Unfinished business: RPI men’s hockey is back after two cancelled seasons
Troy, N.Y. (BVM) — “A little bit of heartbreak, we were the hottest team in the country,” RPI senior center Ture Linden said.
Linden was only a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when NCAA hockey stopped dead in its tracks in March of 2020. RPI was in the midst of a resurgence, its best season since 2015-16, and had a bye in the ECAC tournament. Winning the ECAC tournament would have gotten RPI a berth in the NCAA tournament, and once you’re there, anything can happen. RPI was, like Linden said, the hottest team in the ECAC, reeling off four straight wins to end the regular season, all against in-conference opponents. During those four wins, RPI outscored its opponents by a combined 17-2. Dominance. Linden was a big part of that success along with captain Will Reilly, goalie Owen Savory, and leading goal-scorers Todd Burgess and Patrick Polino. Yet, suddenly, RPI’s season was over without the chance to finish what it started.
“It really hurt,” Linden said. “Especially for the seniors, guys who rebuilt the program and were huge in bringing RPI back to the standard it was before.”
After a longer offseason than normal, RPI looked toward another shot at the conference championship with a similar core. Reilly, Polino, and lead point scorer Chase Zieky had all graduated, but RPI was still ready to be as competitive as ever. It was then that the Ivy League suspended sports for the season, taking out a chunk of the ECAC. RPI, Union and Colgate followed suit, leaving only four teams in the conference to play as essentially independents.
First no playoffs, now no season. With that revelation came transfers. Savory, off the back of two rock-solid seasons in net for the Engineers, headed to UMass-Lowell. Burgess would spend his senior season at Minnesota State-Mankato. Suddenly, from that 2019-20 team, RPI had lost seven of its top eight leading scorers and its starting goalie. Linden was the top scorer still with the program. He was joined by forwards Ottoville Leppanen and Zachary Dubinsky, defenseman Simon Kjellberg, and goalie Linden Marshall as the core returners when RPI hockey would resume for the 2021-22 season.
“First off, really good friends off the ice,” Linden said of his former teammates. “That sophomore year team, ‘19-20 was the closest team I’ve ever been on. We loved spending time together off the ice, it was just hard in that way to lose some of those key guys to that year. Still friends with them, still keep in touch, and that’s what really matters.”
Some of the returning players opted to play in other amateur leagues to stay fresh. Leppanen headed back to his native Finland to play a handful of games in the Suomi-Sarja. Dubinsky would join the Omaha Lancers of the USHL. Other players opted to take the time to recoup injuries and work on skills.
“I think I went two or three months off the ice,” Linden said.
Linden at first spent his time away to work on strength and conditioning, he then took time to work on his stride to get faster, then worked with skills coaches to improve his play on the puck. Though he wasn’t playing games anywhere, Linden was still trying to improve as much as possible.
“I decided ‘this needs to be different than another offseason, this needs to be a lot harder and I need to work on things that I wouldn’t normally work on,’” Linden said.
Now, after an over 500-day offseason, RPI is ready to challenge for the ECAC title yet again. Linden and Marshall have been named the captains of the squad while Leppanen and grad-transfers Shane Sellar and Anthony Baxter will serve as alternate captains. Though it lost many players to transfer, RPI gained a large group of players via transfer as well.
Sellar, Baxter, T.J. Walsh, Jakob Lee, Jack Agnew and Justin Addamo are all transfers now slotting into large roles for the team.
“Our biggest focus this year has been bringing guys up to speed in terms of the culture that we had in that ’19-20 season,” Linden said.
RPI spent much of the year without hockey, meeting on Zoom with the team and melding into a team through remote teambuilders despite the inability to be together in person.
“We were talking every week throughout the last year,” Linden said. “That’s really helped this year because we’ve been here now two months to get guys up to speed and acclimated to our culture. That helped us when we got here because guys already knew what to expect in a way.”
“Our goal is to win the ECAC and then see what happens; we want to be top-four in the regular season then we want to win the playoffs,” Linden said. RPI is off to a good start, despite its 1-2-1 record early on, after two tight games with Bowling Green and a 6-2 drubbing of Canisius College. The Engineers’ ECAC season starts with a two-game series against arch-rival Union, first at Union and then the RPI Blackout at home.
“Individually, I just want to be the best leader I can be,” Linden said.
RPI is a team that had its heart broken, but it’s also a team that won’t let the misfortunes in the past drag it down in the present. This is a team that isn’t worried about what could have been, it’s a team that wants to win now. Do they have the sheer, unmatchable talent of the Michigan super team that boasts four of the top five picks from the 2021 NHL draft? Of course not, but is the culture, drive, and sheer compete this team brings enough to win against anyone? Definitely.
From veteran transfers to freshmen and sophomores with no prior NCAA experience, the mentality is the same. This team wants to win.
