ITHACA, N.Y. — Winners of nine of its last 10 games, the #14/15 Cornell men's hockey team returns home to the friendly confines of Lynah Rink for nine of its final 13 regular-season games starting with Friday's game against Clarkson and Saturday's game against #16 St. Lawrence. Both games will be broadcast on the subscription-based Ivy League Digital Network. Jason Weinstein will have the play-by-play and Tony Eisenhut will provide color commentary. Their call can also be heard in the Ithaca area on WHCU (870 AM, 95.9 FM) and accessed worldwide here.

GAME #17: CLARKSON at #14/15 CORNELL
TIME: 7 p.m.
DATES: Friday, Jan. 20, 2017
PLACE: Lynah Rink · Ithaca, N.Y.
RECORDS: Cornell 11-4-1, 6-2-1 ECAC Hockey · Clarkson 11-9-3, 6-4-1 ECAC Hockey
RADIO: WHCU-AM (95.9 FM, 870 AM)
WEBCAST: Ivy League Digital Network
LIVE STATS: CornellBigRed.com

GAME #18: #16 ST. LAWRENCE at #14/15 CORNELL
TIME: 7 p.m.
DATES: Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017
PLACE: Lynah Rink · Ithaca, N.Y.
RECORDS: Cornell 11-4-1, 6-2-1 ECAC Hockey · St. Lawrence 12-6-6, 8-1-3 ECAC Hockey
RADIO: WHCU-AM (95.9 FM, 870 AM)
WEBCAST: Ivy League Digital Network
LIVE STATS: CornellBigRed.com

Cornell game notes (PDF)
Clarkson game notes (PDF)
St. Lawrence game notes (coming soon)

Big Red Rewind:
•  Cornell has won nine of its last 10 games, including a road sweep of Princeton (5-1) and defending ECAC Hockey champion Quinnipiac (2-1) last weekend.
•  Freshman forward Jeff Malott scored his first three collegiate goals in a span of 8 minutes, 44 seconds during the first period to power the Big Red past the Tigers on Friday.
•  Malott became the first Big Red freshman with a hat trick since current NHLer Matt Moulson on Feb. 7, 2003 (vs. Dartmouth). It was the team's second hat trick of the season (Mitch Vanderlaan, Nov. 12 at Yale), which is a first for the program since 2004.
•  The Big Red smothered the Bobcats on Saturday, with goals from senior forward Jeff Kubiak and junior forward Alex Rauter paving the way. Senior goaltender Mitch Gillam needed to make just 19 saves to earn the win.

Highlights from Saturday's 2-1 win at Quinnipiac:


First Ivy To 400:
•  Already the winningest coach in program history and in Ivy League history, Mike Schafer has eclipsed another milestone in his career with his 400th victory. He ranks 10th in victories among active Division I coaches and is Cornell's fifth-winningest coach across all sports — second among current coaches, behind just Dave Eldredge (men's and women's polo).

The Hot Hands:
•  Senior defenseman Patrick McCarron (2-13–15) ranks second in team scoring and fifth nationally in points per game for blueliners (0.94). He had an eight-game points streak earlier this season, which was the first for a Cornellian since Greg Miller from Oct. 29 to Nov. 22, 2011, and the first for a Big Red defenseman since Mark McRae from Jan. 25 to Feb. 21, 2003.
•  Senior Mitch Gillam (11-3-1, 2.00, .924, SO) has the nation's longest active winning streak for goaltenders, having backstopped the Big Red to victories in his last nine starts. He has a 1.45 goals against average and .941 save percentage over that span.
•  Junior forward Alex Rauter (6-1–7) scored goals in each of last weekend's games, including the winner against Quinnipiac in the waning moments of a power play. Rauter is now tied for second on the team in goals.

Who's Who at CU:
•  Senior forward Jeff Kubiak (2-2–4) — the Big Red's leading scorer last season — returned for the Florida College Hockey Classic on Dec. 28 after a 10-game absence due to injury. He's been reunited with sophomore wingers Mitch Vanderlaan (9-7–16) and Anthony Angello (4-5–9) to reprise the vaunted 'JAM' line, which produced the team's top three scorers last season.
•  Vanderlaan leads the team in goals and in overall scoring, and he ranks third in ECAC Hockey for goals per game in league play (0.78). He has points in 12 of the Big Red's 16 games.
•  Junior forward Trevor Yates (6-4–10) leads the team with four power-play goals and ranks third on the team in overall scoring.

Road Warriors:
•  Cornell has played just four home games to date, which is by far the lowest total in the country (Harvard and Boston College have played the next-fewest home games with seven). The Big Red will now play nine of its final 13 regular-season games at home, all within ECAC Hockey play.

The Sum of Intangibles Is Tangible:
•  A quick glance at Cornell's traditional statistics illustrates some of the team's storylines, though several others fly beneath the radar.
•  Through 16 games, the Big Red has already accumulated 72 man-games lost to injury — which includes lengthy absences from the team's leading scorer last year (Jeff Kubiak, 10 games), its leading producer of power-play goals from each of the last two years (Matt Buckles, six games) and a top-four defenseman (Ryan Bliss, 16 games).
•  With Kubiak out of the lineup for so long, senior Jake Weidner took on an even bigger role as the Big Red's leading faceoff man. He is ranked sixth in the nation in average faceoffs per game (24.4), and his 68.2 winning percentage in December was tops among those taking at least 50 draws.
•  Weidner is also the nation's top shot-blocker among forwards (1.94 per game). Sophomore defenseman Alec McCrea currently ranks tied for seventh in the nation among all shot-blockers (2.38 per game).

What, Me Worry?:
•  Entering the weekend, five of Cornell's 11 victories so far this season had come in games in which the Big Red has surrendered the first goal.
•  The Big Red's resilience from an early deficit has become somewhat of a trend, with the team sporting a very respectable 10-11-3 record when conceding the game's first strike since the beginning of the 2015-16 campaign. That's a stark turnaround from the team's 14-34-5 record when yielding the game's first goal from the previous three seasons (2012-15).

Killin' It:
•  The Big Red penalty kill ranks fifth in the nation with a 88.6 percent success rate. Cornell's penalty kill has been especially good of late, surviving 40 of its opponents' last 43 power plays (93.0%).

The Streak Is Over!
•  Junior forward Alex Rauter's penalty-shot goal in The Frozen Apple on Nov. 26 ended a remarkable string of futility on such plays for the Big Red. Rauter became the first Cornellian to score on a penalty shot since Feb. 27, 1987 — 949 games since Joe Nieuwendyk scored on a penalty shot against Rensselaer.

Apple Harvest:
•  Freshman Yanni Kaldis (0-7–7) ranks second on the team in assists. His passes set up the shots resulting in all three of the Big Red's power-play goals Nov. 5 at Harvard, making him the first Big Red player to record three power-play assists in a single game since Byron Bitz on Jan. 7, 2006. Subsequently, Kaldis was named the ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Week on Nov. 8. He enters this weekend ranked second in the league in scoring for freshman defensemen (0.78 points/game).

Turning The Trick:
•  Mitch Vanderlaan's hat trick Nov. 12 at Yale was Cornell's first since Jan. 22, 2011, when Tyler Roeszler scored three times against Colgate. Subsequently, Vanderlaan was named the ECAC Hockey Player of the Week on Nov. 15.
•  The Big Red's leading goal-scorer to date potted a couple more goals Nov. 19 against Princeton to become the first player from Cornell with seven goals in the first seven games of the season since Blake Gallagher did so at the start of the 2009-10 campaign. He scored his team-leading ninth goal last Friday at Princeton.

Gillam's Groove:
•  Senior goaltender Mitch Gillam posted the third-longest shutout streak in program history last season, spanning 213 minutes, 17 seconds over four games in November 2015 — including consecutive shutouts at Yale and Brown. That marked the Big Red's first back-to-back shutouts since Andy Iles did so Dec. 2-3, 2011 against St. Lawrence and Clarkson, and it was the Big Red's first consecutive road shutouts since Ben Scrivens blanked Princeton and Quinnipiac from Nov. 7-8, 2008.
•  An odd twist on Gillam's nine career shutouts is that he's only won seven of them — Dec. 28, 2014 against Lake Superior State and Nov. 20, 2015 against Yale were both scoreless ties.

Never Too Close For Comfort:
•  Cornell's 1-0 win last Saturday at Merrimack was hardly new territory for the team. The Big Red had four 1-0 victories last season for the first time in program history. Cornell also set a team record by going to overtime in 14 of its 34 games last year. The previous record was 12, set in 1985-86, then matched in 2010-11 and 2011-12.
•  Cornell went to overtime in seven of its final 15 games last year, with a 4-3-7 record in those games.
 
Binational Interests:
•  Cornell has the unique distinction of having exactly 14 players hailing from both the U.S. and Canada. The Big Red joins just two other teams — Robert Morris and Michigan Tech — with an even split on their respective rosters.

Helping Out:
Members and friends of the Cornell men's hockey program embarked on another mission trip to the Dominican Republic through the Portal de Belén Foundation over the summer. It was the fourth time the program has participated, following trips in 2009, 2012 and 2014. Current members of the team Ryan Bliss, Alec McCrea, Anthony Angello, Dan Wedman, Alex Rauter, Hayden Stewart, Trent Shore, Jared Fiegl and Dwyer Tschantz were on this year's trip, as well as Mike Schafer, the Jay R. Bloom '77 Head Coach of Men's Hockey.
  

About Clarkson:
•  The Golden Knights are currently 25th in the Pairwise Rankings.
•  Clarkson split its ECAC Hockey road games last weekend. Yale scored the winner with 59 seconds left in the third period on Friday, then the Golden Knights rebounded with a 7-2 thrashing of Brown on Saturday.
•  Clarkson had an eight-game unbeaten streak from early November to early December, which included victories at Union (the Dutchmen's lone league loss to date) and at Notre Dame. The Golden Knights also have defeated Vermont and Mass.-Lowell this year.
•  The team's three leading scorers have all been playing on the same line of late, with junior Sam Vigneault (7-14–21) centering seniors Jordan Boucher (7-12–19) and Troy Josephs (10-7–17).
•  Senior defenseman James de Haas (4-8–12) has all four of his goals on the power play.
•  Freshman Jake Kielly (10-8-3, 2.60, .917, 2 SO) is Clarkson's primary goalie.

The Series Against Clarkson:
•  Friday's meeting will mark the 132nd game between the two programs that have been battling since the 1922-23 season.
•  The Big Red owns a 64-53-14 record against the Golden Knights after the teams split their two games last season.
•  Cornell secured a 5-2 win in the teams' last meeting at Lynah Rink on Dec. 5, 2015. Alec McCrea had a goal and two assists in the game, and Anthony Angello scored on a breakaway with 0.4 seconds left in the second period.

About St. Lawrence:
•  The Saints are currently 15th in the Pairwise Rankings, 16th in the USCHO.com poll and receiving votes in the USA Today/USA Hockey Magazine poll.
•  St. Lawrence was predicted to finish second in ECAC Hockey this year in both the coaches and media preseason polls, and it has shaken off a 3-4-1 start by going 9-2-5 since the start of November.
•  The Saints rallied twice to earn three points on the road last weekend. A pair of third-period goals lifted them to a 2-1 win Friday at Brown, then St. Lawrence stormed back from a two-goal deficit for a 2-2 tie Saturday at Yale.
•  Senior defenseman Gavin Bayreuther (6-17–23) leads the team in scoring, but he has missed the last four games with an injury. Junior forward Mike Marnell (11-11–22) leads the squad in goals, but he also missed last weekend's games due to injury.
•  Junior Kyle Hayton (11-5-6, 2.14, .932, 3 SO) is in his third season as the Saints' starting goaltender. He was the lone goalie on the Preseason All-ECAC Hockey team by both the coaches and media.
•  The Saints have conceded just 10 first-period goals over 24 games this season.

The Series Against St. Lawrence:
•  In a series that began during the 1926-27 campaign, Cornell holds a 58-45-8 all-time lead. The teams split their two games last year.
•  Cornell locked down a 2-1 victory on Dec. 4, 2015 in the teams' last meeting at Lynah Rink. Senior forward Jake Weidner scored the eventual winner in transition late in the second.

Freshman Force:
•  The jump to college hockey can be a big one for newcomers, but forward Anthony Angello — a 2014 draft pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins — clearly felt right at home as a freshman last season. Angello was the Big Red's first player to have points in his first four collegiate games since Ryan Moynihan from Nov. 8-16, 1996 — which was Mike Schafer's second season as head coach of his alma mater.
•  Angello then scored the overtime winner Nov. 14, 2015 at Colgate and was named ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Week twice (Jan. 12 and March 1) on his way to posting a team-high 11 goals.

Feel The Draft?:
•  Cornell has five players on the roster who have been selected in the NHL Entry Draft, including four from 2014. Sophomore forward Beau Starrett (Chicago Blackhawks) was selected earliest in the group, having been taken in the third round with the 88th overall pick. Classmate Anthony Angello, also a forward, was selected in the fifth round by the Pittsburgh Penguins. Junior forwards Jared Fiegl (Arizona Coyotes) and Dwyer Tschantz (St. Louis Blues) were then picked in the seventh round. Senior forward Matt Buckles was taken by the Florida Panthers in the fourth round of the 2013 draft.

An Empire State of Mind:
•  The Big Red's stars in the Nov. 26 win over New Hampshire at The Frozen Apple at Madison Square Garden all had ties to New York. Junior forward Alex Rauter, who scored on a penalty shot in the third period, is from nearby Chatham, N.J., participated in the New York Rangers prospect development camp in 2012, and once played youth hockey on MSG ice in between periods of a Rangers game. Freshman forward Noah Bauld, who scored the game-winner, was actually born in New York before moving to his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia when he was a toddler, and senior goaltender Mitch Gillam once attended the New York Islanders' prospect camp.

Anniversary Season:
•  There are some significant milestones in Cornell hockey history that have happened in years ending with a '7', so this season will feature a couple noteworthy anniversaries. This is the 60th year of hockey in Lynah Rink, since the facility was dedicated April 6, 1957.
•  This season also marks the 50th anniversary of Cornell's first national championship team in 1967. There will be a special ceremony to honor that team Jan. 27-28 during home games against Dartmouth and Harvard.

Up Next:
•  Cornell concludes its home stand with games against Ivy League rivals Harvard (Friday, Jan. 27) and Dartmouth (Saturday, Jan. 28) next weekend. The Big Red then travels to New York's Capital District for Feb. 3-4 games against ECAC Hockey-leading Union and Rensselaer.