Good thing Jeannine Donato remembered to prepare a little extra stuffing this year. After all, her husband, Harvard men’s hockey coach Ted Donato ’91, planned on bringing home a few more diners than usual this Thanksgiving.

With a seven-hour bus ride to Upstate New York looming and players unable to return home, the Crimson celebrated the holidays as a team last Wednesday at the Donatos’ house in Scituate, Mass.

“It was a real treat,” sophomore defenseman Dylan Reese said. “It was good to spend Thanksgiving with the guys...If you can’t spend it with your family, that’s probably the best place to be.”

The Donato children made their Harvard guests feel right at home, laying down readily accepted challenges in their mini-hockey game. And according to those in attendance, the meal wasn’t half bad either.

“He really rolled out the red carpet for us,” sophomore forward Ryan Maki said. “Everything you could possibly want was pretty much there, so it was good.”

EMPOWERED PLAY

Harvard’s power play unit, which converted three of its 10 chances in North Country this weekend, now ranks third-best in the country behind only Princeton and Mass.-Lowell.

After managing just one goal on 17 tries through its first three games, the Crimson has scored 13 power-play goals in its last 37 opportunies, a six-game conversion rate of 35.1 percent.

“It’s just naturally clicking now,” captain Noah Welch said. “When the P.P.’s not going well, you try to do too much, and when you do that, it doesn’t work out. But now it’s five guys on the ice, we each have one or two plays that we make, and those are our options.”

That simplification of play has translated into higher point totals across the board for the first power-play unit, whose five members now occupy the top five spots on the Crimson scoring charts.

Assistant captain Tom Cavanagh, fresh off his five-point weekend, leads Harvard with 14 points, courtesy of four goals and 10 assists—both team-highs—followed by freshman forward Jon Pelle, senior forwards Andrew Lederman and Brendan Bernakevitch and Welch. But maintaining those numbers has required the Crimson to remain flexible and tweak its strategy on the fly.

“I think before we were using a lot of Pelle and [Cavanagh] coming out front and hitting [Cavanagh] in the slot,” Welch said. “Now, teams are playing us down low, so we’re getting the puck up top, and me and Ledzy shoot a lot, and vice-versa.”

ALL SHOOK UP

Donato, who has employed the same three defensive pairings in eight of nine games so far this season, assigned new partners to all six of his blue-line mainstays in practice this week.

Reese skated with Welch, who was formerly matched with Peter Hafner. Hafner joined with Tom Walsh, whose former partner, Dave MacDonald, worked alongside Ryan Lannon.