No. 20 Dartmouth (10-7-2, 7-4-1 ECAC Hockey) will face RPI (6-17-2, 5-7-1 ECAC Hockey) at 7 p.m. on Friday and Union (12-11-1, 5-7-0) at 7 p.m. on Saturday. Both games will be played in Hanover.
Coming off of two consecutive ties -- 5-5 against Harvard on Sunday and 2-2 against Holy Cross last Wednesday -- the Dartmouth squad is looking for a much-needed win. Dartmouth earned 5-2 victories over both RPI and Union at the beginning of the this season, and hopes for the same results this weekend.
"They are going to be different teams and we are a different team," defenseman Evan Stephens '11 said. "We have to play our best. We can't expect to go 90 percent and beat them."
Dartmouth is in fourth place in the ECAC Hockey standings, and needs to focus on its special teams play in order to defeat eighth-place RPI and 10th-place Union.
Both of RPI's last two games went into overtime. After defeating St. Lawrence University 7-6 last weekend, RPI went on to lose to Clarkson University 4-3. The RPI squad recently defeated Princeton and Colgate University, but lost to Cornell.
This past weekend, the Union team suffered a 4-3 overtime loss to Clarkson and a 5-2 loss to St. Lawrence.
Union's high scorer, Adam Presizniuk, has 27 points this season, with 11 goals and 16 assists. He exceeds Dartmouth's highest scorers, Adam Estoclet '11 and Doug Jones '12, by six points and is third in the ECAC Hockey League in goals scored.
Dartmouth goaltender Jody O'Neill '12 has a 0.928 save percentage so far this season, while Mathias Lange, RPI's netminder, and Union goalie Corey Milan both have save percentages of 0.901.
O'Neill said that the Big Green team will slightly adapt its game in order to anticipate RPI and Union's systems and strategies this weekend.
These two games against conference teams could help further determine Dartmouth's postseason expectations. O'Neill, however, said it is still a little too early to be thinking about playoff berths.
"We want to try and win every game we can and we're going to take it one game at a time," he said. "We try to focus on the journey, not the end result".
