867-5309: With a Little Help from the Moores, Crimson Solves Engineers

A weekend sweep of Union and Rensselaer at home was exactly what the Harvard men's hockey team needed to get back on track.

As expected, the Crimson posted a 5-2 victory over the Skating Dutchmen to get the ball rolling, but the clincher came in front of a 2,776 sellout crowd at Bright Hockey Center Saturday night. Harvard dominated a beleaguered Engineers' squad and coasted to a 5-2 win to seal the homestand.

The Union-RPI sweep is the first time the Crimson has stolen this series since February 1996. But the Dutchmen aren't the problem. It's the Engineers who have been Harvard's Achilles' heel for years.

Just 1-9 in the last 10 meetings, the Crimson last defeated RPI 2-1 in the first game of the 1999 ECAC quarterfinals . Before Saturday, Harvard's most recent regular season victory over the Engineers was a 6-1 win in January 1997.

The Moore brothers were crucial to the Crimson's success, as the pair combined for 10 points on the weekend.

Younger brother Dom picked up an assist and netted the team's first hat trick since defenseman Matt Scorsune '00 picked up a trio in a 7-6 win over Vermont two years ago. Captain Steve Moore notched a goal--his first tally since the second game of the season--and five assists in the two-game stint.

"It was just one of those nights where you're seeing the target and you're hitting it too," Dom said. "It makes it easier when you get three perfect passes."

Always modest, Moore stressed the playmaking abilities of his linemates. And while assistant captain Chris Bala, rookie winger Tim Pettit, and the elder Moore certainly did their part in setting up Dom's first collegiate hat trick, no one can take anything away from him.

Unfortunately, RPI Coach Dan Fridgen didn't see it that way.

"Harvard did a good job finding him when he was open," Fridgen said. "It doesn't take Mario Lemieux to score the goals he did. You could have put them in with one arm on the stick."

Perhaps the Dutchmen left Moore unattended in front of the net, giving him not one, but three golden opportunities. But I'd hardly call it a fluke. Perhaps Fridgen should swallow his pride and concede to the better player and the better team.

None of Moore's tallies were garbage goals. In fact, all three were well-executed and perfectly timed shots.

Moore backhanded a rebound from Pettit past RPI netminder Nathan Marsters at 14:51 in the opening frame to knot the score at one apiece for his first even-strength goal of the season. He sealed the trio with two more power-play tallies early in the second stanza, less than two minutes apart.

At 1:37, Moore launched a shot past Marsters on a pass from Bala behind the net.

Steve Moore hit his little brother low in the slot, allowing Dom to light the lamp for the third time at 3:18 with a top shelf shot.

Moore's spectacular performance on the man-advantage highlighted a Crimson power play unit that is steadily climbing up in the conference's statistics. Harvard's power play jumped from a woeful 6.7 percent earlier this season to 22.8 percent. This weekend alone, the Crimson went 5 for 12 on the man-advantage, posting a dominant 41 percent success rate.

"Last night we tried to rush things a little bit more," Moore said. "Tonight we waited for our spot and tried to find seams. Combine the patience with the skill we have out there and we can be dangerous."

If that's not enough, Harvard boasts a penalty kill unit ranked fifth in the nation and second in the ECAC. The Crimson is about 90 percent effective with a man down, and Harvard has scored more goals on the penalty kill than it has allowed all season.

The team's penalty kill statistics were greatly boosted by this weekend's 91 percent success rate. Only Union was able to net goal on the man advantage, but the Crimson was able to kill the other 10 chances, including all six of the Engineers' power plays.

"We've added some speed and energy to our penalty kill," Harvard Coach Mark Mazzoleni said. "Some of our best penalty killers are also among our top-six scorers and sometimes the other team gets complacent and you can generate scoring chances."

I offer only one caveat to temper this otherwise upbeat outlook. While the Crimson's penalty kill and power play have been invaluable to the team's success, Harvard cannot rely on its specialty teams to produce the majority of its offense. Of the Crimson's 49 goals this year, 26 have come in either man-advantage or man-down situations. Harvard needs to generate more even-strength offense in addition to maintaining strong speciality teams.

And senior goaltender Oli Jonas gets a nod for yet another tremendous performance between the pipes. Currently ranked eleventh in the nation, Jonas boasts a .921 save percentage, which falls just three-thousands of a point short of the league lead behind Marsters and Cornell's Ian Burt.

Although Jonas faced 72 shots in the homestand, his biggest test was a barrage of shots by the RPI squad towards the end of the second period. Jonas was clearly up to the task, holding the Engineers' scoreless, and robbing RPI of a number of beautiful chances, including a 2-on-1 break at 6:30, in the process.

"Jonas has been a rock and consistent for us from day one," Mazzoleni said. "He hasn't had many substandard games. We give up about 35 shots a game, but he's been giving us that opportunity to withstand someone's best shot."

All in all, picking up this pair of wins was crucial in the hunt for the ECAC title at Lake Placid. Even though only half the season has elapsed, it is essential for Harvard to cushion its first-place slot in the conference with winnable games like these.

And it certainly helps that Dartmouth snapped Vermont's unbeaten ECAC streak, handing the Catamounts a loss and a tie last weekend.

With sophomore winger Brett Nowak and classmate Aaron Kim back in the lineup against Princeton and Yale next weekend, the Crimson will post a six-defensemen rotation and a stocked offensive lineup that could very easily steal another pair of victories on the road, repeating last year's late-season stunning sweep of the Tigers and the Elis.