WASHED OUT

ITHACA, N.Y.—For a team that came so close to victory, the Harvard men’s hockey team hasn’t looked this defeated in a long, long time.

Saturday night’s 1-0 loss to archrival Cornell left the Crimson battered, bruised and, in all ways, beaten.

And everything felt worse because, in a predictably crazed Lynah Rink, Harvard was intense, rather than intimidated. This time, the coaches’ clichés were true: the Crimson really, truly played hard. At times, Harvard played pretty well, too.

The Crimson players forechecked masterfully and stayed out of the penalty box—two things Harvard needed to do in order to win. Junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris made a half-dozen showstopping saves, the latest installment in what has been the best stretch of his college career.

There was no faulting anyone’s effort.

And that’s what was so frustrating about it.

Harvard, favored almost unanimously to win the ECAC, with a dozen NHL prospects on its roster, is now 5-4-1. It was uncharacteristically outshot both of this weekend’s games. It was shut out in three of its first 10 games for the first time in the 104 seasons of Harvard varsity hockey.

Something is wrong. So far, no one’s been able to fix it.

“We’re frustrated right now,” assistant captain Tyler Kolarik said after Saturday’s game. “It’s a matter of getting it done. There isn’t much to say.

“I don’t have the answers.”

No one else seems to, either.

Harvard is being outshot, but not outworked. Its power play, featuring some of the East’s most talented players, is only the sixth-best in the league at 17.1 percent. And even though 11 of the team’s top 13 scorers are back from last season, when it averaged a league-leading 3.91 goals per game, the Crimson has the ECAC’s ninth-best scoring offense (2.60).

By now, everyone thought this team—with 16 seniors and juniors—would have learned how to win without graduated stars Dominic Moore ’03 and Brett Nowak ’03.

Instead, the team’s upperclassmen leaders are still trying to make sense of what’s going on. They want to change course—only they don’t seem to know how.

They do, however, know what it takes to reach the NCAA tournament. They’ve done it two years in a row. Better than anyone, they know what it takes.

And, better than anyone, they know they don’t have it—at least not right now.

It’s an awful feeling when you know greatness but can’t create it on your own. Remember Amadeus? This team is playing Salieri to last year’s Mozart.

“We’re questioning ourselves, not scoring goals,” Kolarik said. “We just have to find it.”

Specifically, what Harvard has to find is a way to replace Moore and Nowak, two players who scored big goals and made everyone around them better.

Junior center Tom Cavanagh looked the part Friday night at Colgate, when he scored his first collegiate hat trick in a 4-2 win. He was, without question, the best player on the ice. His second goal—coming on a two-on-three rush—was breathtaking. Afterward, Crimson coach Mark Mazzoleni compared his release to that of Joe Sakic.

But Saturday, with freshman linemate Steve Mandes out because of an injury, Cavanagh had only one shot on goal.

That’s a glaring example of how this team can’t win consistently when counting on one, two or three players. Last year, Harvard had three lines that could score. This year, it has two.

Of Harvard’s 24 goals scored by forwards, 20 came from players who skated on the team’s top two lines Saturday night. That tells you something about how predictable the team’s offense has become—and, by extension, how easy it has been to stop.

Here’s another key statistic: Last year, Harvard owned the third period, outscoring opponents 38-23. This year, that figure is 9-5—in favor of Crimson opponents.

Without a doubt, injuries have contributed to Harvard’s mediocre start. Senior winger Kenny Turano was lost in the second game and will miss almost the entire season. Regular rearguards David McCulloch and Dylan Reese didn’t travel with the team because of injuries, and Mazzoleni was forced to skate five defensemen for much of the third period on Saturday.

And now we have Mandes, a promising freshman and Kolarik clone, missing the Cornell game after taking a shot from behind against Colgate.

Still, Kolarik said the injuries were “no excuse.”

“I’m not going to blame the injuries,” he said. “We have to find a way to win, and score goals.”

The burden is especially heavy on Harvard’s first power play unit—Cavanagh, Kolarik, Dennis Packard, Tim Pettit and Noah Welch—which has been healthy all season. Saturday marked the second time in three games that the Crimson finished 0-for-6 on the power play.

“We didn’t win the specialty-team battle tonight,” Mazzoleni said, “and that cost us the game.”

As talented as those five players are, they couldn’t set up consistently. They couldn’t get shots through. They couldn’t get deflections on net.

Far too often, they couldn’t get good dump-ins. And when they did, Cornell sent it right back out of the zone. You heard of Disney on Ice? Well, this was Sisyphus on Ice: Ball rolls up, ball rolls down. Puck goes in, puck goes out.

All last week, both Mazzoleni and players on the unit said it was the “little things” that Harvard needed to correct in order to make the power play successful. Saturday night, those minor flaws proved important enough for the Crimson to lose another winnable game.

Almost midway through the season, Harvard is running out of time to make adjustments—on the power play and elsewhere. If that doesn’t happen in soon, all those “little things” could add up to one big disappointment.

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.