Re: Union
Jeff Kampersaal at Princeton has run a system that relies on defense and positioning. Not that he is sacrificing speed or skill but he's not looking to create on ice track meets. That has changed somewhat as he has been able to recruit higher end talent.
Harvard has been regularly outshot this year by wide margins yet we run the same system that enabled us to dominate opponents in previous seasons. The problem for us is recruiting top end talent - we've struck out the last few years and it is showing up this season.
Your excuse for Harvard's increasingly lacklustre performance in recent years, and abysmal performance this year -- ie. "lack of talent" relative to better performing teams--is certainly not supported by ANY objective facts.
Since the time the current year's senior class arrived on campus, Harvard's roster has been graced with
12 players who were selected for Canadian or US National U18 and/or U22 teams. That's more than half the roster!! While I would certainly not suggest that being selected to a National team necessarily makes someone MORE talented than many who are passed over, it would be ridiculous to suggest any of these players are not top end talent. Further, the majority of remaining Harvard players have very unusually strong hockey resumes which generally include attendance at NDC camps, league all star honours, titles with top teams, National Championship appearances, scoring titles, family NHL pedigrees, et al.
Compare that to other ECAC programs, none of which have nearly the same depth of national team experience, nor breadth of other hockey achievements all the way down the roster:
Nationally #3 ranked Clarkson has only half as many (
6) players with National USA or Canada U18 experience (plus 1 player on the Czech National team). In addition, historically, Clarkson teams have often been widely seen as relatively slow by D1 standards, though they have typically seemed to have been able to overcome this in the win column regardless. Most of their players in many seasons would have been deemed far too slow to be of any interest to Harvard. (In fact, a great many relatively slowish players for a variety of teams over the years have notched much higher stats than anyone on Harvard's current roster, but I digress....)
Nationally #5 ranked SLU has only
2 players with National team experience. Furthermore, SLU has only 3 seniors and 8 freshman, meaning they are overall a very inexperienced team in terms of D1 level play. Perhaps even more notably, a large number of players on the roster have no real "blue chip" hockey achievements noted in their bios, unlike virtually every player on Harvard's roster. This relative lack of "blue chip" talent is not a new phenomenon for SLU. Their "lack of talent" and very young roster have been no barrier to top end performance, either this year or in years past, where their performance has also been consistently good. I think of SLU as typically having great "lunch bucket" teams, not flashy or particularly speedy but with exceptional work ethic and great teamwork rather than exceptional individual skill.
Taking a look at top-rated Ivy competitor Princeton, now #9, which you seem to believe has been more successful at securing high end talent relative to Harvard. However, they have
4 players on their roster (only 1/3 as many as Harvard recruited in the same period!) who had National U18 team experience coming in. There are actually a great many players on Princeton's roster who had zero interest from Harvard.
In actual fact, Harvard has always been far more blessed talent-wise relative to the majority of it's ECAC competition (perhaps with the one exception of Cornell in a few of its greatest glory years). Harvard's top academic reputation automatically makes it a highly favoured destination. Its significantly more flexible admission policies relative to its Ivy competitors, especially vs Princeton and Yale, are also well-known factors that make it that much more appealing to recruits, and provide it with access to a significantly larger player pool to draw from. Historically strong performance on-ice, albeit now changing, has made it a further big draw. While there are certainly a few other reasons for Harvard to have growing difficulties in recruiting moving forward, that has not yet been a factor in poor team performance.
A look at the RPI rankings indicates that only Union and RIT currently rank lower than Harvard among D1 programs this season. Probably not coincidently, both are non-Ivy non-scholarship schools which, unlike Harvard, result in very difficult recruiting challenges for their coaches. There is no comparison whatsoever to the skill level of players rostered by these 2 schools relative to Harvard. Player for player, it is truly like night and day difference.
At some point, one has to stop laying the blame on the players' lack of hockey skills for Harvard's woes and begin to look elsewhere for the real answers. As the above data and their bios show, Harvard's rostered players were incredibly talented and high-achieving on ice the day they stepped on campus, both in absolute and relative terms. In the vast majority of cases, they were heavily pursued by several other D1 hockey programs. It's not possible that suddenly those skills, displayed in other hockey environments, just disappeared. If it's not talent, what else could it be? For many seasons, a significant number of players actually seem to have gone backwards in offensive numbers during their Harvard careers (other than those who saw little ice time early on of course). What could possibly account for that?
Conversely, in numerous cases, many relatively unheralded incoming players have made a big impact on other teams. Just a lot of late bloomers? Diamonds in the rough spotted through unusually clever recruiting off the beaten path? These strong performances may also be a mark of good development, high motivation and growing confidence, strong team chemistry, adjusting coaching strategy to team and individual strengths, etc.--all important attributes related to effective coaching which creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
A great many experienced observers for many years, have judged Desrosiers and Wells the best coaches in the ECAC, and I would agree. I don't think it's any accident then that their teams are ranked where they are in the country, despite the fact they are not necessarily blessed with the most talent, nor the most highly desirable educational venue either to be attracting "the best of the best".
Are you just looking for an easy scapegoat or do you really want to find the truth? To discover the reasons for Harvard's growing malaise I might suggest you would need to dig much deeper. Make sure you leave no stone unturned.
