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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

A Turning Point?

As soon as I write off RPI's season they go and put up a 7 spot in the Saturday day. Couple that with 3 goals in the first period Friday night and could we be seeing an offensive resurgence that offsets the horrendous defensive play?

I am going to cop out and say wait a while to see what happens. Clearly RPI has demonstrated that it CAN score and Appert seems to be feeling the oats a little bit:

http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2008/12/08/sports/doc493cb50c15e2d640046301.txt

“We gained some confidence in the fact that we created a lot of scoring chances on Friday (in the 7-3 loss at Yale) in both the first and the periods,” he said. “There’s no question we can gain confidence by finally getting some offensive success.

“I wasn’t worried about curtailing any of their exuberance,” he said. “I’ll make sure that their attention is focused on, while the goals and the win are good, we still have a long way to go to make that our norm and not the exception.”

The question remains, can the lads sustain this effort? Their defense isn't getting any better as they gave up 7 goals to Yale. As I have argued before, you need to increase the scoring if the D is going to be this lackadaisical and it looks like someone over at HFH has gotten the message.

On a sad note, it looks like the Governor's Cup is going the way of the dodo bird. I was always disappointed in the crowds that turned out for the event but I would always schedule time to go to it. Having it in the Knick was a great event and has great potential.

Someone on the USCHO message boards mentioned getting a tourney underway with SLU, Clarkson, Union and Ripee and I think this is a tremendous idea. These truly are the rivalrly teams for RPI and having them all come together would be tremendous. Of course, if the event was held in Lake Placid or somewhere north of the CD this could cause travel issues for the casual fan during the winter time but I am all for trying to keep something like the GC going in the future.

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