By Brandon Thomas
Cornell Athletic Communications

ITHACA, N.Y. – It's finally back to business as usual this weekend for Cornell men's hockey – but like with what seems to be so many things in the post-pandemic world, there are going to be some residual twists. Among the most notable will be overtime and point distribution formats, which need to be explored in depth to be understood.
 
The league sent out a memorandum on the matter earlier this week to clarify exactly how it all works. That might seem odd, considering that it's the exact same format as last year – but two-thirds of the league (including Cornell) had its seasons canceled due to the pandemic and may have missed it.
 
"The new point system: If you ask me to explain it to you right now, I would not be able to do it," Mike Schafer '86, the Jay R. Bloom '77 Head Coach of Men's Hockey, said last week.
 
He's not alone. Pack a lunch and we'll get through it here.
 
At the heart of the matter was a change from the top. In July 2020, the NCAA approved a change to Rule 91.1 to align all of its teams to use the same overtime procedure after years of some conferences doing this and some conferences doing that. Now, across the board, a tie at the end of 60 minutes will be followed by up to five minutes of 3-on-3 sudden death overtime. If it remains tied after the 3-on-3 session, the game will officially be recorded as a tie for NCAA and Ratings Percentage Index purposes.
 
But wait, there's more! In ECAC Hockey men's conference games, there will be no ties – even though the national records say there are. Those league games that remain deadlocked after overtime will advance to a best-of-three shootout.
 
All of the shuffling results in an overhaul in the points system for league standings. A win in regulation time gets a team three points; a win in overtime or shootout is worth two; an OT or SO loss yields one point; and a regulation loss remains a zero.
 
"I think it might be confusing to fans if you see you're down by six points, but really it's only two wins," said Mike Schafer '86, the Jay R. Bloom '77 Head Coach of Men's Hockey. "I think the fans are going to have a harder time adjusting to it than the coaches or the players. We talk to our players all the time about how we don't care about what's going on in the standings. Just focus on that next game."
 
One caveat of which Schafer is acutely aware is that there *is* a difference between an overtime result and a shootout result – just not in league standings. The difference is how the result is weighted, which isn't represented by the points breakdown. For purposes of the RPI and, by proxy, the Pairwise Comparison Ratings, an overtime victory is equivalent to 55% of a regulation win. Remember that a shootout win still goes down as a tie in national records, so that would be 50% of a regulation win.
 
And just for kicks, here's one more thing to consider: Shootout results are not acknowledged as part of ECAC Hockey's head-to-head comparisons if a tiebreaker is needed at the end of the regular season. In that vein, an overtime win would be more valuable than a shootout win.
 
At the end of this long and winding road is a new display of conference standings. The commissioners of the six leagues have decided to unify in this matter, just to mix in a semblance of clarity. The traditional Win-Loss-Tie display remains, and it is inclusive of additional columns depicting overtime records (OT Wins "OW"-OT Losses "OL") and shootout wins ("SW"). In other words, W+L+T=total games played.
 
One last wrinkle: ECAC Hockey women's hockey does something different. There will not be shootouts in league women's games, which means ties are still on the table. To get deadlocks accurately valued in the three-point system for standings, ties will be worth 1½ points. The other difference from the men's side is that overtime results are nationally weighted parallel to league points – which is to say an OT win is worth 67% of a regulation win for RPI purposes.
 
Got it?

A Familiar Face

He didn't know it until less than a week from the game, but defenseman Jack Lagerstrom saw a familiar face behind the visiting team's bench on Saturday. The National Team Development Program Under-18 Team's head coach is Adam Nightingale, who shifted over to Ann Arbor after a stint as the assistant coach for the Detroit Red Wings. But a few stops before that, Nightingale was the head coach of the Shattuck-St. Mary's 14U team when Lagerstrom first arrived at the school for the 2014-15 season.
 
"He was played a big part in my time there, because he was bantam year coach. So it was my first year away from home," Lagerstrom said. "It was totally different scenery than what I was used to. He was very helpful with all of that. He was also very generous and supportive on the ice, and off the ice with academics. He was very good for me."
 
Nightingale chatted about the small-world connection with Cornell play-by-play broadcaster Jason Weinstein before Saturday's game.
 
"Jack was a great kid; has a great family. You could tell right away that they really cared about Jack," Nightingale said. "He has a pretty good sense of humor and a rocket for a shot, and I'm sure he still does. I'm sure we'll see it tonight."
 
Nightingale was right – but it was Lagerstrom's vision of the ice that made more of a direct impact. His cross-ice pass from the defensive zone sprung senior Kyle Betts on a semi-breakaway that eventually resulted in freshman Ondrej Psenicka's goal late in the first period.

Oh, That's Better

There's no doubt the biggest moment of Saturday's game against the NTDP came with the score tied at 2 and the Big Red working on a power play with 5:20 remaining. Freshman Justin Ertel was trying to shake pressure just inside the Cornell blue line when Marek Hejduk slashed down on his stick and wired a one-timer from just above the hash marks past an unsuspecting senior goaltender Nate McDonald.
 
Except the goal didn't count. Referee Tom Dellafranco immediately washed it out and called a penalty. A Cornell timeout followed – but not for the reason one would assume.
 
"I took a timeout not to set the 5-on-3 – we've only practiced the 5-on-3 for 30 seconds so far – it was because I thought we were getting the penalty," Schafer said. "I really had no idea we were going to be going on the (two-man advantage)."
 
You'd never know it by the result. Senior Max Andreev won the ensuing faceoff back to sophomore Tim Rego on the left point, and he quickly turned a pass to a wide-open junior Ben Berard in the right circle that was blasted high inside the near post.

Happy Coincidence

The fact that Cornell's first eight games this year are against seven of the other nine teams that didn't play last year could be interpreted as brilliant strategy, but it's really just good fortune.

For starters, the only ECAC Hockey games the Big Red schedules on its own are the two against its travel partner — Colgate. The other 20 are arranged by the league itself, and the 2021-22 edition was finalized and distributed before the onset of the pandemic, back in August 2019. So while an effort is made by the league to pair up Ivy League schools against each other as much as possible in the early going (a considerate nod to the Ivy's late arrival to game action), it's really just a coincidence that the Big Red is playing the majority of its November tilts against teams also just returning to action.

This weekend's season-opening pair of games against Alaska is a bit different, but it wasn't an intentional effort to get in another team that sat idle last year. It was really just a matter of having a team fill a void that developed late in the scheduling cycle.

"There were lots of scheduling conflicts from the previous year, where teams had contracts (from 2020-21) and they wanted to fulfill those (in 2021-22)," Schafer said. "At one point we had another team coming in, and now we've had to push that back to next year. We're fortunate that Alaska Fairbanks could come in."

Off The Crossbar is a weekly-ish notebook about the Cornell men's hockey team written by assistant director of athletic communications Brandon Thomas, who is in his 11th year as his office's primary contact for the team following a stint of a few years as the team's beat writer at The Ithaca Journal and a few years as an observer from Section D. He can be reached at brandon@cornell.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @BT_unassisted.