With the Cyclones coming off a sweep of a struggling Eastern Michigan team, winning 4-3 and 10-4, they can mark their spot in college hockey history if they manage to sweep Arizona State this weekend.

With two more wins, head coach Al Murdoch, currently sitting at 923 career wins, will stand alone at the top of the all time wins for coaches across all levels of collegiate hockey. Former Michigan State coach Ron Mason currently holds the record with 924 wins.

Murdoch attributed the his closeness to breaking the record to the program’s willingness to want to win over the years.

“It comes down to our desire to play to the best of our abilities,” Murdoch said. “It’s a heck of a lot more fun winning than it is losing; losing hurts a lot.”

While the Cyclones did get the sweep, this past weekend, the Eastern Michigan Eagles, who were 2-7 heading into the match, gave the Cyclones a wake up call, particularly in Friday night’s 4-3 win in which they were trailing 3-2 heading into the third period. Murdoch stressed that the team needs to do some things better this weekend against Arizona State.

“We need to be a better team, we need to be stronger, tougher,” Murdoch said. “I think we had the potential to beat them by ten goals and we didn’t. A win is a win, but it was an ugly win. If you can win ugly, I guess that’s OK, but we’ll win. We’re a winning team with a winning tradition and I don’t like it being that close against a team that’s not in the top 20.”

Despite their struggles, it has been a recurring theme for the Cyclones to fight back in the clutch.

“They don’t want to have black Monday,” Murdoch said. “They know it’s going to be a lot tougher to face me than it is to face anybody. So if they don’t play hard in the third period, they know they’re in trouble,” Murdoch said.

One of the things the Cyclones struggled with against Eastern Michigan was discipline and taking penalties. They had three guys get ejected from the games this weekend for getting in fights during the games, which results in an automatic ejection. That is one thing sophomore goalie Eric Hudson said needs to improve this weekend.

“We’re going to look into our discipline and getting frustrated. We talked about that earlier and getting frustrated with our opponent is obviously a negative aspect to our game,” Hudson said.

Hudson also mentioned that taking penalties in order to keep them off the scoreboard is also key.

Hudson said the biggest challenge about the Sun Devils is the unknown.

“Arizona State used to be a top-15 team, but now they are kind of under the radar. They don’t play very many high profile universities, but they always come out with a good program”, Hudson said. “ They’re going to be a tough team and have a lot of guys that are skilled hockey players and if we’re not ready, we could lose one or both of these games this weekend.”

The Cyclones could’ve also put more goals in the net to avoid having close calls like they did in game one against the Eagles.

Murdoch is excited for the chance to make history this weekend and feels the contest should be competitive.

“Arizona State will be big, strong, physical, well coached, pretty ready to play; It will be good,” Murdoch said. “It will be end to end hockey.”