NESCAC Semifinal #1 preview 3/2/2019

#3 Amherst vs #2 Wesleyan  Hosted by Trinity  1 PM

Amherst (14-6-4; 10-4-4 NESCAC) 

Offense - 3.06G/GM (3rd)

Defense - 2.00 G/GM (3rd)

PIM - 8.8/GM (6th)

Power Play - 18.1% (5th)

Penalty Kill- 91.2% (1st)

Special Teams Net - +8 (2nd)

Wesleyan (16-7-5; 13-3-2 NESCAC)

Offense - 3.11G/Gm (1st)

Defense - 2.28 G/Gm (1st)

PIM- 8.6 /GM (7th)

Power Play - 20.3% (3rd) 

Penalty Kill - 90.5% (2nd)

Special Teams Net -  + 10 (1st)

The Lowdown: 

Last August, Ross Douthat - who gave a speech at Amherst in 2016 that I watched the webcast for along with tens, of...tens of other people - wrote an op-ed structured around a W.H. Auden poem calling for more humanities studies at elite institutions like Amherst at which humanities majors have dropped significantly in recent years. 

Douthat may be right that history serves as "repository of wisdom and example" but you can't turn to history as an example much in this matchup. For starters, that's because these two have met just once in the NESCAC playoffs, February of 2007 when the then fifth seed Lord Jeffs  downed the host fourth seed Wesleyan (the Cards highest regular season finish before this season) 2-0 in the quarterfinal. Amherst denied Wesleyan senior Will Bennet a chance at the history books with the blanking by keeping him out of the 100 point club (Bennett ended his career with 99 points). 

Overall, the history books heavily tilt to Amherst with a 72-21-9 advantage all time. More recently, however, the Cards hold a 2-1-4 advantage in the last seven, including a 1-1 tie this season down the road from Trinity in Middletown and a 1-0 win at Amherst thanks to a 47 save shutout from newly minted NESCAC Player of the Year Tim Sestak.  With regards to the most recent history regardless of opponent, Wesleyan was on a three game losing streak before last weekend's win while Amherst hasn't lost since that 1-0 blanking by the Cardinals in late January. It doesn't take a scientist or statistician to realize there is too much noise in any of these trends to draw any kind of conclusions. 

Amherst makes its first trip to the semifinals since 2016 when they lost the finals to host Trinity. Since then, the Cardinals have made their first two trips to the NESCAC semifinals but have yet to make it to the finals, losing 5-4 to Hamilton in 2017 and 5-1 to Colby last season at Trinity.
The Cardinals leading scorer, First Team All-NESCACer Walker Harris, had not scored in his first two playoff runs in the Cac, but the junior - a class that has made the semis every season on campus and has three of the Cards top four scorers in Harris, Spencer Fox and Tyler Wyatt - lit the lamp in the 4-1 victory over Middlebury in the quarterfinals and now sits at 75 career points, well situated to join the history books with a strong finish to this season and a solid senior campaign.

Last weekend, Second Team All-NESCAC blueliner Chad Malinowski helped deliver the Cardinals first ever home NESCAC MIH playoff win while his brethren from the lacrosse team prepped to begin their national title defense run with an intersquad scrimmage mere hundreds of yards away. He'll hope to delay the start of his lax season even further this weekend along with seven other Cards looking to be the first Wesleyan senior class to deliver a NESCAC championship.

For Amherst, their elder statesmen look to avoid being the first Amherst senior class since 2008 to graduate without a NESCAC title in their four years (the athletes formerly known as Jeffs won in 2009, 2012 and 2015). Led by All-NESCAC first team blueliner Phil Johansson, who had an assist in their last semifinal game back in 2016 (a 4-2 win over Middlebury), the senior class also includes John Festa, who only has nine goals in his collegiate career, but two of them came in that win over the Panthers, his only two goals of his freshman campaign. Festa also had an assist last weekend when the athletes now known as Mammoths avenged last season's quarterfinal blowout to Colby with a 5-1 trouncing of the Mules. Junior and First Team All-NESCACer Joey Lupo also scored a short handed tally in the quarterfinals victory.

Sestak is a lock in net for Wesleyan while Amherst is a bit more of a mystery. Jack Arena has gone with an international platoon in net, featuring sophomore Canuck Mike Cullen (1.75 GAA and .924 save percentage in 13  games) and junior Giancarlo Ventre (2.24 GAA and .923 save percentage in 12 games) from upstate New York. While they had been rotating NESCAC games, Ventre got the nod for the Mammoths in the final two regular season games, while Cullen started in the NESCAC quarters and had to make only 16 saves behind a typically disciplined Arena led defense. A pure rotation would call for Ventre, but who knows, maybe Arena has a leadership council that helps decide goalies like Terry Meagher did back in 2013. 

Come 1 PM, what the NESCAC history books say, or what the majors of  any of the players are,  or even their GAA, PIM, GPA or SAT scores are (don't release them or else!) won't matter as it will all be decided on ice, exactly the way it should be.


Pre-Game Tweet/Gram 
Note: Jake Donnelly was apologetic when it was pointed out by both by us and @NESCACicehockey (the word press blog guy) that his blog well pre-dates us, historically speaking. 

And finally, for the greatest fans in the world, the fans of @NESCAC hockey in general (including the man, the myth, the legend @hockeyinthecac, and his attempted usurper @NESCACicehockey<--seriously, who are you?), here are the game stats/storylines for SF No. 1 tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/fBFUls957L

— Jake Donnelly (@JacobDonnelly31) March 1, 2019

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GAMEDAY | @wesleyan_hockey takes on Amherst in a @nescacathletics Semifinal contest at 1:00 p.m. today on the campus of Trinity College #GoWes #RollCards

A post shared by Wesleyan Athletics (@wesleyan_athletics) on Mar 2, 2019 at 6:31am PST

As long as we are speaking history, let's go with a catchy tune from the Moth and the Flame "Ozymandias" named after the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem about the crumbled statue of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (Ozymandias is the greek name) dealing with the arrogance of mankind and the temporal nature of achievement. Happy Saturday y'all!