back from the game (phone ran out of juice) - decent competitive first period. After Leonard's goal, they kind of stopped playing and started taking bad penalties. The second period they were horribly flat, and the third not much better. Yes, they played last night, but I'm not going to buy they were DOA to start the second period, especially after the performance in the first.
More concerning to me is lack of strategy and positional play. UNH is good, and can skate, but RPI seemed behind the play a lot and don't have much feel for a structure of how to breakout, how to enter a zone, how to play basic defense. The lack of hockey sense as a team has not been present in the last 5 years, and is still missing.
Lastly, I don't see this talent assessment others do. Might be good for the ECAC, and maybe using UNH as a measuring stick isn't fair, but the overall skating capability isn't good, and no one stood out as a star, like you'd see from Polacek, Pirri, D'Amigo, etc. There's depth unlike other years, and they kept trying, so we'll see how they progress. However, they work too hard for too little
