Ron Fogarty didn’t mind waiting another few days to start his season.
It was the first weekend in November, but the appearance of Fogarty’s Princeton Tigers on Harvard’s Bright-Landry Hockey Center ice sheet marked the team’s first appearance of the 2023-24 season. The previous weekend, before Halloween, had been the first games for five of the six Ivy League programs in Division I hockey, but a rescheduled nonconference game pushed the Tigers’ start past the end of the season’s first official month.
Over 50 teams already had 10 or more games to their name, but Fogarty and his Tigers had no intention of complaining about the late start. All that mattered was that they were on the ice against a conference opponent – a historic Ivy League rival, to boot – and points were at a premium.
“We’re no different than any other college hockey team,” said Fogarty. “You can’t slip up in October or November, just like you can’t slip up in March. Every game is important, and your preparation has to be on Friday before flipping to Saturday, if we’re playing different opponents. Regardless of the start time, it doesn’t matter when the games fall on the schedule.
“We’re going to play the same amount of games that we do every year.”
Owning a level-headed approach allowed Princeton to ice the Crimson for an extra point in a shootout after Harvard forced a 4-4 tie through regulation and overtime, but the experience gained from that game and the loss to Dartmouth the next day enabled the Tigers to hit a second gear this past weekend against Brown and Yale.
Playing at home for the first time this season, the team clipped a pair of overtime wins that went into the books as official victories while earning four points towards the ECAC standings, but the win over each team signified a different step forward in its early growth. The first game against Yale was as back-and-forth as it got with the Bulldogs rallying from two separate two-goal deficits, but Adam Robbins’ goal with less than five seconds remaining in the overtime session earned Princeton its first win of the season.
One night later, Brown jumped out to a two-goal lead in the second period when Alex Pineau and Max Scott scored over a six-minute span, but Ian Murphy set a table for Joe Berg’s game-tying goal with just over a minute remaining before Tyler Rubin broke behind the Bears’ three-on-three defense and buried a top-shelf winner that sent the Baker Rink crowd into a frenzy.
“We had a couple of multiple-goal leads against Yale before they fought back,” Fogarty said, “but getting that extra point was a win. And then on Brown, we were the team down by two and we got an extra attacker goal. We caught them in a line change [in overtime] that sprung [Rubin] for the win, but in both instances, it was just a workmanlike mentality. Our energy was very good and even-keeled through each of those games.”
The points continued an Ivy League revolution during the first two months of ECAC’s 2023-2024 season, and the Tigers jumped into the top-echelon fray currently occupied by Dartmouth, Cornell and Harvard. All four teams are within a weekend’s worth of work of first place Quinnipiac, but all have reached their respective levels despite cannibalizing each other by starting their seasons against one another.
Princeton, in particular, gained a foothold against those teams by establishing notable individual showcases within the gritty overall team performance. Both games were won by freshmen goalies after Ethan Pearson was injured in the loss to Dartmouth, and Rubin’s three-point weekend earned him defender of the week honors at the conference level. David Jacobs likewise added a four-point weekend, and freshman Kai Daniells’ two goals and four points in the first four games went right along with the wins by Arthur Smith and Conor Callaghan in net.
“We know that every game and every period is going to be a grind,” Fogarty said. “ECAC is a tight conference, so it’s important to get leads and points, especially on the road. We got a couple of points against Harvard, and we clawed back against Dartmouth before they scored in the last minute. That maybe lost us a point or two, but to get the two wins and two points each night was big for us at home.”
The special teams, meanwhile, cranked out two power play goals against Yale after scoring twice on the power play against Dartmouth, and the penalty kill stopped all four opportunities for the Bulldogs while the power play goals against the Big Green negated two power play goals by the Dartmouth special teams.
“It’s been a big emphasis for us to have the combination up over 100 percent,” Fogarty said. “Obviously the power play is carrying us right now, and we have to work on our penalty kill to get that number up. To have the power play where it is right now has got us a couple of wins, but it’s going to be tough to sustain numbers in the high 30-percents throughout the year. If we can stay in the high-20s, that would be great, and with the work on our penalty kill, we can make sure we get over that 100 percent number.”
All of this represents the first step forward for a Princeton team that started last year by burning opportunities to remain atop the league standings after tying Colgate and Cornell for third place at the holidays. They were at 16 points, but they also required a league-high 11 games to get there, to which the numbers faltered and slipped as the second half ramped up. By the time the year ended, Princeton had lost enough ground to fall into an eighth place tie with Rensselaer and Union, to which the Tigers finished as the team relegated to the road in the first round of the playoffs.
Gaining early points doesn’t erase the mentality needed to avoid a redux, but it sure didn’t hurt that the first four games produced a total of six points. Nor did it hurt that the Baker Rink crowd connected with the team through the only home games before a December 9 game against Sacred Heart, which ultimately means more opportunities for a run at the ECAC later in the season when teams make the trip down to the league’s southernmost outpost.
“Our turnout has been great over the past couple of years,” Fogarty said. “It’s attributed to our work with our youth clinics. We have clinics that run on Monday evenings where our guys help out, and they’re immersed within not only the Princeton University community but the Princeton community. We develop relationships with youth programs, and our guys are very approachable after the games throughout town. Our marketing department at Princeton does a great job of targeting those youths, so our crowds have been consistently tremendous over the past couple of years.”
