The Saints finished one goal away from an NCAA at-large bid, but instead settled for a season-ending tie in the ECAC Hockey consolation game against Princeton. The team finished fourth in the league on the strength of an 8-1-2 finish to league play, and derived much of its success from its dynamic transition game and the production of a stellar senior class. <\/p>\n
Senior forward Mike McKenzie and the graduated defender Zach Miskovic led the team with 16 goals apiece, and 13 players finished with double-digit points — including four defensemen. Four of the Saints’ top five scorers were seniors, as were five of SLU’s top half-dozen goal-scorers. Senior Alex Petizian made 31 appearances for SLU, allowing under 2.2 goals a game and saving shots at a .927 clip.<\/p>\n
The Saints look secure in net with the same faces (Petizian, classmate Kain Tisi, and sophomore Robby Moss) as last year … but beyond that, there are an awful lot of question marks. McKenzie is clearly the team’s top returning forward, production-wise, but others will have to step up if St. Lawrence hopes to come anywhere close to approaching last year’s achievements. <\/p>\n
“We’ve got a pretty big class to replace,” Saints coach Joe Marsh said, “and last year’s class was a pretty special group. For us, we’re just pleased with everything the guys have done to this point. Everything we’ve done, they’ve embraced. It’s a big group of guys and they’ve been willing to stand our pretty [ambitious] agenda. From a coaching perspective, it looks like a pretty low-maintanence group. We’ve got a lot of work to do, to be sure, but the guys seem willing to do it. Nothing too earth-shaking here, we’re just cautiously optimistic. <\/p>\n
“[Losing players] just happens. It’s not going to be up to one guy, like Mike McKenzie, you know. He’s obviously a big part of it. [Senior] Jerry Cunningham has always been in shape, he’s a great athlete, but he worked extremely hard this summer and he looks great. A lot of the guys did that themselves; I didn’t have to say, ‘You’ve got to do this, this and this.’ They see that all of a sudden, opportunities are presented, and they’ve done some things since the end of last season to take advantage of them.”<\/p>\n
Marsh doesn’t mince words when it comes to the diminished state of his offense.<\/p>\n
“Maybe we’re not going to score as many goals as we did a year ago, but there are different ways to win hockey games. We have got to play good, sound defense. … We can be a strong team, physically. The discipline is a huge part of it … not just penalties, but how we play our game.”<\/p>\n
At least the veteran coach has a few known quantities to work with among this year’s forwards.<\/p>\n
“We keep one line intact: [senior Travis] Vermeulen, [sophomore Brandon] Bollig and [senior Alex] Curran, a good line for us last year, a big strong line, physically. [Sophomore Mark] Armstrong, [junior Aaron] Bogosian and [junior] Jared Keller make a good solid line, they played well together last year. Right now we’ve got Cunningham going with McKenzie, and maybe Kyle Flanagan, a freshman — he’s a really talented young guy. <\/p>\n
“We have a lot of other guys battling it out for the other line. We’ve got five lines even, so that last fourth group could be any one of those [remaining] six guys. I think we can get some consistency. I like to play four lines. The way we play, I think it’s important that we play at a real high tempo. <\/p>\n
“Probably the biggest question mark is replacing four senior defensemen who were extremely productive. Miskovic led the country in goals from a defenseman; he had 16 goals. All four of those guys fit very very well into the offense, our transition game was really good and a lot of our offense was generated form the D-corps. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we want our defensemen to step up and get involved in the play.”<\/p>\n
On the back end, the Saints are just hoping for a few quick learners. <\/p>\n
“Hopefully it doesn’t take too long [for the defense to acclimate]. We still want to play an aggressive style, we don’t want to play trap hockey … but we’ll have to work exceptionally hard. We’ll pull back the reins a little bit in certain areas, like pinching the defensemen, maybe we’ll be a little more conservative in things like that to allow guys to get their legs under them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Year The Saints finished one goal away from an NCAA at-large bid, but instead settled for a season-ending tie in the ECAC Hockey consolation game against Princeton. The team finished fourth in the league on the strength of an 8-1-2 finish to league play, and derived much of its success from its dynamic transition […]<\/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