The Lynah Faithful will be back in action tonight as the Cornell men’s hockey team hosts Colgate at 7 p.m.
The Red (7-5-3, 5-2-1 ECAC) comes into the contest among the leaders of the league, while the Red Raiders (5-12-3, 3-5-0) are languishing near the bottom of the standings.
Tonight’s game, the ECAC Game of the Week which will be broadcast on Empire Sports, is the 115th meeting between the two teams. On Saturday the teams will have a rematch at Starr Rink in Hamilton, N.Y.
“I think you have to look at these games as single game sets,” head coach Mike Schafer ’86 said. “I think we play a physical style which will help us, in the sense that we play the same team back-to-back.”
Schafer also feels that the television coverage could allow the proven players to see more time on the ice.
“I think the TV game [tonight] will allow both teams to shorten their benches a little in the sense that you are going to have three or four time-outs in the course of each period,” Schafer said.
The Red comes into tonight’s tilt as the 15th-ranked team in the country according to USCHO.COM. In the USA Today/American Hockey Magazine poll, Cornell is 17th in the nation. In addition to these national accolades, the Red sports the seventh-best goals against average in the nation at 2.27 and the penalty-kill unit holds the same national ranking, killing nearly 89 percent of man-disadvantage situations.
Despite these excellent numbers, the Red feels that these games will be vital to the second-half of the year.
“This is pretty much the halfway point for a number of games and we definitely want to get four points and give us a boost for the rest of the year,” sophomore Stephen B