Each week during the season, we look at the big events and big games around Division I men’s college hockey in Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
Dan: Hey everyone, and Happy Tuesday!
Well, Paula, we finally made it. The last week of the regular season (well, for some leagues). A season that started in October with hopes and dreams is now in a position to sort out its playoff stretch. This is the time of year we all live for…unless you’re one of the teams that’s out of the postseason already.
As I dive in, that’s the story here out east with Atlantic Hockey, where the league introduced a new postseason format where eight of the 10 teams make the field. This weekend formally eliminated the two that will miss – Bentley and Air Force – while RIT, which lost to Bentley on Saturday night, clinched the regular-season championship as the winners of the Robert DeGregorio Trophy.
Atlantic Hockey is the only league that eliminates teams prior to its playoffs, but the format has been in college hockey for a number of years. When Hockey East was a 10-team league, it eliminated the bottom two teams and went to an eight-team format, and a number of the women’s leagues had formats that eliminated various teams from the postseason for years. The trend in recent decades has been to include everyone, but the conference is bucking it this year with a three-weekend format that allows for the best-of-three quarterfinals and the single-elimination semifinals and championship to be played at the better seed all the way through the finals.
This brought up an age-old conversation piece for me because “every team making the playoffs” is becoming increasingly common. It’s not singular to hockey, but I know ECAC specifically made it a point of pride to include every team in its women’s postseason for the first time this year. Hockey East, the league that used to eliminate the bottom two teams, uses a format that includes everyone. Outgoing commissioner Robert DeGregorio told Chris Lerch earlier this year that he wanted to include every team.
Where do you stand on postseason formats? I see the positives and negatives of both sides, and while I’m picking on Atlantic Hockey here (and it’ll seem like sour grapes because Bentley missed the postseason), I want to make sure that we’re discussing the format more so than the league, even though I took a very longwinded way to get there.
Paula: As cold as this sounds, I like seeing some teams eliminated from playoff contention. I think that the possibility of not making conference playoffs contributes to the fan interest in regular-season play and heightens the drama, especially in the final weeks.
Let me be clear: this isn’t an anti-participation trophy rant. I’m in favor of rewarding people for participating in many different situations. Not making the playoffs is heartbreaking for players, and I’m not one who subscribes to the toughen-up philosophy of life that claims that a good knocking-down is a valued experience. My take has nothing to do with that kind of thinking.
I appreciate good stories, and from a fan’s perspective, whether or not a team is going to make the playoffs is good storytelling and I’m hooked.
I remember the days of the old CCHA, which went back and forth between including everyone and eliminating some. For most of the time I covered that league, though, everyone was included. That created some economic hardships for some schools – not just those who traveled, but those who hosted. If a league is going to expect everyone to play, there should (in my opinion) be some financial support where it’s needed.
Because the Big Ten has only seven teams, the league has arrived at the perfect solution with the top team getting a bye for its three best-of-three first-round series. This season, Minnesota ran away with that bye from early on, but determining who’s going to host that first round is going to come down to the last weekend, with four teams – Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State – all vying for home ice. One very good team is going to travel. It’s exciting.
You mention RIT winning the Robert Degregorio Trophy. Kudos to the Tigers and their first regular-season title since 2011. While RIT provides proof of how difficult it is to win a regular-season title, Quinnipiac and Minnesota each secured consecutive regular-season titles this past weekend. The Bobcats earned their third consecutive Cleary Cup and the Golden Gophers clinched their second consecutive regular-season Big Ten championship – and sixth overall, which is remarkable given that this is only the end of the 10th season of B1G play.
How do we even discuss teams like Quinnipiac and Minnesota? Are teams with sustained levels of success like their outliers? The CCHA, Hockey East and the NCHC are all shaping up to be classic photo finishes, yet the three teams that have secured regular-season titles never looked back this season. What kinds of stories do these results tell, Dan?
Dan: I like to think that both are indicators of the cross-section of college hockey’s past and present. Quinnipiac, in particular, is a program that’s built its current history by laying a groundwork foundation over time. This program hasn’t even been in ECAC for 20 years, but what it’s done with an arena, financing, institutional support, and the right coach supporting everything is a blueprint for likeminded programs. Whether you love or hate the team’s success, there had to be an emotional investment over the last 30 years that commands respect from everyone who looks on from the outside.
That’s a far cry from Minnesota, which is probably the ultimate blue blood in the sport. I say “probably” only because I’m from Boston and therefore biased against anything that isn’t from my hometown… but you gotta give credit where credit is due there.
I remember the Frozen Four last year in Boston. I can’t remember if it was Bob Motzko or Mike Hastings, but one of them talked about how Minnesota, as a state, goes mad when the Gophers are good. As someone who grew up going to BU games at Walter Brown and, to a greater degree, Red Sox games at Fenway and Bruins games at the Garden, I can relate to the sentiment. Things are way more fun when the fan base has the electric current going.
It’s a fandom that’s been passed through generations, and Minnesota has been able to sustain its greatness by simply harnessing – for decades – what makes the state’s hockey culture great among players who understand that ideal.
It’s just not as good as Massachusetts, clearly. (Smiles, winks, tongue-in-cheek)
These two teams evenly splitting first-place votes probably draws a bit of a battle line between the old school and new school into the last day of the regular season, even though the PairWise is the ultimate statement.
Paula: I think it’s interesting that you leave Michigan out of the discussion about states with strong traditions of college hockey. Minnesota is the undisputed State of Hockey, but if there is to be a discussion about regions that have long-sustained traditions that contribute to hockey culture, Michigan needs to be included.
According to College Hockey, Inc., the top three U.S. states supplying players to men’s Division I programs this season are Minnesota (219), Michigan (162) and Massachusetts (130). Those three Ms have long been among the top states for youth hockey in the U.S., so these statistics are hardly surprising.
I think your tongue-in-cheek poke at this regional rivalry goes back to the deep-rooted belief that there is a significant difference in how hockey is played between the East – which is, let’s face it, mostly New England and New York State – and the West, which is literally everything else according to most people in college hockey. In fact, I’m not sure that Western New York counts as “west” to college hockey folks closer to the Atlantic Ocean.
I don’t think that college hockey is played differently region to region. There seemed to be some distinctions when I first started covering years ago, but everyone now has access to everyone else’s video and other game/coaching resources, every coach attends the same seminars, every team values “finesse” as much as it values grit.
The differences aren’t between regions but are between schools that can attract blue-chip recruits as opposed to those who cannot – or who do not yet. Quinnipiac has two NHL draft picks on its roster this season and a total of 10 Canadian players. That tells me a lot about Quinnipiac recruiting – like how the Bobcats are able to find outstanding talent that fits their program while recruiting in an area where they’re competing against teams that have traditionally attracted those blue-chip players. Give the Bobcats another two or three seasons of this level of success and Quinnipiac will be competing against places like Boston University and Boston College for top talent.
I am not certain that voters look at Minnesota vs. Quinnipiac as old school vs. new school. I know I do not. Minnesota earned my first-place vote because I think that the Gophers’ road sweep of Penn State is a tremendous thing. That’s not to take anything away from the Bobcats’ home wins over Yale and Brown, but I see the Nittany Lions as a team that can make some noise in the NCAA tournament, and I see the Big Ten as a stronger conference this year than the ECAC. So the Gophers got my vote. I can’t speak for other voters, but I know that those factors – those perceptions – go into the thinking of lots of college hockey folks.
Dan: You bring up a great point about Quinnipiac and the number of Canadian players that the team has. There’s a deeper discussion here about how hockey has changed in the United States in general, and it’s not just based on where teams are located in the college spectrum. After your note, I went to the College Hockey, Inc. media kit and found that California has nearly 50 players playing college hockey. Yes, the state is humungous and carries major population centers up and down the West Coast, but that number was an absurdity to older generations. The fact that hockey is growing nationally is showing exactly what we’re seeing in the talent pool.
I don’t know that teams have to compete with the traditional powerhouses to find the right players anymore. I do think that we’re reaching a critical moment in college hockey where the game has grown to a greater extent than we sometimes think about. I remember being in Nashville to see a Predators game, and the state hockey tournament exhibit had something like a dozen teams. It doesn’t seem like much to someone from Massachusetts, but those dozen teams probably never existed 20 years ago.
What I guess I’m trying to get at is this – as the years go on, I don’t know that teams will have to recruit against one another in those traditional markets. Without fully referencing the Quinnipiac roster for where every player is from, I think the teams that are willing to go into those markets are going to find talent that they can build their programs with. And with that will come more growth to the game in the way of teams and opportunities.
Switching gears, as we near the end of the season, I know that I’m also looking forward to the return of the 5-on-5 overtime that goes forever. It’s a staple of playoff hockey, but as a traditionalist, I’ve never been a huge fan of the shootout and the 3-on-3 overtime, but I will throw this out there as a question. Do you have a favorite overtime memory from the playoffs, and as we near the postseason, is there anything that we can remind fans about for the next few weeks?
Paula: All three of my favorite OT playoffs memories involve the CCHA, Ohio State, and Michigan – even when they weren’t playing each other.
There’s 1998, when Michigan State beat Ohio State in overtime to win the CCHA championship at Joe Louis Arena but a week later, Ohio State beat Michigan State in the West Regional to advance to the Frozen Four. That regional was played at Yost Ice Arena – the Michigan connection – and that weekend may have been the single best weekend of NCAA playoff hockey I’ve ever covered. Michigan, North Dakota, Yale and Princeton rounded out the field and Yost was positively rocking all weekend.
Ohio State lost its semifinal game in the Frozen Four that year to Boston College in Boston, but Michigan beat New Hampshire to advance to the title game against BC. When the Wolverines tied it up late in the third, I knew that Michigan would win it all because Marty Turco was in net. Michigan won 3-2 and the locals were shell-shocked.
My single favorite college hockey playoff overtime memory is the 2004 CCHA semifinal game at JLA between Ohio State and Miami. The Buckeyes were the underdog and the semifinal game was the second contest they were playing that weekend in the (mercifully) short-lived CCHA Super Six format. Current Ohio State assistant coach, JB Bittner, scored the game-winning goal 23 seconds into OT, and the Buckeyes went on to defeat Michigan for the playoff championship.
In each of those scenarios, no one anticipated the winning outcome – and that’s what makes playoff hockey so amazing. I’ve said repeatedly in this column and elsewhere that I think conference playoff hockey is the best thing we get to witness all season. Look at how close the regular-season races are in the CCHA, Hockey East, and the NCHC. That will make for some completely unpredictable playoff outcomes in those leagues.
In B1G Hockey, Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State are among the top 10 teams in the PWR and yet one of them may wind up not hosting a first-round playoff series. In Atlantic Hockey, RIT – a team that has flirted with PWR inclusion most of this season and a team that was miles ahead of the AHA competition all season long – very likely has to win out to earn the NCAA conference autobid.
We use the word “parity” far too much in college hockey, but this season genuinely has proven that about half of the D-I field can legitimately make some postseason noise. If that results in 5-on-5 playoff OT hockey, Dan, then I am here for all of it.
