At the rate Penn State's men's ice hockey team is scoring, head coach Joe Battista and his players may want to buy some stock in GE.

The Icers are lighting the lamp at a phenomenal rate. Through their first five games, the defending ACHA champs have netted 31 goals and have scored less than five goals in a game only once.

Battista knows his team is going to have to maintain this scoring pace because the Icers face some formidable foes over the next few weeks.

No. 8 Delaware is one of those adversaries. The Icers travel to Rust Arena in Newark to face the Blue Hens in a pair of games this weekend. The puck drops 7 p.m today followed by an 8 p.m. opening face-off tomorrow.

"I think this is the best team they've ever had," Battista said of the Delaware squad. "They're playing with a ton of confidence right now."

The Blue Hens are 6-1 and are quite a scoring machine themselves. Though Delaware doesn't score at quite the same rate as the Icers, the Blue Hens have still scored 34 goals in 7 games.

"This is another real big game," Battista said. "They're 6-1 and we're 4-0-1 so it's another big test early in the season on the road. They're certainly one of the teams that's going to contend for the national title this year."

Delaware only lost three players from last year's team which beat the Icers here in Happy Valley, 3-2.

"I don't think any of our guys have forgotten that," Battista said.

Senior Mike Blevins, an ACHA academic All-American, hasn't.

"They came in and beat us at our place," he said. "We remember that and we're going to try to go out and take that against them."

While the Icer offense has been explosive, the defense has been equally impressive assistant coach Dave Bauer said.

"The defense overall is playing very well," he said. "The veteran guys like Josh Mandel, Scott Curry and Brandon Cook are doing a terrific job. Curtiss Patrick has jumped right in and he's playing higher than I ever expected a freshman to play after five or six games. He's one of our go to guys already."

Through the first five games, the Icers have yielded only eight goals.

Two other factors may have a significant influence on this weekend's doubleheader.

The coaching matchup will be a classic example of teacher vs. student, or, in this case, students. Delaware head coach Josh Brandwene and assistant coach John O'Connor are former Icers who played for Battista during Penn State's 1990 national championship season.

"They've done a whale of a job with the program," Battista said. "They've taken a program that was kind of a middle tier program a few years ago, and in the last four or five years, they've become national contenders."

The other factor is the surface on which the teams will skate. Rust arena is an Olympic size rink, which is bigger than most NHL-type sized rinks such as Penn State's Ice Pavilion at the Greenberg Sports Complex.

A regular size rink is 200 feet by 85 feet, while an Olympic rink is 200 feet by 100 feet.

"It creates a completely different set of angles for your goalies and a different set of angles for your breakout, power play and forecheck," Battista said.

Despite the size difference and wide open style of play the Olympic rink forces, Battista said the scoring doesn't necessarily increase.

"What happens I think is teams tend to play more conservatively on the bigger ice sheet and they tend to bunch up in front of the net defensively and force perimeter shots," he said. "We haven't scored more than four or five goals ever down there and obviously they have an advantage because they practice on it every day."

Blevins said he and his teammates aren't too concerned about the size of the surface and he thinks they can actually use it to their advantage.

"The bigger rink is going to cause the game to be a little more spread out, so we're going to have to utilize our speed," he said.

Blevins said despite the two outside aspects to the game, the bottom line is that Delaware is going to be a tough opponent.

"They're a feisty team that is just going to go out and try to bang you around and try to get in your face and get you off your game," he said.