Nobody inside the Rensselaer hockey program felt satisfied at the end of last season.
The year began with elevated expectations after the 2022-2023 season established the Engineers as a legitimate force on home ice. They’d beaten everyone short of Quinnipiac and Cornell while avoiding sweeps on every weekend at Houston Field House. Struggling to win games on the road felt like a repairable goal in the offseason, so a logical assumption placed RPI near ECAC’s wide open middle tier as long as it marginally improved.
The math seemed simple. Home ice plus more road wins equaled a shot at the league’s top four, which is why it stung badly when RPI finished in 12th place with three home wins. A seven-win road schedule did little to stop that bleeding, and a year steeped in hope crashed out in a sweep loss to Quinnipiac despite the 3-2 win over Clarkson in the ECAC First Round. The lost opportunity felt icky, so head coach Dave Smith spent the offseason diving deeply into his program’s fabric.
Two games into the season, it’s hard to call an edited RPI a true success story, but a 14-goal outburst isn’t anything being rejected by the folks residing in the Capital District after the team launched 8-3 and 6-3 victories in a weekend sweep over Atlantic Hockey America’s Canisius.
“It was an important [weekend],” said Smith of the team’s dueling wins over the Golden Griffins. “We had played well at UMass in an exhibition game, but you never know how to measure it because the other team is doing their own thing and you’re doing your own thing. You get everybody in the lineup, so [Friday] was an important night to kick the season off on the right foot and get positive vibes after a tough year. But then when you’re able to win, you ask how you’re able to build on it and if we can build some momentum that then [translates] to building momentum through the weekend. It felt really good to be able to do that.”
Offensive breakthroughs surprise even the most red-blooded hockey observer, but the Engineers registered marks that hadn’t fallen since the glory days at the turn of the century. Their 14 goals registered RPI’s largest offensive outburst over a two-game stretch since a two-weekend sweep spanning UMass and Mercyhurst during the 2000-2001 season and came within a goal of the 15 goals scored against Dartmouth and Cornell near the end of the 1998-1999 season. The 8-3 win over the Big Green in late February of that year also came one night after a 5-2 win over Vermont, which meant this weekend was the highest-scoring weekend since Valentine’s Day week during the last years of the second Clinton administration.
Those teams routinely finished among the league’s top four teams and placed RPI in either the ECAC Championship or the formerly-used Third Place Game on a regular basis, so the offensive production clearly gave Smith a positive outlook towards this year’s regular season after he rebuilt his roster by actively augmenting his recruiting with players entered into the transfer portal.
“It’s NHL language,” he said. “We want to build ‘through the draft’ and supplement with ‘free agents,’ which in the college world means you’re building through recruiting and using the transfer portal to supplement your needs and holes. We’ve been able to bring in guys because of the strength of our master’s degree, and we kept a number of guys going into their fifth year while adding a couple of more. We wanted to maintain that overall philosophy, but you don’t necessarily know who is going to return [in any given year]. Our guys have been open and honest with us about wanting to stay when they love it at RPI and wanting to leave [the program] in a better place than it was last year and when they got here. That’s been our primary focus because we have these guys who want to establish a legacy and leave something behind.”
That legacy included a team steeped in the kind of instant chemistry that produced 16 different scorers on Saturday night. Six different players scored goals in the first two periods of the eight-goal game after six different goal scorers lit the lamp during Friday’s game. Only three players – Rainers Rullers, Tyler Hotson and Jagger Tapper – scored on both nights, and just under 20 players recorded at least one point. Five players had plus-3 ratings, including Dovar Tinling, who finished with three assists and a goal over the two games, and nobody earned more than a minor penalty across either game, which in turn kept Noah Giesbrecht and the returning Jack Watson decidedly clean in net.
“I was mad because we gave up a late goal on both nights,” laughed Smith. “It’s not that the game was over, but it might have been out of reach, so it was a little frustrating because we had done some really good things defensively. But what you talk about on any team is the balance of how you play because you can’t win being just a defensive team or being just an offensive team. You can’t win with just goaltending.
“You have to be good in all three dimensions, and we were good in back with splitting the time between Watson and Giesbrecht. We’re not going to score six and eight on every night, so we’ve got to be able to keep the puck out of our net and give the offense a chance to win.”
Getting to that point felt like a year-long struggle during the 2023-2024 season, but binging offense against Canisius offered a glimpse into the potential of a team willing to break itself out of the league’s lower tier. Winning two games on the road certainly didn’t hurt RPI, but the current question is about how the Engineers translate the success into their future, which begins this weekend with their home-opening series against Niagara, another Atlantic Hockey America program.
“What we’ve tried to do is address our defensive core so we could be more mobile back there,” said Smith. “Watching the weekend, our D-core stood out, so we’re asking if we’re doing the things that we’ve been practicing, so we can establish our identity. We wanted to play fast. We wanted to get our defensive involved, and getting every line [involved] got the balance that you need to be successful on any night. You take the wins and realize that you had to earn them, and then you try to build off that.”
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One final message…
Before we leave for the week, I wanted to at least mention news that broke over the weekend when Union broadcaster Matt Dubrey announced that he’d been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
Good friend Ken Schott from The Daily Gazette wrote a wonderful story outlining Matt’s battle and shared a link to a GoFundMe page established by his wife Amy. I’m expecting a bit more than just a blurb at the end of the weekly column this week, but in the interest of having traveled down a coverage road before finding out, I wasn’t sure exactly where to address it.
One thing I promise is to share Matt’s message and battle as much as possible, and I’ll start by going into things a bit more next week. So more to come, but until then, please check out the GoFundMe and see if you can help one of ECAC’s voices in his fight to beat back leukemia
