M. Hockey Held Without Special Teams Tally

HAMILTON, N.Y.—With two minutes left in Friday’s first period at Lynah Rink, the score sat knotted at zero.

But after surviving three early penalty kills, the Harvard men’s hockey team got a power play of its own—a chance to turn the tide.

And when the buzzer sounded 120 seconds later, the 0-0 tie had indeed been broken.

By the Big Red.

After 4:15 of Cornell power plays, including a 1:45 two-man advantage, Big Red blueliner Ryan O’Byrne was whistled for cross-checking. It was a two-minute minor 18:00 into the first period—the waning minutes of the frame were now the Crimson’s.

“It was a big turning point in the game,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91. “We’d done a tremendous job, [goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris] made some tremendous saves, [we] killed off a 5-on-3 and kind of got to take a deep breath and get on the power play, and then we had the chance to do something.”

But just over a minute later, after pressuring Crimson defenseman Tom Walsh into a turnover in his own zone, Cornell’s Mitch Carefoot fed the puck to his captain Mike Knoepfli, who punched it in from just outside the crease.

Big Red coach Mike Schafer deemed the score “a product of us using more guys on the penalty kill.”

“We’ve been practicing with a lot more people,” he said, “so we’re able—when the puck goes down—to get a little more pressure in the offensive zone as opposed to being a little more patient.”

The Lynah fans had something to cheer about, and Harvard left the ice for the first intermission in a 1-0 hole from which it would never emerge.

“Certainly we feel like we can recover from one goal,” Donato said. “But that’s a tough pill to swallow after you just killed off 5-on-3, to give one up short-handed.”

But, blunder aside, it was actually the Crimson power play that could have won the game time and again—and did not.

Harvard, 0-for-5 with the man advantage at Lynah, has gone 1-for-17 (5.9 percent) in three regular season games. This weekend, the power-play puck barely seemed to make it out of the Crimson defensive zone.

With this season’s pervasive whistle-blowing, it is the power play that could prove pivotal.

But, as Donato would say the next night, when his team’s power play went 0-for-5 against Colgate, “The end result is we need goals. We need our power play to be effective and help us win games.”

And not to let in goals, either. Harvard’s penalty kill, managing .864 on the season, stopped five out of six chances on Friday.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that it was special teams that was the difference in the game,” said Grumet-Morris, who racked up 14 saves on Cornell’s power play.

“Their penalty kill got a goal. Their power play got a goal—2-0 Cornell.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.