Penn State hockey is 18th in the PairWise with a regular season series against Notre Dame and the Big Ten Tournament still to go.
So yes, the postseason is not out of the question, but let’s assume for a moment that the Nittany Lions do not sweep Notre Dame in South Bend and that they do not go on a deep run through the Big Ten Tournament. Especially a run that will probably involve more time on the road than at home.
In short, let’s assume Penn State misses the tournament.
The somewhat obvious follow-up question will be, why?
And that answer is easy to state but harder to solve. Penn State has let in 119 goals this season, 56th worst in the nation (out of 60 teams) with St Lawrence dead last having let in 130 goals. On the flip side, Penn State leads the nation in goals per game with an average of 4.69 which is almost a full goal better than No.1 ranked St Cloud State.
This, generally, has been the trend for the past five years. The Nittany Lions have finished in the Top 6 in goals scored for four-straight seasons, finishing in the Top 3 for three-straight years. The 2014-15 season is the only ‘outlier’ and even finishing 12th in the nation in goals per game is hardly a huge drop.
But the goals allowed hasn’t followed suite. Penn State has finished four of its last five seasons in the bottom 42 when it comes to goals allowed, the only exception, the 2016-17 season when the Nittany Lions were 24th. That team made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
How to fix this issue is a little less clear. One could point to goaltending as Peyton Jones’ 3.38 GAA and .901 save percentage heading into the new year has worsened slightly to a 3.57 GAA and an .888 save percentage since January 2nd.
Generally though, boiling down defensive issues to goaltending is a misleading -and often wrong- hypothesis. Penn State’s defensive unit has done Jones few favors at times, and Penn State’s forwards and have done their defensemen few favors with turnovers and mistakes. Jones could be better, but he’s far from the obvious reason for the Nittany Lions’ woes, it’s much more of a group effort.
I asked Penn State coach Guy Gadowsky earlier this season if his offensive style, a fast-paced, aggressive forecheck and active defenseman minded scheme, requires more from players to do well. If somehow the scheme itself requires a higher effort to pull off.
The answer, as I suspected, was yes.
Which brings Penn State to what its real issue might just be, that of mentality. It’s something I think has flummoxed Penn State’s leadership and coaching staff a bit this season because it is not something you can really see. There have been countless times Penn State has let in goals while being in the proper position. It has not always been as much about the Xs and Os as it has been something far less tangible, something to do with how individual players approach the game and situations within the game any given night.
Which as you might imagine, is frustrating to try and fix.
“The captains were really good but the problem is there isn’t a lot of really clear answers and there is no magic pill anyway. I didn’t expect that from them,” Gadowsky said of a meeting he had with his captains following Penn State’s loss to Wisconsin on Sautrday. Hoping to find out that something was different heading into the game. “I was sort of expecting ‘yeah you know what this is what happened before Saturday and this is how we were thinking.’ It was nothing.
“They said everything was very much the same, felt the same…It’s not up to the coaches, the captains, the leaders, the seniors to get you going,” Gadowsky added. “It’s up to you and a big part of that will determine how far you go in this game.”
It might be too late to save this particular season, but the Nittany Lions will need to find themselves again in the months following and leading up to the 2019-20 campaign. The program has long succeeded on the backs of proving people wrong, or the motivation to catch teams by surprise. But Penn State hockey is no longer a surprise, it is no longer the young upstart trying to punch up a weight class, at their best the Nittany Lions can and have, played with anyone. They just have a hard time doing it every night.
And usually that’s an issue between the ears. And frankly, the teams that show flashes of greatness and flashes of great indifference are usually the latter of the two at their core.
“You learn every year that every season is different and every team is different, even if it’s only changing a few players,” Gadowsky said. “Every team has its own personality and I think that’s something we really are learning that you just can’t duplicate a culture as much as you really want to.
“I don’t think you can impose a culture on a team.”
It would be a very Penn State hockey kind of thing to sweep Notre Dame this weekend and do all of the things that seem unlikely. And if it does it will find itself back in Allentown playing in the postseason for the third-straight year.
But it will once again only have itself to blame for making something it could have done with ease, so difficult.
