Here's your 2021-22 season thread, Tiger fans.
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>>> RIT Tigers 2021-22 Season Thread <<<
- Thread starter Ed Trefzger
- Start date
Very nice character win against the Irish tonight. I think the Tigers converted just about every ND mistake into a goal. RIT could have easily collapsed after the tieing goal, but hung on for OT. I can think of some tiger teams in the past would have folded under the pressure. I'll celebrate tonight, because ND probably won't take RIT lightly tomorrow.
iowabasedtraveler
Well-known member
Congratulations!! HUGE win!!
Wow, that was a really quality win. I've been impressed by what I've seen from Matthews. If he fell apart, that would have been the end, but he held strong and the offense delivered. Let's see what they can do tonight!
Side note, I was in the ND barn when RIT beat Minnesota state in the 2015 NCAA tourney. Great result on day 1 but crummy one on day 2 vs Nebraska-Omaha. But let's see if we can get the sweep tonight!
Obviously splitting in South Bend is a great result (even if OT's are downgraded in value in the pairwise this year), but I'm not sure I understand the rationale of throwing a freshman goalie into the fire for his first game, especially with how well Matthews is playing. Matthews should pretty clearly be the starter here heading into the bulk of conference play.
TigerFan86-87
R!!!!...I!!!!!...T!!!!!!
NC games are the best opportunity to get young guys some playing time, especially if they're not quite ready for prime time. It's all about the conference games in this league. Unless the AHA improves it's NC record dramatically real soon and someone can go undefeated in NC games while posting a huge win % in-conference, there will be no at-large bids. The most likely path to the NCAAs is still winning the AHA tournament.
Good weekend. A rough 10 minutes Friday night cost the Tigers a point, but it could have been worse. Power play still needs to be better - even though RIT ended up scoring on one, it felt like Mercyhurst was just as likely as RIT to score and only Matthews brilliance kept the Lakers off the board shorthanded. Speaking of, his 22 save on 25 shot performance Friday night was one of the best 88% save percentage performances I've ever seen. Real high difficulty level on a ton of those shots thanks to break downs and rushes. They cleaned that up on Saturday but the game was more territorially even.
On to AIC, who's struggled a bit to open the year. Be nice to put some distance between the two teams with another good weekend.
On to AIC, who's struggled a bit to open the year. Be nice to put some distance between the two teams with another good weekend.
So, just looking at the schedule, on uscho's website, and it seems like some games are miscategorized as non-conference instead of AH play on team's individual schedule pages. For example the Dec 3rd/4th series Bentley @ Mercyhurst are both listed as non-conference on Bentley's team schedule page (while on Mercyhurst's team schedule page there doesn't seem to be a conference/non-conference designation at all.)
Anyway, it does look like every team has 26 games (if I assume every game between AHA foes is a conference game and not a non-conference game, with the exception of the exhibition Niagara and Canisius played to start the year). However, no team has an equal 13-13 home/road split. Sacred Heart might have even more of a beef than we do - they also play 10 home and 16 road, but they are being forced to play at Air Force 4 times in 5 days (Fri, Sat, Mon, Tues) leading up to the Thanksgiving weekend. That's ridiculous.
Here's a list of how many home conference games each team has:
16 - Air Force
15 - Holy Cross
14 - Niagara, Bentley, Canisius, AIC
12 - Mercyhurst
11 - Army
10 - Sacred Heart, RIT
This is nothing more than a ridiculous league doing ridiculous things. There is no excuse for one team to have 16 home games and another two to have 10. I don't give a shit if a team had to cancel a series because of COVID last year, or that a new schedule had to be drawn up with RoMo leaving. This is a new year and needs to have as much competitive balance from a scheduling standpoint as possible, and they didn't come close. RIT/Sacred Heart/Army/Mercyhurst will have a real beef if they end up not winning the conference by one or two points to a team that had more home than road games, not to mention the possible impacts on playoff seeding/home ice advantage
Anyway, it does look like every team has 26 games (if I assume every game between AHA foes is a conference game and not a non-conference game, with the exception of the exhibition Niagara and Canisius played to start the year). However, no team has an equal 13-13 home/road split. Sacred Heart might have even more of a beef than we do - they also play 10 home and 16 road, but they are being forced to play at Air Force 4 times in 5 days (Fri, Sat, Mon, Tues) leading up to the Thanksgiving weekend. That's ridiculous.
Here's a list of how many home conference games each team has:
16 - Air Force
15 - Holy Cross
14 - Niagara, Bentley, Canisius, AIC
12 - Mercyhurst
11 - Army
10 - Sacred Heart, RIT
This is nothing more than a ridiculous league doing ridiculous things. There is no excuse for one team to have 16 home games and another two to have 10. I don't give a shit if a team had to cancel a series because of COVID last year, or that a new schedule had to be drawn up with RoMo leaving. This is a new year and needs to have as much competitive balance from a scheduling standpoint as possible, and they didn't come close. RIT/Sacred Heart/Army/Mercyhurst will have a real beef if they end up not winning the conference by one or two points to a team that had more home than road games, not to mention the possible impacts on playoff seeding/home ice advantage
The stats supplier is breaking our schedule data at USCHO. The developer working on it for us has been working on having it update information without breaking what's already there.
I could not agree more. It ends up spreading the impact of COVID to another season. Coach Wayne Wilson said as much in our preseason Zoom webinar, which unfortunately has not been uploaded to YouTube by the alumni office yet.
That is a bummer. I don't recall seeing it advertised either. For the webinars last year, I got multiple emails from Alumni Relations promoting it, but didn't see any this time around.
To add to the ridiculousness, the AHA pointed out that AIC has not traveled to RIT in 3 years, and RIT has made 3 trips to AIC. Seems fair.
- (RV/UR) RIT at AIC: AHA leader RIT travels to Springfield, Mass., to take on AIC on Saturday and Sunday. The games will be the fifth and sixth in a row played by the Tigers and homestanding Yellow Jackets at the Mass Mutual Center. AIC last visited RIT nearly three years ago on Nov. 9-10, 2018.
Scott Biggar
Member
Mark your calendars, the next alumni webinar with Coach Wayne Wilson is December 7th. More details to come (hopefully) from alumni relations as the date gets closer.
Well, Athletics posted a series of coach chats, but Men's Hockey is not included.
https://ritathletics.com/news/2021/11/3/general-tiger-chats.aspx
The whole thing really is absurd. They justified it by saying RIT cancelled a trip to Air Force last year, but the year before AF had a playoff series at RIT cancelled, and last year RIT played more road games than home games during the regular season despite not making it to Colorado, so shouldn't some other schools (like say AIC, who has more home than road games) be making extra trips to RIT this year (note that I don't support this - this year's schedule should have been fairly balanced like I said before).
I get the travel issue with Air Force, but for schools who actually draw fans gate is an important part of revenue too!
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CornwallAce
Patron Saint of Defunct Teams
You do realize AIC and RIT play 4 games this season?
As an aside, I had thought when the Atlantic went to 11 teams, that they had a 10 year grid made up, 3 years when team A only goes to team B, 3 years where team B only goes to team A and 4 years where team A and B play 4 games. But that theory got blew up when I put the schedules in a grid and found one team A which went to team B four times in 5 years.
With all that said, I totally agree with you, it is rather clown like of the Atlantic not to at least have 14 or 12 home games for everyone. Then when asked by the media, why not 13 for everyone they could cite Covid logistical issues for having an odd # of home games and extra traveling(I say this weakly) At least better than 10 or 16.
Admittedly, I did not realize that when making my post about this being RIT's 3rd consecutive trip to AIC, and didn't look at the schedule. I do recall your theory of the 10 year grid, but obviously that was disproven, and certainly losing RMU throws that out the window anyway.
Admittedly there I was playing off of mar's post and didn't look to see if AIC made a return trip this year.
I can even see teams rotating 14-12 and 12-14, for the sole reason of Air Force being in the conference (or maybe everyone else does 13-13 and AF rotates) - no one's flying down there for 1 game, nor should they. Although I suspect the AHA will go back to 28 games next year.
Feel like these upcoming games against Princeton are ones that RIT (and Atlantic Hockey in general) have to take advantage of. Princeton's 3-3-1, but their wins are against LIU (no division 1 wins this year), Yale (no wins, losses to both Army and Sacred Heart), and Brown (only win against Yale). Army also handled them at Tate Rink earlier in the year. Would be real nice to get a non-conference sweep to follow up the nice sweep last weekend.
Welp, now I'm expecting a split and hoping for a sweep, instead of hoping for a split. Hope you're happy!
Powers &8^]
Well, split achieved
Nice night in general for AHA. 3-1 with Mercyhurst beating Ohio State and us and HC taking care of lower tier ECAC teams.