J

oe Alberici won’t ascribe Army’s early defensive success in its first season without defenseman Johnny Surdick and goalie AJ Barretto as a mere continuation of the unit’s perennial strength.

The identity, though, certainly doesn’t hurt.

The Black Knights have allowed just five goals in their two wins, ripping Massachusetts 17-4 in their opener on Saturday before dispatching NJIT 19-1 two days later. It’s equally tempting to sound the small sample size alarm and point out that Army usually finds itself among the national leaders in scoring defense.

“Nothing’s ever taken for granted,” Alberici said. “Just the fact that you’re standing on the sidelines and waiting your turn and watching how it’s been done on game days, that’s got to rub off. It has to be a positive. Now it’s helpful, but I don’t want to chalk [our start] up to that and say year-over-year it’ll just be that way. I’m not even going to tell you it’ll be game-over-game.”

Certainly, no one expects Army (or anyone, for that matter) to allow 2.5 goals per game. Yet this strong a start is at least mildly unanticipated considering Surdick won the Schmeisser Award as the nation’s top defenseman and Barretto was a four-year starter in the cage who claimed MVP honors in last year’s Patriot League tournament. Both graduated off last year’s NCAA tournament team.

Sophomore Wyatt Schupler earned the right to succeed Barretto after navigating a four-man race and sports a microscopic 2.90 goals-against average to go with a .789 save percentage in his first college action.

“It’s been a very competitive process, and I think that sort of competition has helped him up his game,” Alberici said. “Nobody anointed Wyatt as ‘The Next One.’ He wouldn’t have thought that. Nobody on the staff was saying, ‘Oh yeah, it’s going to be Wyatt’s job.’ It didn’t become all that apparent to any of us until late in the fall, and even then it was, ‘Wyatt’s going to be No. 1 going into January practice.”

The guys in front of Schupler have done their job as well, which is right in line for a program that has ranked in the top 10 in scoring defense nationally in seven consecutive seasons (including second last year).

Senior captain Tom Rigney is a second-year starter. Sophomore Marcus Hudgins moved down from pole and caused three turnovers against Massachusetts to earn conference defensive player of the week honors, and Alberici described him as athletic a defenseman as he’s ever coached at West Point. The cerebral Bennett Taylor earned the other starting spot after working on the man-down unit as a junior.

Meanwhile, Army’s rope unit is tested. Junior Kyle Beyer played extensive at long pole last year, while senior Anthony George is a mainstay at short stick who routinely makes plays off the ground.

Collectively, they’ve produced a promising start — with the aid of some other factors the Black Knights hope can continue with Rutgers visiting on Saturday.

“When I look at our first two games, it’s a very small sample size, but we’ve been winning a great percentage of our faceoffs, which helps you defensively,” Alberici said. “We’ve been riding at a nice clip, and that helps you defensively. And on top of that, we’ve been getting good goaltending. There are a lot of factors, and we’ve tried to emphasize those factors as a way of compensating for the loss of an AJ Barretto or John Surdick. We don’t have to do it with one player. It could be a couple players, and that’s held up.”