ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell will wrap up the non-conference portion of its schedule at 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 7 with its second visit of the season to Merrimack. The game against the Warriors will mark the first time in program history that the Big Red has made two separate visits to a non-league opponent in the same season. Play-by-play from Jason Weinstein can be heard in the Ithaca area on WHCU (870 AM, 95.9 FM). His call can also be accessed worldwide here.

GAME #14: CORNELL at MERRIMACK
TIME: 7 p.m.
DATES: Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017
PLACE: Lawler Rink · North Andover, Mass.
RECORDS: Cornell 8-4-1, 4-2-1 ECAC Hockey · Merrimack 7-9-3, 1-4-3 Hockey East
RADIO: WHCU-AM (95.9 FM, 870 AM)
WEBCAST: MerrimackAthletics.com
LIVE STATS: MerrimackAthletics.com
TICKETS: MerrimackAthletics.com

Cornell game notes (PDF)
Merrimack game notes (PDF)

Big Red Rewind:
•  Cornell is coming off a second-place finish at the Florida College Hockey Classic after a 2-1 overtime loss to Colorado College in the Dec. 29 championship in Estero, Fla. Senior forward Jake Weidner scored the Big Red's lone goal on the power play in the third period.
•  After missing a combined 16 consecutive games due to injury, senior forwards Jeff Kubiak and Matt Buckles each had a goal and an assist Dec. 28 in a 5-2 FCHC first-round victory over Northern Michigan.
•  Senior defenseman Patrick McCarron had four assists over the two games in Florida and joined Weidner on the all-tournament team.
•  The loss to CC broke Cornell's string of six straight wins, which was tied for the second-longest active streak in the country behind Penn State (11 games). The Big Red last won six consecutive games from Feb. 11 to March 26, 2005, when it won 11 straight heading into an NCAA Regional final.
•  Cornell competed at the FCHC for a 17th consecutive year since the tournament's inception in 2000, and this marked the fifth time that it finished in second place.

Highlights from the 5-2 win over Northern Michigan:


Highlights from the 2-1 overtime loss to Colorado College:


The Hot Hands:
•  Senior defenseman Patrick McCarron (2-12–14) has surged to the team lead in scoring and now ranks fourth nationally in points per game for blueliners (1.08). He had an eight-game points streak snapped heading into the FCHC. That made him the first Cornell player to have points in eight straight since Greg Miller from Oct. 29 to Nov. 22, 2011 and the first Big Red defenseman with points in eight straight since Mark McRae from Jan. 25 to Feb. 21, 2003.
•  Senior forward Eric Freschi (1-6–7) has six points in his last five games after posting 17 points in his first 99 collegiate games. He scored the winning goal Nov. 29 against Colgate.

Who's Who at CU:
•  Senior forward Jeff Kubiak (1-1–2) — the Big Red's leading scorer last season — returned for the FCHC after a 10-game absence due to injury. He's been reunited with sophomore wingers Mitch Vanderlaan (8-5–13) 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 goal and ranks fourth in ECAC Hockey for goals per game in league play (0.86).
•  Junior forward Trevor Yates (6-3–9) leads the team with four power-play goals. He ranks 13th nationally in power-play goals per game (0.31).
•  Senior goaltender Mitch Gillam (8-3-1, 2.34, .913) has a string of 45 starts snapped when junior Hayden Stewart got the nod against Colorado College. Gillam's seven shutouts last year were tied for the third-most in the country.

Killin' It:
•  The Big Red penalty kill ranks sixth in the nation with a 88.1 percent success rate. Cornell's penalty kill has been especially good of late, surviving 29 of its opponents last 31 power plays (93.5 pct.). The Big Red was 6-for-7 on the kill in its Oct. 28 visit to Merrimack, conceding only a five-on-three goal.

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.

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 13 games, the Big Red has already accumulated 56 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, 13 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 currently ranked fifth in the nation in average faceoffs per game (25.0), and his 68.2 winning percentage in December was tops among forwards taking at least 50 draws.
•  Weidner is also the nation's top shot-blocker among forwards (1.85 per game). Sophomore defenseman Alec McCrea currently ranks seventh in the nation among all shot-blockers (2.46 per game).

What, Me Worry?:
•  Five of Cornell's eight victories so far this season have come in games in which the Big Red has surrendered the first goal. Only two other teams in the country have that many wins when being scored upon first — Union (6-4-2) and Minn.-Duluth (6-1-3).
•  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).

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.

Milestone Watch:
•  Already the winningest coach in program history and in Ivy League history, Mike Schafer is closing in on another milestone this season. Schafer is now just two victories short of 400 over his career. He became the 35th coach all-time to rack up 350 victories across all NCAA divisions, and he is also just the third coach to pass 350 victories with Ivy League tenure, joining Ned Harkness (Cornell, Union and Rensselaer) and Tim Taylor (Yale).

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., and once played youth hockey on MSG ice in between periods of a New York 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.

Apple Harvest:
•  Freshman Yanni Kaldis (0-6–6) is tied for 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.

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 eighth goal Dec. 28 vs. Northern Michigan.

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 eight career shutouts is that he's only won six of them — Dec. 28, 2014 against Lake Superior State and Nov. 20, 2015 against Yale were both scoreless ties.

Road Warriors:
•  The history of Cornell hockey dates all the way back to 1900-01, but this year was the first time the Big Red has ever started its season with five consecutive road games — and all three of the trips over that stretch were lengthy. The Big Red traversed approximately 2,450 miles over a 17-day span (Oct. 27 to Nov. 13), amounting to about 44 hours on the bus.

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 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.

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 Merrimack:
•  Like the Big Red, the Warriors split a pair of Dec. 28-29 games at the Florida College Hockey Classic. Merrimack finished third after losing to Colorado College in the first round, 3-0, before rebounding with a 4-2 win over Northern Michigan. The victory snapped a three-game losing streak after the Warriors were swept by rival UMass-Lowell before the holiday break.
•  Merrimack has a 5-3-1 record at home, and it is 6-1 when it scores the first goal. The Warriors haven't yet lost a game it's led at the end of any period.
•  Junior winger Brett Seney (6-10–16) leads the team in scoring, rating (plus-7) and power-play scoring (six assists).
•  Senior center Hampus Gustafsson (9-5–14) is the team's leading goal-scorer and has four of the squad's 12 power-play goals.
•  Sophomore Drew Vogler (6-6-3, 2.68, .902) has been the team's primary goaltender, though junior Collin Delia (1-3, 2.85, .891) is back in the fold after an early-season injury. Vogler earned the win Oct. 28 against Cornell with 33 saves.

The Series Against Merrimack:
•  The Big Red and Warriors have only met on five previous occasions, with Cornell holding a 3-2 series lead. The Big Red lost its season opener Oct. 28 at Merrimack, 3-2, conceding the game's first three goals before strikes from Matt Buckles and Mitch Vanderlaan.
•  Cornell swept a two-game series Jan. 6-7, 2016 at Lynah Rink. Mitch Gillam made 26 saves for a shutout in a 3-0 victory in the opener, then the Big Red used a pair of Anthony Angello goals to jump out to a big lead early the next night en route to a 5-2 win.
•  The first two meetings between these programs came during the now-defunct Syracuse Invitation Tournament. Cornell won the first matchup, 4-1, on Dec. 28, 1996, then Merrimack took a 3-2 decision on Nov. 28, 1999.

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.

Never Too Close For Comfort:
•  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.

Up Next:
•  Cornell returns to ECAC Hockey play for the regular season's final 15 games, starting with a Jan. 13-14 road trip to Princeton and Quinnipiac.