthers had a typical tough non-conference schedule with two dates each against perenial powerhouse Plattsburgh and eventual national champion Norwich, who took out Hamilton in the NCAA Quarterfinals and Trinity in the natty title. The Panthers played their Green Mountain rivals quite tightly, losing by only one goal in November at the Primelink and tying the Cadets 2-2 at Middlebury in January. In 31 games, Norwich only didn't win four with a 27-1-3 record.

High Point
There are very few high points in a season which features a winning percentage similar to the batting average of an MLB pitcher, but we forced this construct on you, so we will choose one. The three Panther wins on the season all came within a four game span  in late January/early February.

Middlebury finally broke into the W column in the sixteenth game of the season. By that point they had gone 0-13-2 and had already lost as many games in an entire season since 1987-88 - the second Reagan administration  - when they lost 16 games. The Panthers buckled down at home against Bowdoin and two juniors stepped up, Klein with 32 saves and Vincent Gissonti with two tallies to deliver the 5-1 victory.

After losing at Conn College to startoff the next weekend (Conn College's only two conference wins in the past two seasons were the season sweep of Middlebury), Stephen Klein had one of the best performance of his career, stopping 41 shots for a 1-0 shutout of Tufts. They then returned home for another 1-0 victory this time over Wesleyan. The Panthers sat just four games out of a NESCAC playoff spot with five to play...

Low Point 
...but then the Trinity game happen. The Panthers then recent defensive prowess (four goals allowed total in four games) - went by the wayside and the Bantams throttled Middlebury 11-3. The Panthers finished out the season with four more loses, including totally losing their cool in the penultum game of the season against Hamilton when the Panthers got whistled for 54 penalty minutes and gave up fourteen power plays to the Continentals.

MVP
Vincent Gissonti (F, '18) The junior from Montreal reached double digit goals (10-3-13) for the first time in his career and became the first Panther to do so since the 2014-15 season.

It's been over a decade since the last of Middlebury's eight national titles, but they had never before missed the NESCAC playoffs, let alone finished in last place. 
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