Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

[AJ Fan]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

It's possible that the coaches and players were informed prior to the season that the format would revert back to the highest seed hosting the semis and finals and that it was never posted until recently. But again for the second seed's fans expecting another home game, it is a bitter pill to swallow and I can tell you in the case of Harvard, you won't get our fans to travel to Ithaca. There will be a revenue loss there for sure as opposed to our hosting a game at Bright.

Yeah, a trip to Ithaca is pretty much out of the question. I was looking forward to the semifinal game, too. Guess it's the women's basketball game for me!

 

[Watson Rink]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Moving to this thread tonight from the ECAC tourney thread as we await other teams' results and the decision of the Lords of Bracketology as to whether the season is over or not....

If tonight's loss were to be analyzed in the depth that the Boston Globe analyzes each Patriots game, based on exhaustive watching of video, what would the grades be for different aspects of the team's play?

Based on just having watched the game once on the fly, I'd venture:

High marks for team speed, forechecking and backchecking tenacity, ability to generate oddman rushes, physical conditioning
Low marks for ability to finish, ability to find shooting lanes, giving up goals on innocuous-looking plays, team depth

What do other people think?

After the dust settles, we can revert to our earlier discussion of how the prospective Class of '16 may help fill in the gaps next year.

Bitter as tonight's result may be, I have to reiterate how pleased I am that this 18-player team with one senior has managed to get this far. They have definitely over-achieved my initial expectations.

 

[dave1381]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

I wasn't able to watch the game tonight, but nothing in your description surprises me, and I think your post is totally spot on.

As I said in the ECAC thread, I'm fully confident Harvard gets in if SLU/UMD/BU/Providence all lose this weekend.

 

[Veritas]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

I have to agree in general with Watson Rink. I could not get the game on the radio as WHRD chose to broadcast a regular season basketball game instead so had to follow on Live Stats.

I do wonder about the effect of lack of depth over the course of a long season. Earlier in the season Harvard beat SLU handily twice and tonight lost in OT. The cumulative effect of the season has to take some sort of toll on the Harvard women.

Speaking about basketball, it is clearly the new darling of the athletic department. I am wondering if the emphasis on Basketball will result in reallocation of AI band slots for both men's and women's hockey. That would not bode well for the future.

Moving to this thread tonight from the ECAC tourney thread as we await other teams' results and the decision of the Lords of Bracketology as to whether the season is over or not....

If tonight's loss were to be analyzed in the depth that the Boston Globe analyzes each Patriots game, based on exhaustive watching of video, what would the grades be for different aspects of the team's play?

Based on just having watched the game once on the fly, I'd venture:

High marks for team speed, forechecking and backchecking tenacity, ability to generate oddman rushes, physical conditioning
Low marks for ability to finish, ability to find shooting lanes, giving up goals on innocuous-looking plays, team depth

What do other people think?

After the dust settles, we can revert to our earlier discussion of how the prospective Class of '16 may help fill in the gaps next year.

Bitter as tonight's result may be, I have to reiterate how pleased I am that this 18-player team with one senior has managed to get this far. They have definitely over-achieved my initial expectations.

 

[dave1381]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

I do wonder about the effect of lack of depth over the course of a long season. Earlier in the season Harvard beat SLU handily twice and tonight lost in OT. The cumulative effect of the season has to take some sort of toll on the Harvard women.

I feel the difference in outcome had more to do with SLU improving than Harvard getting worse. Probably the lack of depth was an obstacle in terms of Harvard improving though.

Harvard did match up well with SLU this year. If you were to guess the outcome of this semifinal based solely on recent results, you would've expected SLU to beat Harvard convincingly, and most people on the ECAC thread felt that way. But Harvard gave SLU it's toughest game since Thanksgiving from anyone not named Cornell, just like Harvard gave SLU its worst defeats back before Thanksgiving when SLU wasn't playing nearly as well. So I was pleased the game was closer than a lot of people expected.

Speaking about basketball, it is clearly the new darling of the athletic department. I am wondering if the emphasis on Basketball will result in reallocation of AI band slots for both men's and women's hockey. That would not bode well for the future.

Will result? It has to have happened already to some degree. Basketball can't admit lower AI players and not have it come from somewhere, assuming the overall constraint is close to binding. The question is more exactly how evenly that impact was divided among the other programs. Now if every program takes some marginal AI hit, but the men's basketball team makes some tourney run that improves the overall image of the athletic program, that's a win-win. But I would be concerned if Harvard women's hockey were no longer able to go after a player with Sarah Vaillancourt's talent & AI. I have no idea whether that's the case.

What may be an even bigger impact than basketball is the Ivy League recently increased the minimum AI -- allegedly because when they switched from class rank to GPA, AI's all creeped up a bit. So that may also make it harder for Ivies to get some top recruits.

 

[Skate79]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Moving to this thread tonight from the ECAC tourney thread as we await other teams' results and the decision of the Lords of Bracketology as to whether the season is over or not....

If tonight's loss were to be analyzed in the depth that the Boston Globe analyzes each Patriots game, based on exhaustive watching of video, what would the grades be for different aspects of the team's play?

Based on just having watched the game once on the fly, I'd venture:

High marks for team speed, forechecking and backchecking tenacity, ability to generate oddman rushes, physical conditioning
Low marks for ability to finish, ability to find shooting lanes, giving up goals on innocuous-looking plays, team depth

What do other people think?

After the dust settles, we can revert to our earlier discussion of how the prospective Class of '16 may help fill in the gaps next year.

Bitter as tonight's result may be, I have to reiterate how pleased I am that this 18-player team with one senior has managed to get this far. They have definitely over-achieved my initial expectations.

I wasn't able to watch the game but listened to the audio feed. Based on how the announcers described the game, it sounded like a physical and chippy contest with SLU blocking a lot of shots. Harvard did have some break-ins that they failed to capitalize on and I agree that we lack a finishing touch, something that plagued us all year. We also have had a tendency to give up 'soft' goals and that seemed to be the case last night although I didn't see either SLU goal.

I do think the lack of depth hurt us. There is no getting around it. I commented earlier in the season that I felt this might come back to haunt us later on during the playoffs and while I won't use it as an excuse for losing, you have to wonder if Dempsey's line, Pucci and Edney in particular were gassed by the time OT started. The third line just didn't have an impact and the second line didn't pick up the scoring slack. Marissa Gedman had a tough last month of the season with numerous penalties and giveaways. There were D breakdowns and poor clearing attempts during PKs that hurt us on more than one occasion. And Bellamy was just okay, not great during the last month and the playoffs and that simply isn't going to cut it. She may lose her job next year if the reports on the incoming frosh goalie are accurate.

As far as the AI is concerned, doesn't that also affect Cornell who does not seem to have a problem recruiting stud players? I know their AI is much lower than Harvard's and they seem to put their resources into hockey at the expense of other programs including football. I don't know if the recent decision on AI will have an impact on recruiting and getting commitments from players like Kendall Coyne but you see the effect that Coyne has had on NU's program. Imagine if she were wearing Crimson and white. Might last night have turned out differently? Who knows but I would have liked our chances even more with a player or two like Coyne in our lineup.

Losing in the semis 5 out of the last 6 years is not an aberration; it is an alarming trend that requires the coaching staff and players to make adjustments in their game prep, attitude, mental approach and willingness to 'get dirty' in front of the net. Otherwise, we are in for more of the same in the coming seasons.

 

[Watson Rink]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

The announcers described the game accurately in all the respects cited above.

At this point I'd like to resurrect a fascinating controversy that began to rage on this thread around February 2 but then died away, namely, which factor has more adversely affected the team's results since 2007-2008: lack of depth or lack of Olympians. Bear in mind some factors that may differentiate H from your generic hockey team, such as a coach who emphasizes team defense and conditioning; one who tends to use only her top lines in critical situations and who used to use first-years very sparingly; a baroque set of AI rules that affect recruiting; a tradition of Patty Kaz nominees and winners; the team's recent skid in limelight tournaments (ECAC, Beanpot and NCAA); and many more factors that don't occur off the top of my head, some of which may help and some hurt the recruitment of "stud" players and also define the expectations of good solid players (e.g. you'll have to play defense, you'll have to train hard, third-liners will get limited ice time, grinders will be rewarded for their efforts, etc.).

Let me start with the Class of '13: was it a good or bad recruiting class? On the one hand, it lacked a Chu, Cahow or Vaillancourt. On the other hand, in terms of depth, if you had four classes exactly like that class, you'd have a team of 28 players. On D you'd have four Puccis, four Romatoskis and four Hayssens; at F you'd have four Dempseys, four Spurlings and four Chutes; in goal, you'd have four Bellamies (or perhaps you'd have two Bellamies and a couple of Ds or Fs with skills comparable to Bellamy's). That's a deeper team than we have now, and probably a better one too. One fascinating question is how much further into the ECAC/NCAA mix such a team would go than the current team without an Olympian or two; another fascinating question is who you would trade from that team for an Olympian or two (1) in hockey terms and (2) within the parameters imposed on recruiting. And a disquieting question is how often those recruiting parameters allow you to get a class like the Class of '13, much less an Olympian.

 

[dave1381]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Well tough luck for Harvard with the results today. They had a much better chance at an at-large then it sounds like Katey even realized based on Digit's commentary, but clearly it's over.

As for the Olympian vs. depth question, I think you need both some elite players and some depth. A team like UND has some Olympians but not the depth, and they look pretty far from winning a title. Probably the distribution of talent isn't the same as it was when there was a huge gap between Olympians and the rest, so probably depth is more important going forward.

 

[Skate79]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Well tough luck for Harvard with the results today. They had a much better chance at an at-large then it sounds like Katey even realized based on Digit's commentary, but clearly it's over.

As for the Olympian vs. depth question, I think you need both some elite players and some depth. A team like UND has some Olympians but not the depth, and they look pretty far from winning a title. Probably the distribution of talent isn't the same as it was when there was a huge gap between Olympians and the rest, so probably depth is more important going forward.

SLU deserves to go. They went up to Dartmouth and beat them twice, beat Harvard and Cornell at Lynah. They allowed all of four goals in four games with two going into OT. They handled the pressure beautifully and deserve as high a seed as the committee will give them. Congrats to them.

I was at the HE tournament today in Hyannis and while BU and Providence made it to the finals, Northeastern is a very good team and should be included in the NCAAs. They threw everything but the kitchen sink at LaCasse and she stopped them all. Just one of those days. I think BU will take the title unless LaCasse has some more magic up her sleeve.

After watching the HE tournament, I came away feeling that Harvard has a ways to go to compete effectively against out of conference teams. Yes, they beat Providence but beating BU and BC is a different matter altogether. The speed and physicality displayed by both teams is something Harvard just doesn't see on a regular basis. It's not their fault; the ECAC is what it is. Still, to be a serious NCAA contender is going to require a step up in talent that I'm not sure is available to Harvard given their academic requirements.

 

[Watson Rink]

Depth

Depth

A few preliminary comments on depth vis-a-vis the incoming class. Just the added depth, I suspect, will improve the current team's performance considerably.

This year's team was extraordinarily lucky that they didn't have many long-term out-of-the-line-up injuries and illnesses. Probably Baumgartner's was the longest. On the other hand, you had a lot of kids coming back pretty quickly after what looked like possible concussions and similar injuries. We don't know how many players rushed back before they were 100% ready. Those sorts of early returns and nagging injuries can sag a team's performance.

Next year the team should be back to a fuller complement that will allow more recuperation time as well as a bit of competition. For years, Katey rolled three defensive pairings and too often this year injuries and illnesses interfered with that. Up front, rolling three healthy, vigorous lines is also a sine qua non. If there are more than nine healthy forwards, let them contend for ice time on the third line or form an entire energy line: it will put a spring in their step when they're on the ice. Nobody expects a third line to be scoring demons, but Katey has had a number of third lines that ate up a lot of minutes cleverly cycling the puck within 15 feet of the opponent's goalline, totally out of danger. And people could and did move up from those third lines as they matured.

Finally, in goal you can't risk putting everything on one set of shoulders (ask Claude Julien about that while Tuuka Rask is injured). We tend to misremember the Martin/Kessler saga when we think of them as splitting, or competing for, starts. IIRC, Kessler was injured all of her first semester and Martin almost all of her senior year; and after Martin had graduated, Kessler was injured for the last third or more of her senior year. If there is a Thomas/Rask situation next year, that will be the least of the team's worries.

Now all we have to do is bite our fingernails and wait to see if the prospectives listed on the DI recruiting thread really wind up here. (You never know about the Admission Committee's priorities these days: I could take a cheap shot and say that with 3 seniors departing, the men's 20-man BB team will be down to "just" 17 players plus the incoming frosh and you never know when a foul-out will get that 11th man out of his warm-up jacket and ready to head in, leaving just 9 "pine brothers" sitting like a row of statues; but I digress....)

 

[Watson Rink]

The well-Stocked Men's BB team

The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Just to clarify my comments about the men's BB team, there are actually "only" 19 players, not 20.

The 10-man rotation consists of 2 Srs, 3 Jrs, 1 So and 4 Fr. 1 Sr, 2 Jrs, 3 So and 3 Fr constitute the pine brothers.

Two excellent players, perhaps the heart of the team, one last year's Ivy POY, are graduating. So perhaps they should get two recruits this year, one Sarah V and one Jillian Dempsey so to speak, to restock. But not more than two recruits, please.

I'm beginning to wonder whether that is what the Admissions Committee told Katey four years ago.

BTW, and I mean no disrespect, does anyone know what the story was with Ling Ling Lok '12? She played a total of three games, I believe, and I've always been curious what happened with her.

 

[Veritas]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Watson Rink -
I have been wondering the same thing about Ling Ling Lok. Seemed a great recruit. I am not sure if she is still at Harvard.

 

[Hux]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

BTW, and I mean no disrespect, does anyone know what the story was with Ling Ling Lok '12? She played a total of three games, I believe, and I've always been curious what happened with her.

She wasn't a D1 player.

 

[Watson Rink]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Among the positives for the season, I just noticed that the team edged out Dartmouth for second place in intra-Ivy League winning percentage:

Cornell .917 (11-1)
Harvard .667 (8-4)
Dartmouth .650 (6-3-1)
Princeton .542 (6-5-1)
Brown .167 (2-10)
Yale .000 (0-10)

The foregoing doesn't prove much that we didn't already know from ECAC results: one outlier at the top, two outliers at the bottom, and three solid contenders bunched together in the middle.

Also noted that the Ancient Eight (Six?) were a combined .531 in overall ECAC play (72-63-10) and .558 (39-30-8) against non-Ivy opponents, if I'm doing the math right; the only fly in the ointment being the Ivies' .200 (1-4) record against non-Ivies in the tournament!

 

[dave1381]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Sure, though the official Ivy title only counts the regular season games, no Harvard sweep of Princeton or Cornell sweep of Brown, and Harvard was 4th.
http://collegehockeystats.net/1112/standings/ivyw
But I'm not losing sleep over whether Harvard was 2nd or 4th in the regular season Ivy standings by a point.

 

[Watson Rink]

Re: Harvard Women's Hockey 2011-2012: Taking the Next Step

Yes, that illustrates the different ways you can think about and weight post-season play. Some metrics, like regular-season championships, entirely omit post-season results; some metrics, like RPI and KRACH, appear to weight March games equally with October games; some metrics, like tournament championships and NCAA autobids, are based solely on post-season results; NCAA at-large bids for teams on the bubble are decisively affected by last-minute results whenever teams outside the bubble win autobids; and polls appear to be based heavily, though perhaps not entirely, on recent results.

So in looking for positive metrics for the 2011-2012 season, it appears that for a team that peaked in late November, with the sweeps of Clarkson and SLU and the split with Dartmouth, those metrics that evenly weight early and late season performance are generally the best looking: even as of March 5, the team remains #8 in RPI and #7 in KRACH, but it has dipped to 10th in Pairwise and a very distant #11 in the USCHO poll (down from #8 before the recent SLU game). The only metric that happened to improve during the play-offs was the team's overall Ivy League results.

 

[Trillium]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

She wasn't a D1 player.

You are seriously misinformed. Just because she never got to play does not mean she was not extremely capable of doing so. In actual fact, she was one of the 40 or so invitees to the Canadian U18 National Camp in her senior year of high school.

I had the privilege of watching her play several times. She was actually significantly better than many players who've logged lots of ice time at Harvard, and quite a bit better than many players who have had impressive D1 careers elsewhere. In fact that's quite true of quite a number of players at Harvard over the years.

It is my understanding she chose to leave the team when it was obvious she was not going to get much opportunity, and I believe she is graduating from Harvard this year.

 

[Watson Rink]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

. In fact that's quite true of quite a number of players at Harvard over the years.

Sorry, I followed your previous sentence but not this sentence quoted above. What's true of quite a number of players at Harvard over the years?

. It is my understanding she chose to leave the team when it was obvious she was not going to get much opportunity.

Yes, I can imagine that it was hard for any of the three recruited Fs that year to get much opportunity given that every single F returned from a team that had just gone 32-2. IIRC, there were more than 12 Fs on the squad. So here are several questions about the recruiting/admissions process and the player development process as it relates to unusually successful, wellstocked teams (women's hockey in 2007-2008, men's BB this year which is why I've been picking on men's BB):

1. Does the Admissions Committee tell the coach of the Wellstocked Team (or does the coach assume) not to expect much sympathy from the committee this year, i.e. not a lot of recruits and no academic stretches?
2. Do prospective players shy away from applying/accepting because they worry about not having much playing time initially and having their future development as players get lost in the shuffle due to the sheer number of players?
3. Does this situation not only result in a smaller class of recruits, but recruits who have (A) lesser athletic credentials than in a usual recruiting class and/or (B) more other interests and other things going for them besides their athletics if the athletics don't pan out?
4. Can the coach pitch the committee on the idea that since (s)he doesn't need quantity this year, this is the time to stretch for one unusually talented recruit?

I have no idea whether and to what extent hypotheses 1, 2, 3A, 3B and 4 are factually correct.

I'm not so much interested in how skilled a particular player from the Class of '12 was, as in the reasons why she left the program, which may shed some light on the general phenomenon of the Overstocked Team and the current situation in which the men's BB team never plays half its players while the women's hockey team struggles to dress three healthy lines and six healthy Ds. While I'd love to see men's BB get one new Keith Wright and one new Oliver McNally, I'd say limit the Class of '16 to two new players and let the glut thin out.

 

[alslammerz]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Sorry, I followed your previous sentence but not this sentence quoted above. What's true of quite a number of players at Harvard over the years?




Yes, I can imagine that it was hard for any of the three recruited Fs that year to get much opportunity given that every single F returned from a team that had just gone 32-2. IIRC, there were more than 12 Fs on the squad. So here are several questions about the recruiting/admissions process and the player development process as it relates to unusually successful, wellstocked teams (women's hockey in 2007-2008, men's BB this year which is why I've been picking on men's BB):

1. Does the Admissions Committee tell the coach of the Wellstocked Team (or does the coach assume) not to expect much sympathy from the committee this year, i.e. not a lot of recruits and no academic stretches?
2. Do prospective players shy away from applying/accepting because they worry about not having much playing time initially and having their future development as players get lost in the shuffle due to the sheer number of players?
3. Does this situation not only result in a smaller class of recruits, but recruits who have (A) lesser athletic credentials than in a usual recruiting class and/or (B) more other interests and other things going for them besides their athletics if the athletics don't pan out?
4. Can the coach pitch the committee on the idea that since (s)he doesn't need quantity this year, this is the time to stretch for one unusually talented recruit?

I have no idea whether and to what extent hypotheses 1, 2, 3A, 3B and 4 are factually correct.

I'm not so much interested in how skilled a particular player from the Class of '12 was, as in the reasons why she left the program, which may shed some light on the general phenomenon of the Overstocked Team and the current situation in which the men's BB team never plays half its players while the women's hockey team struggles to dress three healthy lines and six healthy Ds. While I'd love to see men's BB get one new Keith Wright and one new Oliver McNally, I'd say limit the Class of '16 to two new players and let the glut thin out.

I think you're comparing apples and oranges to be completely honest, simply because most women's hockey teams have similar roster situations to Harvard's, just like most men's Ivy basketball programs have similar roster situations.

 

[Skate79]

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

Re: The well-Stocked Men's BB team

You are seriously misinformed. Just because she never got to play does not mean she was not extremely capable of doing so. In actual fact, she was one of the 40 or so invitees to the Canadian U18 National Camp in her senior year of high school.

I had the privilege of watching her play several times. She was actually significantly better than many players who've logged lots of ice time at Harvard, and quite a bit better than many players who have had impressive D1 careers elsewhere. In fact that's quite true of quite a number of players at Harvard over the years.

It is my understanding she chose to leave the team when it was obvious she was not going to get much opportunity, and I believe she is graduating from Harvard this year.

I forgot about Ling Ling. Never got a chance to see her play so I can't comment on ability or potential. It is true that players have left the program when they felt that they were not going to get significant ice time. That's a player's choice of course - Jackie Young decided to leave Harvard entirely and transfer to BC.

I'm not sure I understand your statement about "a number of players at Harvard over the years". Also, could you be more specific about which players at Harvard you think logged significant ice time and yet were not as skilled as Ling Ling? I hope you are only referring to players from her freshman year to this season because to compare other players from other seasons prior to her arrival is an unfair comparison and is without merit. Who do you think she should have replaced on the roster in the past two or three seasons?