The conversations surrounding the ECAC postseason have always been divided into three distinct parts.
The first four teams, the ones that receive first-round byes, usually lead that discussion, but the next two groupings – the ones that play off in the first round – are just as important for the way they offer matchups and paths to the semifinals in Lake Placid.
That discussion is always a critical piece of the last month of the regular season, but this year’s February calendar took on a completely different tone when the conference adopted a new format. Losing the best-of-three format meant the toughest road trips could eliminate a team within a night, while a favorable matchup with a short bus trip could equally balance a road team’s ability to enter someone’s home and win.
Everything is under a white-hot spotlight, and with three weekends remaining, the race for home ice heated up in a big way last week when Rensselaer upset Colgate on the road to grab its seventh point in the last two weekends. Having initially dropped all but one result between the beginning of December and the end of January, it represented an inflection point for the Engineers, who moved into the No. 8 seed with a shot to shore up home ice and a postseason game at one of ECAC’s most dangerous venues.
“We got better as the game went on,” said RPI coach Dave Smith of Saturday’s win over the Raiders. “Colgate scored early in the third period, and it turned into a grind-it-out game that our guys had to scratch and claw to win.”
The win over Colgate was part of a weekend that saw the Engineers play some of their most complete hockey of the season. They lost on Friday to Cornell, but the 3-1 defeat offered grit and toughness on a level that lacked three weekends earlier during a sweep loss at Yale and Brown, when a combined 7-1 weekend loss included a 3-0 shutout to the Bears, RPI’s third such loss this season.
The team was gutted by injuries, but after taking four points at home from Clarkson and St. Lawrence, a resurgent roster boarded the bus for the Cornell-Colgate trip with more bullets in its respective chamber. A 6-0 loss to Union in the Mayor’s Cup game hurt, but it was technically a non-conference game that only carried ramifications around Albany and the Capital District. It didn’t hurt RPI in the league standings, so the impact was minimized to the table, where the Engineers led the Dutchmen by one point for ninth place.
“We had been dealing with inexperience,” Smith said. “We were leaning on juniors and seniors who missed a year due to the COVID season, and we had centers that were playing out of position. Some guys got hurt and couldn’t play center because they couldn’t take faceoffs, and the lines were being adjusted over the course of the year because we approached it with a ‘next man up’ mentality. But our guys like playing with each other, which made it easy when the [roster] started getting back into form.”
RPI entered the weekend one point behind Brown and two points behind Clarkson for the eighth and seventh spots that carried home ice advantage in the postseason, and when the Bears lost both ends of their weekend series against the North Country teams, the Engineers moved into eighth while the Ivy League team backslid into 10th..
Union, meanwhile, tied RPI for the final home spot, but the two teams’ head-to-head split in conference games meant the Engineers retained eighth place with one extra ECAC win. The Mayor’s Cup loss was again rendered moot, and the Dutchmen, with their 5-10-1 record in league games, instead sat behind the 6-10 Engineers who won two of their three overtime sessions without a trip to the shootout.
Brown and Yale head to the Capital District this weekend, and RPI hosts four of its final six games at Houston Field House, where the team holds a 10-3-1 record opposite a 1-12-0 road statistic. Wins this weekend would give the Engineers more of an inside track to hosting the first round game at their own building, potentially even against Union, while operating within a last month where seeding against Clarkson and Princeton is still very much in play.
RPI hosts the Tigers to kick off the final weekend, but with an additional game at Dartmouth on the road, the opportunity is right within reach for a team that travels with the team chasing it down. Union has to go through the same schedule, and with Brown, Dartmouth and Yale very much chasing the Engineers, those head-to-head wins could seal someone’s trip to Troy even before the extra two games against Harvard and Quinnipiac are counted.
“We’ve enjoyed great fan support,” Smith said. “There’s the weight and tradition of RPI hockey that brings the fans [to the arena]. They missed two years due to COVID because we sat out a year and still dealt with it last year. They’ve been coming out this year and supporting this team.”
RPI hosts Brown and Yale this weekend with both games slated for 7 p.m. starts. Saturday’s game against the Bulldogs is additionally the 45th Annual Big Red Freakout! Game.
