The Brown hockey team is like a second-hand car; it works fine in its own backyard, but on the road it chokes up, stalls, and freezes over.

Tomorrow night the Bruins will go on the road, and the Crimson at home, where it is undefeated in five games. Face-off time is 8 p.m. in the varsity contest, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. in the junior varsity and freshman games.

Since that unfortunate evening in Providence tow weeks ago when Brown gained a 3-2 victory only 30 seconds from the end, both teams have been playing the kind of hockey that is normally associated with them. The Bruins returned to mediocrity by losing to an undistinguished Army team, 5 to 1, after bowing, 5 to 0, to Princeton; and the Crimson seems to have picked up the knack of defensive hockey with three impressive wins.

But the varsity must keep its guard up, especially against the Bruin's surprising speedsters, Dave Kelley and Dave Laub, who have scored 23 goals between them in less than half a season.

Coach Cooney Weiland have been encouraging his forwards to shoot the puck more,a suggestion taken seriously by center Jim Dwinell, who took a team high of ten shots on the Norwich goalie and found three of them in his goals-scored column. Weiland is also trying to revive a facsimile of the old cleary Guttu-O'Mally power play to patch the varsity's playmaking weakness. When a Brown skater is in the penalty box the forwards, for example the first line of Dave Morse, Dwinell and Bruce Thomas, will be joined by one defenseman and skate four abreast across the blue line, in an effort to spring loose a wing.

With Bob Bland back in the nets, and Dave Grannis developing a potent pokecheck technique to go with his normally strong stick-handling, the Crimson must be rated a slight favorite. But even victory can only put the varsity in a tie for second place in the Ivy League. Yale also has a 1-1 record and can be expected to defeat Cornell again, while undefeated Dartmouth visits undefeated Princeton.