The Art of Prediction

A brief rundown of what the team will look like heading into the 2021-22 season.

Even in a good year, it’s hard to make predictions about a college hockey season. From year to year, players transfer, graduate, and sign pro contracts. Leadership groups change. Players grow and develop individually. Not to mention the constant influx of new recruits from junior leagues ranging in skill level and play style. That’s just the nature of college sports.

But this isn’t even a normal year. When the Engineers finally play their exhibition game in October against Brock University, it will end a span of nearly 600 days in which they did not have a competitive game together. Only 12 out of 29 current players were on the roster for that final regular season game against Dartmouth back in February 2020. Here’s a little recap on the roster:

The Departures

There’s no denying the Engineers have lost some of their most important players from the 2019-20 season. And even that might be an understatement. The top scorer (Zieky), top goal-scorer (Burgess), number-one defenseman (Reilly), and starting goalie (Savory) from the 19-20 season have all moved on. More than half the players on this list, if healthy, were guaranteed to play.

Now, it is not uncommon for senior players to be the ones to have the biggest impact on a team. After all, they’ve had the most time to grow and develop at the college level. And considering the focus that Dave Smith and his coaching staff put on developing players, watching the senior class excel shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

RPI will never be able to recruit the most elite players (see University of Michigan for that), but they are able to bring in players with high potential and who are willing to buy into a certain culture and system. The 2019-20 season was a great example of this. You can’t watch those videos of the guys chanting “Hail, Dear Old Rensselaer” after big wins and not see that they have built something special.

Having said that, there was much less roster turnover going into the 19-20 season than there is for this upcoming season. Yes, the team did lose its top-scorer in Jacob Hayhurst, but a much bigger part of the “core” returned compared to this upcoming season. The team doesn’t have that luxury this time around. The big goal scorers are gone, the top defensive pairing is gone, and the number-one goalie is gone. The big question come October will be: can the new and returning players step up and fill these roles left behind?

The Returners

The first thing that jumps out on this list is the center depth. Ture Linden emerged as a fantastic play-driver last season, capable of high usage against the opposition’s best players. He stands out to me as the exact type of player who Smith wants in his team: a “200-foot player” with good hockey IQ who is hard to play against. Zach Dubinsky fits into this mold as well:

Data from Nayan Patel's Win Share Model on HockeyUAnalytics. You can read more about Win Shares on Nayan's blog post found here, but the gist of it is that they try to measure offensive (OWS), defensive (DWS), and total (TWS) contributions to a season from any given player. One win share is roughly equivalent to contributing one win to the team. I have normalized the data by games played, since Dubinsky missed games while he was injured.

The big takeaway here is that the team has two high-end centers, who contribute on both ends of the ice, to build a forward group around. Both play at first-line levels but my best guess is that Ture Linden keeps the 1C title and is the one to match up most often against the opposition's strongest players. He excelled in that role last season: the 4-0 win over Quinnipiac and 2-0 over Harvard, in particular, come to mind. Over the course of those two games, he helped prevent some of the best players in the league (Tufto, Aburuzzese, Dornbach) from scoring.

Here's my worry: aside from Linden and Dubinsky, the only two other forwards penciled into the lineup from this list are Leppanen and Herrman, both of whom have shown quality and consistency at the college level. That leaves more than half of the forward spots up for grabs. Lacka and Mahshie are interesting options here: both missed a lot of playing time last season and didn't have a huge impact on the score sheet, but from what I have tracked, they were actually quite good at driving play.

Granted, both had a smaller sample size of games and these numbers could just be inflated based on linemates (Mahshie, in particular, spent a lot of time with Linden and Burgess, who are great play-drivers themselves). But, Lacka showed real promise in his freshman year and Mahshie played a key role in winning the AJHL Championship with the Brooks Bandits in his final year of juniors. If these two can avoid injury and get consistent playing time, expect them to take a big step forward from last season.

On the defensive side of things, there is a bit more stability. The Engineers have four defensemen returning, all of whom were getting regular minutes by the end of last season. Having said that, there's an argument to be made that RPI have lost their three most important defensemen.

Time-on-ice is not released to the public in the college hockey world, but it can be estimated (see Iain Fyffe's aptly-named Estimating Ice Time). It's not a perfect model, but it does suggest the most frequently used players from the 19-20 season are now gone.

I'm not sure the Engineers have that one player who can step up and fill the hole Reilly left behind on the top pair. Reilly not only brought high offensive upside, but he also played a key role in shutting down the opposition's best players. The team will need to find new ways to share this load. Expect to see quite a bit of experimentation on the blueline to start the season.

The Arrivals

Now for the fresh faces. This group consists of incoming freshmen, transfers, and more generally, the guys who have not yet played a game for the Engineers. It’s an exciting group with a good mix of skill sets. Henri Schreifels and Jake Gagnon can shoot the puck really well. John Beaton and Shane Sellar are excellent two-way players. Lauri Sertti feels a bit like a younger version of Will Reilly. Jack Brackett will likely be one of the fastest skaters in the league.

There are spots open throughout the depth chart that will need to be filled by players from this group.

With Burgess, Polino, Gornall, and DiGrande all leaving, the RW position is completely up for grabs. Gagnon and McIssac are the two on this list who have spent significant time on the right-wing in juniors. Lacka and Bowman join them as the two returning right-handed wingers. But, with such a few number of true RW players, Smith will almost certainly need to play some of his forwards on their off-hand side.

Playing on your off-hand side makes it harder to protect the puck, but it does give you a better angle to shoot at the net. It will be interesting to see how Smith manages the forward lines given how few right-handed players there are.

Putting it All Together

Here’s what that depth chart looks like going into 21-22:

Sure, the Engineers went into the 2019-20 season with a “higher floor” than they have going into this season. There were simply more players returning who had proven they could be successful at the college level. But there is something to be said for how much the team grew going into the second half of last season, and in doing so put up one of the best runs of form that RPI has seen in the last decade.

Like I said before, it is hard to predict college hockey. But if this team is able to build a culture like they did in the second half of the 19-20 season, in which players have the confidence that they can win every game, then I believe they can be successful.

Now, it may take time for the newer players to adjust to the college level and for the coaching staff to figure out where everyone fits best, but that’s fine! Last season proved that you seriously struggle for part of the season and still emerge as a top-four team in the league. I think back to last December, against Brown, when the Engineers were about to be handed their fourth loss in a row, but managed to score a game-tying goal with 2 seconds left in the third. They went on to win the game in overtime and carried that momentum throughout the rest of the season. Talk about a truly dramatic turning point. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take until December this time around.