St. Lawrence was looking pretty good as the calendars flipped over to February, sitting at 14-9-5 with four home games and three on the road to close out the regular season.<\/p>\n
Whoops. SLU fell face first with a first-round bye in sight, going 1-4-2 down the stretch and effectively — albeit coincidentally — choking away the biggest home-ice asset the Saints have: a long, long drive for any visiting opponent.<\/p>\n
Instead of drawing Harvard or Princeton or Brown or Quinnipiac, or anyone else from lower New England, the Saints got the luckiest of all lucky bad teams: Clarkson, which could practically walk from Potsdam to Canton for the games.<\/p>\n
Two overtime games and a nailbiter later, SLU escaped to take on Colgate in Hamilton. Two more one-goal games put the Saints on a serious roll, having all of a sudden won five of six (all one-goal games, incidentally).<\/p>\n
Union put a stop to SLU’s shenanigans with a 3-1 Dutch victory in Albany, and in a meaningless formality, upstart Brown squashed the Saints 3-0 in the consolation contest.<\/p>\n
The Canton club somehow finished fifth in the regular season despite scoring only 62 goals … by virtue of allowing 61. The Saints nonetheless finished with 13 double-digit scorers in their 41-game season, led by seniors Travis Vermeulen and Mike McKenzie. Senior Kain Tisi played nearly twice as many minutes as runner-up (and classmate) Alex Petizian between SLU’s pipes, each maintaining a save rate over 90 percent.<\/p>\n
Coach Joe Marsh is probably SLU’s biggest asset. He has been around the block a few times (and then some). He knows this league, he knows the other coaches, and he knows what motivates players.<\/p>\n
He usually carries a large roster, so depth is rarely an issue, and he always finds a way to get the most out of his boys: The Saints are characterized year-in and year-out as quietly successful, hard-working and offensively gifted at all positions. You know you’re playing St. Lawrence when the defensemen are doing all the scoring against you.<\/p>\n
The Saints lost their first-, second-, fourth-, seventh-, eighth- and ninth-highest scorers from last year. Oh, and both starting goalies. Need I say more? Fortunately, last year’s team had enough depth of scoring that 43 percent of its goals were accounted for by current players.<\/p>\n
Losing that much, all at once, doesn’t exactly breed confidence in my mind. I’d never bet against Marsh, because his teams always seem to be there in the end … but I have to admit, I’m not betting on him right now, either. On paper, this looks like a team that will have to really scrap to stay out of the bottom four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last year St. Lawrence was looking pretty good as the calendars flipped over to February, sitting at 14-9-5 with four home games and three on the road to close out the regular season. Whoops. SLU fell face first with a first-round bye in sight, going 1-4-2 down the stretch and effectively — albeit coincidentally — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":140328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[322],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n