Every conference has that one team that sets the bar for the rest of its league.
It isn’t the best team in the standings – those teams are usually the ones who exceed the bar – but it’s the one team that can compete with anyone on any given night. It can play any style, which from a hockey sense means it combines solid offense with a well-spaced, experienced defense that plays in front of a goaltender capable of answering the bell on any shot.
Special teams aren’t a problem, and its compete level never wavers, even if games don’t always end with points or wins.
It’s also not hard to identify which teams fit that bill, and in ECAC Hockey, the way Colgate’s played over the last two decades built the Raiders into a program that could win from anywhere in the standings.
The program advanced to consecutive ECAC Hockey third-place games by finishing 12th in 2011 and fourth in 2012, and its ability to spot a trip to the league’s final postseason weekend produced an NCAA tournament appearance in 2014. In 2020, the eighth-place Raiders swept Brown before their season was ended by COVID-19, but they rallied to finish last season in fifth after playing out 2020-2021 as one of ECAC Hockey’s four participating teams.
The Raiders gained a reputation along the way as being a team that’s usually difficult to defeat, and after last season’s trip to Lake Placid, the only remaining centered on their ability to crack back into the top four spots or advance to an NCAA tournament. And while it’s an unanswered dilemma, a six-point weekend to wrap up the first half of the season indicated that all roads have to pass through Hamilton, N.Y., even if they don’t necessarily lead there.
“In our approach to games, we’ve been very dialed in and focused on our league games,” said Colgate coach Don Vaughan. “That’s important, and we talk a lot about it, but it’s crazy how hard it is to win [every game]. We had a couple of nice wins out of conference against Merrimack and Arizona State, but it’s a crazy game that makes you respect your opponents, regardless of who you are or who you’re playing.”
The Raiders ended their first half in third place after beating Dartmouth and Harvard this past weekend, but the way they won the games stole some thunder away from the breakaway pack comprising the Crimson and first place Quinnipiac because it was the quintessential Colgate weekend.
The win on Friday included three goals in the first period and two goals across the second and third to cruise to a 5-1 victory over the Big Green, and it preceded a Saturday classic that saw the Raiders rally from a 3-1 deficit against a team bidding for at-large positioning in the early Pairwise Rankings.
Harvard had scored three consecutive goals in the second period after Colgate grabbed a 1-0 lead in the game’s first 90 seconds, and the Crimson used two Sean Farrell goals to take the lead over a 35-second stretch in the early second. Marek Hejduk scored halfway through the period to grant his team a two-goal lead, but Colgate clawed back with Alex Young scoring twice on the power play in rapid succession.
It was a pure success to the system, and after Alex DiPaolo scored 31 seconds into the third, a Colton Young short-handed bid staked the Raiders to a 5-3 lead that was stamped only by Alex Young’s hat trick goal.
“When you get down 3-1 quickly against such a talented team, you think in the back in your mind that the chances of coming back are daunting,” Vaughan said, “but we scored those quick power-play goals and boom, next thing we know, we’re tied after two, so our locker room came alive. The guys were good on the bench even when we were down, and I think that spoke to the maturity of our group. We’ve got a pretty good veteran group that have been through [those games], and coming off of a good year last year, they were able to draw on that experience.”
Every ounce of that Harvard game illustrated why Colgate is a reckoning.
Alex Young’s four-goal weekend pushed him to the top of the Raiders’ stat line, but it only further distributed the numbers among the six players with 10 or more points. Nearly a dozen players have multiple goals scored, and seven players sit with a positive plus/minus level. On the defensive end, Pierson Brandon and Tommy Bergsland are the clear leaders in blocked shots, but another eight players are at or around 10 blocks.
Even trips to the sin bin are evenly distributed, and nobody has 10 penalties called. Two players are over 20 PIMs, but with the exception of Young’s six power play goals, the rest of the team spread its remaining 10 man-up goals over seven players, none of which have more than three.
“We’ve been at our best when we’re able to roll four lines of forwards,” Vaughan said. “You have to put three guys in the fourth line spot, but it’s not necessarily that they’re the fourth line. We’ve experienced some of that this year, and I thought Saturday’s night’s game against Harvard was the best example we’ve had in terms of each guy accepting their role. Alex Young was one of our more skilled guys and we had him playing on our line that was matched up against Harvard’s top line. He was with Arnaud Vachon and Ryan McGuire, and he goes out and scores three goals. Going into that game, he was dialed into playing those hard minutes, but there’s been that attitude that guys are starting to accept whatever role we throw at them on any given night.”
It has Colgate hitting a stride right in time for the first half to close. Five straight wins over ECAC Hockey opponents date back to a mid-November trip to the North Country, and the only two losses to league competition occurred when the Raiders traveled to Quinnipiac and Clarkson.
Both were considered the preseason cream of the conference, and even with the Golden Knights’ slow start, the loss at Cheel Arena remains one of two lopsided defeated from a year that left the first half with a 6-2 league record despite a sub-.500 overall record arising from losses to Northern Michigan and Niagara with splits against Arizona State and Merrimack.
“Our guys have been really dialed into league play,” said Vaughan. “Our non-conference record is what it is. These are all smart guys, and they realize that for us to make it into the tournament, we are probably going to have to win the league. But our focus has really been on [in ECAC Hockey play]. We only have two non-conference games left [against Maine at the end of the month], and we’re focused on being really prepared to play the league games. The non-conference portion really prepares us for what we consider our hardest and most important games, and that’s within ECAC. There’s so much parity that records aren’t reflective of how teams are playing.
“That’s college hockey. There’s a lot of parity, and you have to be ready to go every single time you step over the wall.”
