The first month of the season felt like the continuation of a bad dream at Yale.
A team that finished no lower than sixth in the run-up to COVID-19 won its first game of the 2022-23 season after finishing tied for 11th last year, but the next seven games piled loss after loss onto a team that couldn’t get out of its own way.
Everything went wrong, and after Connor Sullivan scored the team’s only goal in a 2-1 loss to Brown, the Bulldogs wouldn’t score again until Briggs Gammill scored on the power play in the third period against Cornell – 15 periods of hockey later.
The Bulldogs simply couldn’t find an answer, so with two weeks between games against conference opponents, coach Keith Allain looked inwards to find an answer. He met individually and collectively with players and took an honest look at his roster, and he asked the difficult questions about how to move forward.
The team had a game against the United States National Development Program scheduled for Nov. 27, but with the Thanksgiving holiday, Yale wouldn’t play an official game until it traveled to the North Country for a weekend at St. Lawrence and Clarkson.
Things looked desperate, but after pushing the U.S. team to an overtime loss, Yale started turning a corner this past weekend. It didn’t pick up an official win, but the loss to the Saints and the two points collected against Clarkson represented something greater for a team that very quietly reinvented itself on the fly as semester break drew nearer.
“It was actually pretty easy to step back because our performance to that point had been so bad,” said Allain. “Sometimes you can get fooled into thinking that things are going well because the results are close and you steal a win here or there, or maybe a goalie steals it for you, but it was easy to take an honest assessment that our game wasn’t where it needed to be. It was all three phases. We weren’t producing offenses, we were making mistakes in the defensive zone, and we weren’t getting saves.
“So it was somewhat of a downward spiral that we had to grab by the horn and say that things needed to change.”
By having those discussions – and afforded the break that came around the exhibition game – Yale was able to virtually reboot and debunk its software on the fly.
The long scoreless drought drew a direct line between a three-goal weekend against Brown and a three-goal weekend at Cornell and Colgate, but the revamped offense scored three times against the national team’s development program by simply outplaying its opponent. Hayden Rowan, Kalez Szeto, and Connor Sullivan all scored, and Szeto’s assist on Sullivan’s goal early in the third period helped force overtime in a game where the attack generated 15 of its 28 shots in the first period.
“It had been more than a grind prior to that game [against the development team],” said Allain. “We had the weekend off before that game, so we really took stock of ourselves. We did a lot of things internally and changed some things about the way we played. We used that game as a jumping-off point, and I thought our team game was much better across all three periods. It became a step in the right direction.”
Both Nathan Reid and Luke Pearson saw time in net during that game, and the minutes became invaluable two weeks later when St. Lawrence’s 2-0 lead in the first period necessitated a change. What might have been an indictment of the defense or a starter in a past game instead simply felt like a change on that given night, and though Yale was significantly outshot in the first period, the third period finally started generating the opportunities that existed but weren’t capitalized upon in the first two frames.
Less than a minute into the third, David Chen scored to bring the score to 2-1, and while the Bulldogs absorbed another loss, a clear difference existed from the weekend series near the end of November.
“My message to our guys was that we were down [by two] but it wasn’t a 2-0 period,” Allain said. “We just had to keep doing what we were doing, and I thought we got stronger as the game went on. We had them back on their heels in that third period, which was too bad that we weren’t able to get the equalizer. After that game, I told our team that the last time we played an ECAC game and we were down 2-0 on the road in the first period, it wouldn’t have ended 2-1.
“And while I’m not for moral victories, we took a step.”
All of this led to another marked step forward the next night at Clarkson against a Golden Knight team fighting for its own brand of respect after it fell into the middle of the ECAC standings during the first half of the season. Yale simply looked different from even the night before, and the clear confidence oozed after Chen scored the game’s first goal in the first four minutes.
It was the first lead for the team since the first game of the year and held for the next 37 minutes before Anthony Callin tied the game on the power play, but the clear difference between the effort and game film now drew a line of demarcation to the rest of the first half of the season because while the penalty kill numbers were down over the first two months, Yale had significant issues to fix beyond just its special teams.
A team that surrendered over 3.50 goals per game allowed three goals over its final two games, and a heavily penalized team averaging over five penalties per game limited St. Lawrence and Clarkson to one power play goal over the course of a full weekend. It was by no means perfect, but the improvement yielded two points in a league where one weekend’s work and five points separated a home ice playoff spot from last place in the standings.
“We play to get real wins [in regulation],” said Allain, “but we didn’t get a loss [at Clarkson]. And that’s really important. Clarkson is a good team and has a lot of people back from a team that finished much higher in the standings. There’s a lot of talent there. They’re well-coached, and it’s a tough place to play. It’s a tough trip in general to go to St. Lawrence and Clarkson, so to go up there and finish with that game propels us a bit going into our exam break.”
That word – propel – felt like an impossibility when Yale was getting tossed around the ECAC waters throughout late October and November, but there’s now a point where the Bulldogs appear much more dangerous than people might believe. Playing competitive hockey in the league this year is usually enough to steal points, and the bulk of the second half is set for Ingalls Rink, where an eight-win team went 5-6-1 last season.
The only three official home games from the first half were against Brown in the season opener and Princeton and Quinnipiac, which is arguably the best team in the country right now, and after making the trip to Dartmouth for the Ledyard Classic, nine of the remaining games in the second half of the season are in New Haven with an additional game at Quinnipiac and two more at the People’s United Center for the Connecticut Ice tournament in late January.
“All three phases contributed [to our improvement],” Allain said. “Our goaltending has been better for the last three games, and we scored three goals against the US team. We only scored two goals this past weekend, but if you watch the game, we generated a lot more scoring chances than we had been. Our team defense was better.
“We’re not going to jump up and down here because we got an overtime shootout win and a tie on the road, but if you look at the way our team played in all three phases, I certainly feel better about us than I did three weeks ago. Our focus now is to really continue to work on our conditioning and strength for the next two weeks [during exams], and then our next practice on the evening of the 26th will give us three or four days before the puck drops again on the 30th.”
