ECAC Tournament Quarterfinals Tonight

Four months and 27 games have passed since the 1993-94 hockey campaign began. Now the past means next to nothing. The playoffs are here, and anyone could conceivably beat anyone else and erase much of the good or bad of those past 120 days.

The Harvard men's hockey team (19-4-4 overall, 16-2-4 ECAC) will host Cornell (8-15-5, 7-10-5) in a best-of-three series in the ECAC tournament quarterfinals starting tonight at 7:30 p.m. Tomorrow's match is slated for 7:00 p.m. and Sunday's game (if necessary) will also begin at 7:00 p.m.

"It's a whole new season," Harvard Head Coach Ronn Tomassoni said. "It's the playoffs and everyone's on equal ground."

As long as the Crimson keeps its mental focus, it should win this series against the Big, Red in two games. Harvard won both meetings against Cornell this year--5-4 at Ithaca November 19 and a 4-0 shutout at the Bright Hockey Center February 12. Yet, both were very close contests.

Harvard built a 5-1 lead early in the third of the first game, but Cornell tallied three times in a short time-span in the third before finally falling by one.

The second game was close going into the third period, as the Crimson only held a 2-0 lead on two powerplay goals by junior Steve Martins. But senior Brian Farrell connected for the team's third goal with the man advantage, and freshman Joe Craigen iced the game with his late empty netter. Sophomore Tripp Tracy made 22 saves for his only shut-out of the season.

"I think they're a good hockey team," Tracy said. "I do think out of the teams we could have played [Cornell, Princeton or St. Lawrence], they are best team.

Offense: Simply put, there is nothing similar between the offensive styles of these two teams. Harvard's offense relies on speed and finesse and also features an incisive forechecking style.

Cornell, on the other hand, is a clutch-and-grab team. The players don't posses the same skills as the Crimson players do, so they will try to knock Harvard off its game with a rough style of play.

"They're going to come out and try and hook us, hold us and goad us into stupid penalties," junior Ben Coughlin said. "As long as we stay mentally disciplined, things should turn out fine."

Statistically, Cornell averages 3.22 goals a game, far blow the 4.74 mark of Harvard. The Big Red has scored five or more goals only four times this season, compared with the 12 times the Crimson has scored at least five.

Defense: Again, there is no comparison on paper. Cornell allows 4.14 goals against a game, while Harvard is fourth in the nation with 2.85 against.

The Crimson boasts six solid defensemen, three of them seniors--captain Sean McCann, Derek Maguire and Lou Body. The Big Red, on the other hand, has no seniors and three freshmen on defense, and this lack of experience has shown.

"They are primarily a freshman and sophomore team," Tomassoni said, referring to the 20 youngsters on a 28-mean team. "They play with a lot of enthusiasm and with a more physical style. They try to contain you and congest the ice."

Goaltending: Harvard's goaltending duo of Tracy and sophomore Aaron Israel have come up big this season in both important and not so important games. They are skilled players and are helped by the solid defense corps, and they also bring a lot of playoff-type experience to the team.

Cornell's netminders--Andy Bandurski and Eddy Skazyk--have been battered all season. They see a lot more rubber than many other teams--1,008 shots have been directed towards the Cornell duo, while, for example, Tracy and Israel have only faced 648. But both Big Red netminders have stopped over 88 percent of the shots thrown their way.

Specialty Teams: The Crimson's power play ranks second in the nation, clicking at 32.5 percent. And Harvard is hot of late, having scored four power-play goals last Saturday at St. Lawrence.

The penalty-killing units have slipped a little bit in recent games, allowing five extra-man goals against in its last two games.

The Big Red again leaves a lot to be desired. Cornell has converted only 15.2 percent of its power plays, while opponents are clicking at a 23.3 percent rate. However, if Cornell can goad Harvard into taking enough bad penalties, then the Big Red will have a realistic shot at staying very close in the series.

"I can't afford to get as many penalties as I [have been taking]," said Martins, the ECAC's top scorer but also Harvard's leading penalty-minute man. "Knowing that they're going to be physical, they're going to try to take us out of the game mentally. We have to be all the more prepared."

Momentum: Both teams come into this weekend's series off of big overtime victories. Harvard's 5-4 win at St. Lawrence was made possible by Farrell's power-play goal with but four ticks left regulation and junior Perry Cohagan's goal with 56 seconds left in overtime.

Furthermore, the Crimson has not lost a game at home all year--its last ECAC loss was back on December 4, at RPI.

Although Cornell ended its regular season with two bad losses--9-1 at RPI and 5-2 at Union--the Big Red beat Princeton at Ithaca this past Tuesday in overtime, 5-4, in the preliminary round of ECAC playoff competition.

The Big Red rallied back from 3-2 and 4-3 deficits in the third and won the game on Geoff Lopatka's third goal of the game 15:58 into overtime. Skazyk stopped 20 of the 21 shots he faced after the Tigers scored three goals in a 2:45 span against Bandurski in the second period.

"We want to win these two games and go into the final four of the ECAC," McCann said. "[Cornell is] going to come out really hard. They are a tough team and put out 100 percent all the time on every shift."

"We want to take control from the first face-off to the end of the game. If we do that we can win both games."