CANTON, N.Y. — The men's hockey team faces off against St. Lawrence tonight in a matchup of contenders for the Cleary Cup, which is awarded annually to ECAC Hockey's regular-season champion. The Big Red and Saints enter tonight tied for third place with 25 points — two back of league leader Union and one point behind Harvard. Tonight's game will be broadcast through the St. Lawrence website, SaintsAthletics.com. Jason Weinstein will provide play-by-play that can be heard in the Ithaca area on WHCU (870 AM, 95.9 FM) and accessed worldwide here.

GAME #26: #12/13 CORNELL at #17 ST. LAWRENCE
TIME: 7 p.m.
DATE: Friday, Feb. 17, 2017
PLACE: Appleton Arena · Canton, N.Y.
CORNELL: 16-6-3 overall, 11-4-3 ECAC Hockey
ST. LAWRENCE: 15-9-6 overall, 11-4-3 ECAC Hockey
TV: None
RADIO: WHCU (870 AM, 95.9 FM)
VIDEO: SaintsAthletics.com
LIVE STATS: SaintsAthletics.com

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

Big Red Rewind:
•  Cornell is coming off a busy stretch of five ECAC Hockey games in 10 days, where it took nine of an available 10 points to move up to a tie for third place in the standings with Friday's opponent, St. Lawrence.
•  Its last time out, the Big Red defeated Brown, 5-3, on a rare Sunday afternoon tilt at Lynah Rink. Anthony Angello scored twice and Mitch Vanderlaan had a goal and an assist in a game that was pushed back a day due to weather-related  travel concerns for the weekend's visitors.
•  Jeff Kubiak and Anthony Angello each had a goal and an assist, but the Big Red couldn't hold on to a two-goal lead in Saturday's 2-2 tie with Yale.
•  Mitch Gillam made 28 saves in a 4-0 win over Colgate last Tuesday to record the 10th shutout of his career. The Big Red had four different goal-scorers. Matt Nuttle's two first-period assists resulted in his first career multiple-point game.

Highlights From The 5-3 Win Over Brown:


Highlights From The 2-2 Tie With Yale:


Who's Who at CU:
•  Sophomore forward Mitch Vanderlaan (10-10–20) regained the team scoring lead. He broke a string of five straight scoreless games with an assist Tuesday vs. Colgate, then scored a goal to go with an assist Saturday vs. Brown.
•  Junior forward Trevor Yates (10-9–19) typically centers the line with Vanderlaan on the wing. He leads the team with six power-play goals and 11 power-play points, and his goal Sunday gives him six points in his last five.
•  Senior forward Matt Buckles (7-6–13), who typically plays on the other wing of Yates' line, has 11 points in 14 games since returning from an injury-related absence to close out the first semester.
•  Senior defenseman Patrick McCarron (4-15–19) averages the fifth-most points per game for ECAC Hockey blueliners (0.76). 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.
•  The line of senior forward Jeff Kubiak (3-9–12), and sophomore forwards Anthony Angello (10-6–16) and Beau Starrett (2-8–10) posted a combined 11 points last weekend. Angello has five goals in his last five games.
•  Senior Mitch Gillam (16-5-3, 2.16, .917, 2 SO) had the nation's longest active unbeaten streak for goaltenders snapped Jan. 27, having backstopped the Big Red to a 10-0-1 record over 11 starts. The Big Red's lone nominee for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award had a 1.63 goals against average and .931 save percentage over that span.

Road Warriors:
•  Cornell has played just 11 home games this season, which is tied for the lowest total in the country. The Big Red has a better winning percentage on the road (.773) than it does at home (.636).
•  Cornell's wins at Union and Rensselaer to start the month marked the first time the Big Red has swept the Capital District road weekend since Jan. 16-17, 2009.
•  This year marks the first time since 2004-05 that the Big Red has swept three ECAC Hockey road weekends in a single season. Since the league started its travel partner system in 1984-85, Cornell has never had four road sweeps in the same season.

A Little Perspective:
•  Cornell recently took advantage of the games in hand its held on most ECAC Hockey teams to moved up to a third-place tie with St. Lawrence. That leaves the Big Red currently aligned for one of the league's coveted first-round byes. Fifth-place Quinnipiac is four points behind Cornell and SLU.
•  Last week's results leave Cornell steady in the Pairwise Rankings at 13th. If the season ended today and there was one or fewer major upset champion in the Big Ten, Hockey East, ECAC Hockey and NCHC tournaments, Cornell would be in line for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament.

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 25 games, the Big Red has already accumulated 100 man-games lost to injury — which includes lengthy absences from the team's leading scorer last year (Jeff Kubiak, 10 games) and a top-four defenseman (Ryan Bliss, 25).
•  Senior Jake Weidner has the massive task of being the Big Red's leading faceoff man. He entered the weekend sixth in the nation in average faceoffs per game (24.4), and his 60.6 winning percentage since Dec. 1 is third-best among those taking at least 100 draws over that span.
•  By a wide margin, Weidner is also far and away the nation's top shot-blocker among forwards (2.44 per game) and fifth overall. Sophomore defenseman Alec McCrea is also 18th in the nation in shot-blocking (2.16 per game).

What, Me Worry?:
•  Seven of Cornell's 16 victories so far this season have 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 12-11-4 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).

Blip On The Radar:
•  The Big Red has killed off its opponents' last 13 power plays after an ultra rare stretch of teams scoring multiple power-play goals against Cornell in three straight games. Before that slump, the Big Red had the third-best penalty kill in the nation on Jan. 29.
•  Cornell's Jan. 28 loss to Dartmouth marked the first time the Big Red has lost a game in which it held a two-goal lead since Nov. 7, 2015 (a 5-4 overtime loss to Quinnipiac). The Big Red watched another two-goal lead evaporate last Friday at Union only to surge ahead with two late goals to salvage a 5-3 victory, then it yielded the final two goals of last Saturday's 2-2 tie with Yale.

First Ivy League Coach 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 in January. 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).

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.
•  Vanderlaan 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.
•  Freshman forward Jeff Malott (4-3–7) then scored his first three collegiate goals in a span of 8 minutes, 44 seconds during the first period to power the Big Red past Princeton on Jan. 13. He was subsequently named ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Week after becoming the first Cornell freshman with a hat trick since current NHLer Matt Moulson on Feb. 7, 2003.

Gillam's Groove:
•  Senior goaltender Mitch Gillam moved up to a tie for fourth on the program's all-time list for career shutouts after Tuesday's win against Colgate. By stopping all 28 shots from Colgate on Tuesday, Gillam earned his 10th career clean sheet.
•  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 10 career shutouts is that he's only won eight 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 Jan. 7 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.

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 St. Lawrence:
•  The Saints are currently 19th in the Pairwise Rankings, 17th 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 has looked the part. The Saints had a strong midseason surge, but they have lost three of their last five.
•  The Saints played just one game last weekend, falling to red-hot Princeton on the road, 3-1. Sophomore forward Jacob Pritchard (9-11–20) scored the lone SLU goal early in the game on a rebound.
•  Despite a seven-game absence due to injury, senior defenseman Gavin Bayreuther (7-18–25) still leads the team in scoring. Junior forward Mike Marnell (11-11–22) also maintains the team lead in goals, but he has not played since mid-January.
•  Junior Kyle Hayton (14-8-6, 2.12, .933, 4 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 Series Against St. Lawrence:
•  In a series that began during the 1926-27 campaign, Cornell holds a 59-45-8 all-time lead.
•  Sophomore defenseman Brendan Smith scored his first collegiate goal late in the second period to  give Cornell a 3-2 victory over SLU in the season's first meeting on Jan. 21 at Lynah Rink.
•  The Saints had rallied to tie the game after Jared Fiegl and Patrick McCarron gave the Big Red a two-goal lead after the first period.
•  Joe Sullivan scored in overtime to give SLU a 2-1 victory on Jan. 30, 2016 in Cornell's last visit to Appleton Arena. Jake Weidner opened the scoring with a power-play goal for the Big Red.

Highlights From The 3-2 Win Over St. Lawrence in January:


Apple Harvest:
•  Freshman Yanni Kaldis (1-10–11) 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. He was named ECAC Hockey Rookie of the Week following that effort, then garnered the honor a second time last week.

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.

Anniversary Season:
•  The Jan. 27-28 weekend marked a reunion for the 50th anniversary of Cornell's first national championship team in 1967. There were festivities throughout, highlighted by a special ceremony to honor the returning
members of the team during the first intermission of the second game.
•  This is also the 60th year of hockey in Lynah Rink. The facility was dedicated April 6, 1957, a few weeks after it hosted an exhibition between the New York Rangers and the Rochester Americans (AHL).

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.

The Offensive Defense:
•  Mitch Gillam leads the nation's goaltenders in career points. His quick outlet pass Jan. 21 against St. Lawrence set up the line rush leading to Patrick McCarron's goal, giving Gillam five career points on one goal and four assists.

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.

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.

Up Next:
•  Cornell returns home to face Rensselaer on Friday, Feb. 24 and Union on Saturday, Feb. 25 to close out the regular season. The game against the Dutchmen will serve as Senior Night.