Penn State men's hockey is on an all-time heater
The road to St. Louis goes through Allentown.
One of the best things Sandy Barbour ever did for Penn State was pitch an Allentown Regional to the NCAA. A friendly path to the Frozen Four just a bus ride away**, and while the Nittany Lions haven’t quite gotten over that hump, it sure helps to play postseason games in front of a crowd that wants you to win.
**[Starter Course: if a host program makes the NCAA Tournament it automatically plays at its host site.]
All told, Penn State has hosted the 2018, 2019, 2023 regionals and was set to host in 2020 prior to COVID-19. It will host this year in 2025 and is slated to host in 2028.
Which brings us to today.
Penn State is in the midst of an all-time run, a 13-3-4 record over the last 20 games, a stretch which encompasses every game since January 1st.
Longtime followers of the program already know this, but the post winter break stretch has never been kind to Penn State. No small part of this has to do with the Big Ten being good and the occasional struggle within that context being inherent to the system, but on occasion those struggles have transcended *this is just hard* territory.
Except for now.
To be honest, for as much as I will admit to personally liking Guy Gadowsky and valuing our relationship as two people who have done the question/answer dance for over a decade, I have wondered from time-to-time how much longer he was going to be asked to stick around.
Without question Gadowsky has done an immeasurable amount of good for the program and continues to do so, but it can sometimes - from a distance - be hard to tell whether or not getting to that next level is simply something that will take a decade or two more [insert traditional recruiting pipelines and hockey’s general traditionalist nature here] or if someone else could do this job 5% better/faster. Add in Pat Kraft’s enthusiasm for shiny new toys mixed with another bad start to a post-COVID season and that at least had me entertaining the idea of change.
Guess we can shelve that for the moment.
So what’s the difference?
“I don't know, other than the fact that this is a very, very competitive group,” Guy said on Tuesday. “I think a big part of this was the scar tissue that we developed going through a [tough] stretch [the first half of the year].”
This is probably at least partially true - hockey is a somewhat arbitrary sport. They play a lot of games in no small part to make up for the randomness that happens along the way. You can point at lot of little things and sometimes the answer is “idk, it’s just working right now.”
The other half is likely some combination of talent, having a very large [and good] goalie, and that intangible aspect of simply catching fire at the right time. Penn State has built its program on the back of being overly competitive to overcome any talent shortcomings, so this team probably isn’t simply trying harder than the rest, but add in all of the above and you’ve got a group on a goddamn heater.
Defense also helps.
In the first 16 games of the season Penn State gave up three or more goals on nine occasions and lost eight of them. Over the next 20 games, which spans everything since January 1st, Penn State has given up two or fewer goals in 10 of those games. In the games where it gave up three or more goals it’s effectively .500 with a 4-5-1 record.
Whatever the case might be, Penn State is racing towards its latest NCAA Tournament berth - the fourth in the program’s history and fourth since 2017 - very much the hottest team in America.
And if you’re wondering, the Frozen Four this year is in St. Louis.