TEMPE — Coach Greg Powers and his Arizona State men’s hockey team are in familiar territory. A year ago, the Sun Devils started the season 3-7-1 before rattling off a 10-game win streak to ignite a run to the NCHC Frozen Faceoff. Now they are 3-6-1 and searching for that same spark.
Though they are eerily similar starts, it’s for two completely different reasons.
Last year’s squad began the season decimated with injuries to key players. The start of the 10-game win streak coincided with the last remaining pieces returning to the lineup such as forwards Artem Shlaine and Cruz Lucius.
This year’s team has been mostly healthy to begin the year, with only sophomore defenseman Brasen Boser missing time due to injury, and freshman forward Jack Beck sitting out the first six games as part of the NCAA’s eligibility rules for new players coming from professional hockey.
A significant reason why the Sun Devils have started slow this year is because of the youth of the team.
With 11 freshmen and 18 total underclassmen on the 28-man roster, a lot of ASU’s pitfalls can be traced to the mistakes of inexperience.
“We can’t let one mistake become two or two become three,” said Powers, whose team travels to North Dakota this weekend for a crucial two- game series against the sixth-ranked Fighting Hawks. “Whether it’s defensive zone detail, whether it’s not managing pucks and giving them transition the way we need to, or whether it’s just the goalie making the timely save that we need more of. It’s all those things combined that one mistake can’t become two.
“We’ve just got to have a short memory and bounce back from making mistakes. It’s a game of mistakes. You’re going to make them, and we can’t let them compound.”
With an inexperienced roster, the Sun Devils are bound to make more mistakes than the average team. It can be difficult for the young players to balance limiting the mistakes while also not playing timidly on the ice.
In Powers’ eyes, his players are allowed to make mistakes, but they have to be within reason.
“You can make mistakes, and we’re going to continue to play you,” Powers said. “That’s what learning and getting better is all about, but they have to be hard mistakes. They have to be bought-in mistakes. They can’t be soft mistakes. They can’t be soft, passive puck touches. They can’t be trying to make something out of absolutely nothing. It’s understanding when to live to fight another day, and then playing with our structure and being bought-in to playing within the structure that we need to play.”
Those miscues have resulted in a 3.60 goals against per game for the Sun Devils, tying ASU for 11th highest in the country.
Senior defenseman Tucker Ness and junior defenseman Anthony Dowd are the only upperclassmen manning the blue line for ASU, although Dowd is the only one with consistent playing time. Four of the Sun Devils’ nine defenseman on the roster are freshmen.
“We just still have mostly young guys making very basic defensive mistakes, and getting them to understand that they all have a specific job defensively, and when one guy’s not doing their job, and there’s a breakdown somewhere on the ice, you can’t think that you have to do two guys’ jobs,” Powers said. “Just do your job. That’s why we play defensively the way we do, and they’re really starting to see that and understand that, that they know what their job is defensively.”
Last year’s Sun Devils overcame the slow start on the backs of experience. The roster consisted of six graduate students and 16 total upperclassmen, compared to zero graduate students and only 10 upperclassmen this year.
Throughout ASU’s brief history of being a Division I hockey program, Powers had to rely heavily on the transfer portal to acquire experienced talent to fill out the roster. This past summer, Powers felt differently about his team’s needs.
“We made the decision to go young and put a team together that we can build over the next few years with and hopefully win a national championship, and we’re committed to making that pay off, and we think it’s still a team that can win in the short term, too,” Powers said.
Earlier this season, Powers also mentioned that he wanted to have a larger young core that can grow with the team and fanbase so the fans can attach to players instead of only cheering them on for a year.
“It was just a decision where we feel like our younger recruiting has caught up with where the program is,” Powers said. “Like where in the past, it wasn’t at a point where we could bring in this amount of freshmen because they clearly just knew they weren’t ready if we brought them all in. So we had to subsidize competitiveness with going into the portal, and we’re still going to use the portal. We’re just not going to use it to the extent that we always did.”
With 17 new faces on the roster brought in over the summer, it can be tough for everyone to get on the same page quickly. But it’s especially tough when the majority of those players are younger like this year’s Sun Devil squad.
“It’s different,” senior forward and co-captain Bennett Schimek said. “It’s an adjustment, but every season in college hockey is different. Some years you have more turnover than others, but it feels like every season you’re building a new team. Sometimes it takes longer than others to find where everybody fits into that team and what role they’re going to play. It’s been different versus last year. Last year we had an old team. This year it’s a little bit younger, but it’s been good. I’m really excited about what we can do in the future.”
The Sun Devils’ gauntlet of a schedule isn’t helping their cause. They’ve already faced No. 5 Penn State, the 7-1 Miami Redhawks and No. 17 Colorado College, going 1-4-1 against the trio.
Besides this weekend’s trip against No. 6 North Dakota, ASU’s next three series before the two-week winter break includes a home series against No. 4 Denver, home again against Ohio State, which is the first team outside of the top-20, and finally a trip to No. 3 Minnesota Duluth.
“It’s how you get better,” Powers said of the strength of schedule. “It’s how a young team for sure gets better no matter the result. That’s why you have to be so process-driven right now with this young group and it’s all about competing. We know if our guys compete we can beat anybody.”
Last November the unranked Sun Devils went into No. 1 Denver’s barn and promptly swept the undefeated reigning national champs. The upcoming schedule provides this year’s team with the same opportunity for a signature win to get back on track.
Signature wins don’t just happen, though. Especially with this ASU team, which has areas of the game that need to be worked on.
“Just take a look in the mirror a little bit,” junior forward and co-captain Kyle Smolen said. “The answers aren’t anywhere but within ourselves. I think we need a little bit more belief in ourselves before we can believe in each other and what we’re trying to do. It’s just having that confidence that we are capable of doing this stuff.
“I keep saying it to the guys in the room now, is just believe in yourself, believe in what you’ve done in your careers, that you can do this. You’re here for a reason. Coach brought us all here for a reason. You just got to trust it and believe in yourself first.”
As much as the Sun Devils are searching for answers to turn around their season, they aren’t panicking. Powers continues to play his young guys and let them experience their growing pains.
It’s all part of the process of maturing as a hockey player and being better in the long term. With ASU’s expectations to win now, it’s tough to look into the future.
But Powers believes the future isn’t that far away.
“We have a lot of really high-end prospects that are freshmen, but they’re freshmen, and they’re going to make mistakes,” Powers said. “They’re young, and they’re playing against older guys, and it takes a little bit of time. And nobody’s more impatient than I am, but we’re going to stick it out with them, and we think it’ll turn real quick here.
“Once it does, we’re going to be a really, really dangerous team.”
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