TROY, N.Y. — The men's hockey team concludes a quick swing through New York's Capital District at 7 tonight with a game against rejuvenated Rensselaer. The game against the Engineers will be broadcast live online by RPI TV. 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 #22: #16 CORNELL at RENSSELAER
TIME: 7 p.m.
DATE: Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017
PLACE: Houston Field House · Troy, N.Y.
CORNELL: 13-6-2 overall, 8-4-2 ECAC Hockey
RENSSELAER: 6-22-1 overall, 4-12 ECAC Hockey
RADIO: WHCU-AM (95.9 FM, 870 AM)
WEBCAST: RPI TV
LIVE STATS: www.rpiathletics.com

Cornell game notes (PDF)
Rensselaer game notes (PDF)

Big Red Rewind:
•  Cornell descends on Houston Field House after an exhilarating 5-3 victory late Friday night at Union, scoring twice late in the third period after a barrage of Dutchmen power plays help the hosts evaporate a two-goal Big Red lead.
•  Jake Weidner scored a power-play goal from a tight angle for the winner with 4:09 left in the third, then Anthony Angello scored his second of the night on an unassisted breakaway 39 seconds later to ice a game that featured a late start time to accommodate television and didn't conclude until 11:12 p.m. 
•  Alex Rauter also scored on a breakaway, opening the scoring at the 10-minute mark with his eighth goal of the season. After Union tied it on a short-handed goal, Cornell took a 3-1 lead on Angello's first goal of the night (on the power play) and Dwyer Tschantz's first strike of the season.
•  The victory improved Cornell to 4-3 this year against opponents in the USCHO.com poll at the of the game, and #4/5 Union represented the highest-ranked team the Big Red has defeated since taking Game 2 of an ECAC Hockey Championships quarterfinal against #1/1 Quinnipiac last year. The win bumped Cornell up to spots to 15th in the Pairwise Rankings.
•  Prior to last night's game, Cornell was coming off its first consecutive losses in 52 weeks. The Big Red yielded four unanswered goals to lose leads in both setbacks to Harvard last Friday (4-1) and Dartmouth last Saturday (4-2).

Highlights From The 5-3 Win Friday at #4/5 Union:


Who's Who at CU:
•  Senior defenseman Patrick McCarron (3-13–16) ranks second in team scoring and his 0.76 points per game is the fourth-highest total among ECAC Hockey blueliners. 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 (13-5-2, 2.20, .915, SO) had the nation's longest active unbeaten streak for goaltenders snapped last Friday, having backstopped the Big Red to a 10-0-1 record over 11 starts. He had a 1.63 goals against average and .931 save percentage over that span.
•  Senior forward Matt Buckles (4-5–9) has seven points in 10 games since returning from an injury-related absence to close out the first semester.
•  Sophomore forward Mitch Vanderlaan (9-8–17) leads the team in goals and in overall scoring. He has been held without points in four straight games for the first time this season.
•  Junior forward Trevor Yates (8-7–15) leads the team with five power-play goals and ranks third on the team in overall scoring after record two assistst last night — both on the man advantage.
•  Junior forward Alex Rauter (8-3–11) is tied with Yates for the second-most goals on the team, and he enters tonight's game with points in his last four games and six of the seven. 

That Was Unexpected:
•  Before being swept last weekend, Cornell was one of the hottest teams in the nation with a 10-1-1 record over its previous 12 games. 
•  The Big Red also entered last Saturday's game against Dartmouth with the third-best penalty kill in the nation after killing 46 of its opponents' previous 50 power plays (92.0%), but the Big Green gouged the Big Red for three goals on the man advantage.
•  Cornell's loss to Dartmouth last Saturday 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). Cornell followed up that setback by going 6-0-2 over its next eight games, including an OT win over then-No. 1 Providence.

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 21 games, the Big Red has already accumulated 90 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, 21 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 entered the weekend ranked seventh in the nation in average faceoffs per game (24.2), and his 61.3 winning percentage since Dec. 1 is fifth-best among those taking at least 100 draws over that span.
•  By a wide margin, Weidner is also the nation's top shot-blocker among forwards (2.33 per game) and 10th overall. Sophomore defenseman Alec McCrea is also tied for 16th in the nation in shot-blocking (2.19 per game).

Road Warriors:
•  Cornell has played just eight home games to date, which is the lowest total in the country (Brown, Harvard and Bentley have played the next-fewest home games with nine). The Big Red is now in the midst of playing nine of its final 13 regular-season games at home, all within ECAC Hockey play and all within New York state.

What, Me Worry?:
•  Five of Cornell's 13 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 10-11-4 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).

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. 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 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.

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.
•  Freshman forward Jeff Malott (3-3–6) 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 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.

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.

About Rensselaer:
•  The Engineers defeated Colgate, 5-2, last night to improve to win consecutive games for the first time this season. Evan Tironese scored a pair of goals in the second period and Chase Perry made 40 saves in the victory.
•  RPI has largely scuffled to a 6-22-1 record and Pairwise Ranking of 56th — but RPI has shown marked improvement over the last three weeks.
•  The Engineers yielded four or more goals in every game within seven straight losses from Dec. 2-Jan. 7, but it has yielded a total of 12 goals in six games since. In that recent stretch, RPI thumped ECAC Hockey contender Harvard, 4-0, and scratched out a 2-1 win last Saturday at Clarkson. Two of the losses were one-goal affairs against other ECAC Hockey frontrunners in Union and St. Lawrence.
•  Sophomore center Evan Tironese (6-18–24) leads the team in scoring, returning to the lineup last night after missing three straight games. Senior winger Riley Bourbonnais (13-9–22; 7 PPGs) leads the team in goals and his five PPGs in ECAC Hockey games ranks second in the circuit.
•  Sophomore Chase Perry (4-14-1, 3.27, .910, SO) has taken over in goal since the team suspension of classmate Cam Hackett in mid-January. The tandem has split starts to that point.
•  Special teams are not among RPI's struggles this season. Its 52.3% combined special teams mark is fifth-highest among ECAC Hockey teams.

The Series Against Rensselaer:
•  Cornell maintains a commanding 60-36-10 all-time series lead, even though Rensselaer took three of four available points in last year's games. 
•  Jason Kasdorf stole the first game last year, making 44 saves to stymie the Big Red in a 1-0 RPI win Jan. 15, 2016 at Houston Field House. 
•  The Engineers then fought off three one-goal deficits Feb. 27, 2016 at Lynah Rink, capped by Miloš Bubela's extra-attacker goal with 24 seconds left in the third period caroming into the net off a Big Red defender. 
•  No one on the Big Red's current roster has beaten RPI. Cornell is 0-3-3 against the Engineers over the last three year, though Mike Schafer still holds a 28-16-8 career mark against RPI.
 
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.

Anniversary Season:
•  Last weekend marked a reunion for the 50th anniversary of Cornell's first national championship team in 1967. There were festivities throughout the weekend, highlighted by a special ceremony to honor the returning members of the team during the first intermission of Saturday's 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. 
•  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.

Apple Harvest:
•  Freshman Yanni Kaldis (0-8–8) 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.

Leftovers: 
•  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.
•  Cornell surrendered empty-net goals in each of last weekend's games, which were the first it's allowed this year.

Up Next:
•  Cornell returns home for five of its final seven regular-season games, starting with three games next week at Lynah Rink. The Big Red takes on regional rival Colgate at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, then closes out the Ivy League portion of its schedule at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 10 vs. Yale and 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11 vs. Brown.