Although it’s been a chilly start to winter in South Bend, with campus now under a foot of snow, there’s still time for Notre Dame hockey to get hot. With 16 games remaining, the Irish nearly have half their schedule left to play.
However, after becoming the lone remaining team in the nation without a conference win, Notre Dame (4-15-1, 0-10-0 Big Ten) faces a familiar story entering this weekend’s series at Penn State (14-6-0, 6-4-0 Big Ten). The Irish are now mired in their second consecutive losing streak of six or more games, and they’ve lost 13 of their last 14 games dating back to October.
“I believe in the group that we have currently. I believe that we should have more results than we do right now and don’t,” first-year head coach Brock Sheahan said Wednesday. “A lot of that has to do with a change in how we are playing and what we’re doing day-to-day, and another part of that is like, the winning standard has not been here for the last however many years. And we are working through that.”
2026 already has included some near misses for the Irish, who have lost all four games in the new year but played two close contests against No. 1 Michigan last weekend. Notre Dame’s expected goals figure was essentially equal to the Wolverines on both nights, but couldn’t land a result in the win column.
The upcoming series with the Nittany Lions presents another opportunity to make progress, especially on the defensive issues that have held the team back as of late. Notre Dame’s 4.3 goals against per game are fourth most in the country, and the Irish have conceded at least four goals in each of their last seven games.
Cleaning up those issues will be made more difficult this weekend by the absence of the team’s top defenseman and scorer. The Big Ten handed junior Paul Fischer a two-game suspension for a crosscheck to the back of Michigan star forward Michael Hage late in the third period of Saturday’s contest. The suspension will keep Fischer out of both games this weekend.
The Irish will also be without freshman defenseman Caeden Carlisle, whom the Big Ten suspended one game for a check to the head, also in the series finale against Michigan. The two teams compiled 173 total penalty minutes over the course of Saturday’s contest, most of which came in the third period.
“We can only control what we can control. It’s frustrating to lose Paul,” Sheahan said. “The penalty by Paul is not a good penalty to take at a time when it’s a contentious game. It was a good distance from the boards. I thought he’d get one game, he got two. And then Caeden’s hit was unacceptable and something we addressed as a team. He gets the one game, and I would’ve thought he would get two.”
Discipline has already hampered Notre Dame’s ability to build any sort of momentum in the second half. Freshman forward Cole Brown and junior forward Brennan Ali served one game and two game suspensions, respectively, during January’s opening weekend series against Western Michigan. Those absences took two important forwards out of an already jumbled Irish lineup.
For his part, Sheahan felt grateful the Irish aren’t looking at three players suspended for this weekend. The first-year head coach went to bat this week for captain and junior forward Danny Nelson, whose incidental collision with Michigan goaltender Jack Ivankovic Saturday drew the ire of Wolverine fans.
“I’m just happy that people realize — well, at least the league realize — that Danny Nelson’s was incidental contact. He’s not a dirty player. He was not trying to injure their goalie, which is, I think, very obvious,” Sheahan said.
Absent Fischer and Carlisle, Notre Dame will need to embrace a next man up mentality on defense this weekend. Fischer leads the team in points (with 16) and average time on ice, tallying 21 minutes and 36 seconds per night.
“[Seniors] Axel Kumlin and Michael Mastrodomenico are veteran defensemen for us that’ll definitely play a ton of minutes like they normally do,” Sheahan said. “And like I said, [Sophomore] Jaedon Kerr and [junior] Henry Nelson, those guys’ minutes will bump up. And [sophomore] Jimmy Jurcev and [freshman] Drew Mackie, especially for Drew, will have to play more than he’s played for most of the year.”
Sheahan praised the play of senior captain Mastrodomenico in Saturday’s Michigan contest, calling his game “much more simple, solid [and] consistent.” The Irish will need that out of Mastrodomenico again this weekend as they attempt to overcome what Sheahan believes is a plague of defensive issues that have kept the Irish out of the win column.
“We haven’t been able to put it together. We’ve had good moments, we had good moments last weekend, and then we continue to fall apart. [It’s] stuff that we addressed, especially on the defensive side of the puck,” he said. “It’s nothing new that we’ve been talking about, teaching, working through in practice, and I’m hopeful that it’ll all start coming together here as soon as possible.”
