St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

[Muskieman]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Agreed ... It's frustrating to think we are on the right track after last nights game and then BAMM, they lay an egg. I guess it wasn't a complete egg, but I was just hoping for and expecting more. We need to start winning and quickly. I think we can and hopefully we will. We need to get back to work this week with a very hard week of practice and I think things will start to come together. I am still confident at this point, but I'll admit the confidence is starting to slip more and more every game ...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are running out of games to get things on the right track. I thought back in Dec. that we would make it to Tampa, but now think a top-4 RS league finish may be a stretch. The reality is that we are a .500 team right now. Reality is what it is.

[TimU]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are running out of games to get things on the right track. I thought back in Dec. that we would make it to Tampa, but now think a top-4 RS league finish may be a stretch. The reality is that we are a .500 team right now. Reality is what it is.

I also hate to say it, but I think .500 may be optimistic in terms of where we finish. We have ten games left. Six of them are against top-20 teams. Five of those teams have already beaten us and the sixth is the #1 team in the country. This part of the schedule didn't look so daunting when we saw SLU as one of the 2-3 best teams in the ECAC. But at this point, getting just a few points out of those games could be seen as a very good outcome, and it's not unreasonable to think we will drop at least one to Union, Colgate, Brown, and Princeton.

I hope everything starts to click next weekend and SLU runs the table. My somewhat more realistic(?) hope is that they work things out over the course of the next five weeks, turn back into what we thought was going to be a top-10 team, and make a run at the ECAC championship.

[Saints#1]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are running out of games to get things on the right track. I thought back in Dec. that we would make it to Tampa, but now think a top-4 RS league finish may be a stretch. The reality is that we are a .500 team right now. Reality is what it is.

I think we are forgetting too that we had this exact same problem the previous 3 seasons at this exact same point in the season. Last year we were 10-11 and then won 7 straights game all the way up to the Q-Pac game in mid-February. We were thinking the exact the same things these previous seasons and just when we started to count them out they turned it around. Of course they may not every turn it around this season, but we do have the previous years experience to help give us confidence in the fact that they can do this as they have been here before.

[TimU]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Well . . . a win is a win. That's about all I can come up with.

I hope they can match tonight's first period against Cornell, but follow it up with two more just like it.

[critsports]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Well . . . a win is a win. That's about all I can come up with.

I hope they can match tonight's first period against Cornell, but follow it up with two more just like it.

Looks like we are down to a precious few posting here. Hope our thread doesn't become irrelevant.
I was very surprised with Gate only skating three lines that we didn't skate them out of Appleton by the third period. Instead, we wound up chasing them around for the last two periods. Like Tim said......a win is a win; but, I feel like we weren't the better of the two teams on the ice.

[hockeyplayer1015]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Been pretty busy at work, haven't been able to watch or follow games lately, even (sounds like a good thing, unfortunately) . But next weekend through the end of the month I should be able to watch most of the games.

[TimU]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

So I spent most of the game tonight thinking that the effort was there, but frustrated at our lack of any offensive threat. Especially since Cornell really didn't do much either. I kept thinking that we should be able to generate much better chances in close. But credit where credit is due: what a tremendous gut-check effort in the third period against a very big team. They hung in there, stuck with it, and got rewarded. That was a really good win.

The only nagging thought I have is that Hayton, Bayreuther, and Sullivan are carrying WAY more than their share of the load. Maybe I should be happy that if other guys are able to pick it up (like Smolcynski did last night), they'll be a much tougher out going forward. Hayton needs to be player of the week. He stole one last night, and even though he wasn't as busy tonight he made a few HUGE saves in the third period.

Great mental toughness tonight, great win. Maybe I'll go over to RPI after all.

[critsports]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

The only nagging thought I have is that Hayton, Bayreuther, and Sullivan are carrying WAY more than their share of the load. Maybe I should be happy that if other guys are able to pick it up (like Smolcynski did last night), they'll be a much tougher out going forward. Hayton needs to be player of the week. He stole one last night, and even though he wasn't as busy tonight he made a few HUGE saves in the third period.

Great mental toughness tonight, great win. Maybe I'll go over to RPI after all.

Maybe I'll meet you there. The RPI game should be interesting. We completely dominated them earlier in the year and came away with a loss in OT. We certainly owe them some payback for that one. Not sure we are the same team now as then.

A nice third period tonight fueled a comeback.....it looked like the smurfs against the giants out there tonight. Cornell's got some big boys. Not a whole lot of room out there against that team.

[hockeyplayer1015]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Much needed weekend sweep. Hopefully the boys are back on the path, was very happy to wake up and read the happy texts Tim had sent my way. Looking forward (I think ) to watching the games next weekend online.

[TimU]

Maybe I'll meet you there.

We could meet for a burger before the game. If you want to arrive early I'll give you a 15-minute head start.

[sshablak]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Congrats on the sweep, good for you guys.

[critsports]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

[QUOTE=TimU;6265842]We could meet for a burger before the game. If you want to arrive early I'll give you a 15-minute head start. [/QUOTE

At the speed you eat.... I'd need more than a 15 minute head start. Last time I barely finished putting ketchup on my burger and you were done!!

For Tracy's sake..... I hope your not that fast at everything!!!

[Ralph Baer]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Is this news?

Proud to announce my commitment to play college hockey at St. Lawrence University. Thank you to everyone for the support! #Saints #SLU

— MarcDelGaizo (@marcdelgaizo) January 31, 2016

99 D Marc Del Gaizo (@NJRocketsJunior) commits to SLU. Savvy puck-possessor w/ good compete, reads. 5'9 late-99 has 19 pts in 28 EHL games.

— Over The Boards (@OverTheBoards) January 31, 2016

[critsports]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

Is this news?

Proud to announce my commitment to play college hockey at St. Lawrence University. Thank you to everyone for the support! #Saints #SLU

— MarcDelGaizo (@marcdelgaizo) January 31, 2016

99 D Marc Del Gaizo (@NJRocketsJunior) commits to SLU. Savvy puck-possessor w/ good compete, reads. 5'9 late-99 has 19 pts in 28 EHL games.

— Over The Boards (@OverTheBoards) January 31, 2016

Yup.......first I've heard of it.

[SluStatsMan]

Re: St. Lawrence University Skating Saints - 2015-2016

The only nagging thought I have is that Hayton, Bayreuther, and Sullivan are carrying WAY more than their share of the load. Maybe I should be happy that if other guys are able to pick it up (like Smolcynski did last night), they'll be a much tougher out going forward.

Greetings. Some of you know me from the SLU fan group on Facebook, but I just registered here after occasionally reading bits and pieces over the years. Bruce convinced me to finally take the plunge here.

Tim, certainly Hayton, Bayreuther, and Sullivan are stars, but setting aside the defense, if there's one thing we can say about the post-Carey offense, it's that nobody carries way more than their share of the load. And that's a great thing, because it makes a team more resilient in the face of injuries. The last three weeks are a case in point. Yes, Sullivan is tearing up the ice currently, but he (along with Smokes, Thompson, and Pritchard to a lesser extent) has stepped up to fill the void that Marnell has left during his recovery period. (In contrast, Bayreuther's point production since New Year's has been below his average.) Squeeze the balloon in one spot, and it bulges out in another spot. Since Greg Carey graduated, no one -- not Marnell, not Bayreuther, not Sullivan -- has been nearly as central to the offense as he and, to a lesser extent, Kyle Flanagan were.

As you might guess from the user name I chose here, I'm kind of obsessive about crunching numbers to see what's going on. So I did that to see how much more superstar-dependent we were during the Carey era than during the current "scoring by committee" era, as Carvy calls it, in which the points are spread all over the place. This is just a quick-and-dirty look -- it could definitely be done better -- but I computed the leading goal scorer's and leading point scorer's percentage of our total goals and points for each season. SLU's stats pages go back to the 08-09 season, two years before the Carey era, so that's as far as I went.

As expected, the leading scorer's percentages were higher, sometimes wildly higher, in every Carey year than in the two years before then or the two years since then. And also as expected, the leading scorers' percentages in the current "scoring by committee" era are the lowest of the last eight years. In other words, the load has been shared more broadly this season and last than at any time in the previous six years.

For each season in the table below, the first percentage is the leading goal scorer's percentage of the season's goals, and the second percentage is the leading point scorer's percentage of the season's points.

Season Goals Points
------ ----- ------
Pre-Carey
08-09  13%   10%
09-10  14%   12%

Carey
10-11  23%   15%
11-12  17%   15%
12-13  26%   17%
13-14  15%   16%

Post-Carey
14-15  11%   9%
15-16  12%   8%