Three questions surrounding Penn State as they enter the 2024-2025 season

There is always an air of uncertainty when you approach a new season of college hockey. For Penn State, the uncertainty has lingered for an entire offseason.

Guy Gadowsky’s squad ended the 2023-24 season with a 15-18-3 record overall and 7-13-2 in the Big Ten play. Many questions now float around the Nittany Lions as they set their sights on the upcoming campaign.

Fresh faces or inexperience?

Gadowsky brought in one of the biggest classes in program history. 11 new faces will join the fray in Hockey Valley this year.

Not only is it one of the biggest recruiting classes, it’s arguably one of the deepest. High-end talent like Charlie Cerrato and Andrew Kuzma are some of the highly touted freshmen skating onto the scene this season.

Cerrato has made it clear that he and the other newcomers want to make an immediate impact, similar to how Aiden Fink and the rest of his class did a year prior.

The new additions brought the average age down to 21.1 years old. After being one of the oldest teams in the country for the past half-decade, Penn State is now the third youngest in the Big Ten - behind Michigan State and Minnesota - and 13th youngest in the nation.

The young guns bear a lot of responsibility with the opportunity to get acclimated to college hockey right out of the gate against the Nanooks. The departure of three defensemen - Dylan Gratton, Christian Berger and Tanner Palocsik - and five forwards - Ryan Kirwan, Christian Sarlo, Chase McLane, Xander Lamppa and Jacques Bouquot - to graduation or the transfer portal opened holes throughout the lineup

Last year’s squad saw the freshmen produce at a remarkable clip, accounting for 30.6% of the points during the season, but the haze of uncertainty around who they are as players is long gone.

And while there is an energetic buzz around the incoming freshmen, there is no guarantee they can shatter or even replicate what last year’s first-years accomplished.

Replicating last year’s class shouldn’t be the goal for the nine new freshmen on the roster, but instilling the lineup with the Penn State style of hockey is more than attainable for this group.

Can special teams go back to being special?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019-20, Penn State was one of the best special teams squads in the nation.

Scoring on the man advantage at a 27.1% clip while killing off 87.5% of penalties put the Nittany Lions in the top 10 nationally in both categories.

Post-pandemic has been a complete flip of the script for Gadowsky’s team, only eclipsing 20% on the power-play one time (2020-21) and hovering around 75% on the penalty kill each of the last five seasons.

Compare that to the numbers of the reigning Big Ten champions of Michigan State, who had a top-five power-play in the nation (27.1%) and a penalty kill at exactly 80%, it’s evident that work needs to be done to reach the upper echelon.

Before the start of last year, Gadowsky brought in former Penn State forward Andrew Sturtz as an assistant coach to try and shore up the special teams play, who notched 54 goals during his three-year tenure including nine power-play tallies.

After finishing the year with a 19.7% man-advantage mark, and one that dipped to 18.1% in conference play, Penn State was left with the same problems plaguing them the last half-decade and the same question: Why?

A lack of a true power-play quarterback may help begin to answer that question.

Tanner Palocsik was brought in last year to help man the power-play unit, but it never came to fruition, as he finished the season with just two goals on the season.

Pair that with the inability to win offensive zone draws, as Penn State sat 44th in the nation with a faceoff winning percentage of 48.9%, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Year two of the Andrew Sturtz experience will be telling.

With a year under his belt as an assistant coach, the first-year jitters are out of the way and he is in prime position to bring the Penn State special teams back to life.

Can Sturtz adapt and adjust to the struggles of the power play from last season? Or will it be the same old story for Guy Gadowsky’s team as they continue to struggle for answers?

How will the new goalie tandem fare?

Saying Penn State struggled between the pipes last season is an understatement.

The tandem of Liam Souliere and Noah Grannan finished bottom-five in the nation in both goals-against average (3.62) and save percentage (.869%).

Gadowsky has emphasized team defense as paramount for goaltender stats.

“Goals against is a team stat, the save percentages is not just a goaltender stat,” Gadowsky said. “And that has to be addressed, addressed as a team, not just one individual, but that is a very high priority for us.”

It’s no secret that Penn State struggled on the defensive end as a whole, something uncharacteristic for a coaching staff that prides itself on that front and called last year’s blue line “absolutely the best D-core we’ve ever had.”

With defensemen Christian Berger and Tanner Palocsik moving on to greener pastures, plus the loss of Dylan Gratton and Liam Souliere to the transfer portal, the Nittany Lions will need to rebuild and rebound defensively this season.

Three new blueliners, Jason Gallucci, Cade Christenson and Nick Fascia, will hope to clean things up in front of the new goaltending tandem of Arsenii Sergeev and Noah Grannan.

A transfer from UConn, Sergeev put up respectable numbers on a struggling Huskies squad, finishing the 2023-24 campaign with a 2.74 goals-against average and .918 save percentage

It’s unclear how Sergeev will perform in the Big Ten, the “monster conference” as Gadowsky has alluded to before, but he’s already battle-tested from Hockey East, and the hope is the buzz around him will translate onto the ice.

With the new season on the horizon, the Nittany Lions will look to answer these questions while getting back to the “Penn State tough” brand of hockey.

It will be a difficult road series against Alaska-Fairbanks this Saturday and Sunday.

Josh Bartosik is a fourth-year majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact him, email jsb6137@psu.edu.