It was almost unfair how the start of the college hockey season saddled this year’s Quinnipiac team with the expectations and overarching shadow cast from last season.
In a way, it was ironic because it built requisite pomp around a situation that this iteration never experienced.
For the first time in program history, the Bobcats raised a national championship banner to the M&T Bank Arena rafters right before a team with a dozen new players took the ice for the first time this season. On the other side of the rink stood Boston College, the preseason No. 5 team in the nation that had no problem breaking cleanly from missing the national tournament last season, and with a night built around a memory, Quinnipiac lost in overtime after a first-year player tied the game in the third period.
For many in college hockey, the loss kicked off a so-called national championship hangover, but an overtime game against AIC and losses against New Hampshire and Maine were all part of a process that never truly tested head coach Rand Pecknold’s patience. He and his coaching staff started the season understanding how this team looked different from last year, and after smoking past Cornell and Colgate, not even a third-period comeback by Boston University looks to derail the team that hasn’t lost a regular season ECAC game since consecutive losses last January.
“We’re doing well,” Pecknold said of the team’s overall turnaround. “We basically lost half of our team [from last year], but I love the transfers that we brought in, and our freshman class is really good, so we’re excited about that. But it’s still a work in progress, and we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of an all-in buy-in of our culture, that this is how we play, and this is what we need to do to win.”
Winning games has never been the problem at Quinnipiac, but this year’s team stumbled out of the gate after the BC loss. It twice trailed AIC before rallying for an overtime winner on the road, and the 5-4 loss to UNH included a seven-goal first period that produced a one-goal lead for the Bobcats before the Wildcats tied and won the game with an overtime goal. The next weekend against Maine, a second period goal by Christophe Fillion sent the first game to overtime before Brandon Chabrier’s three-on-three goal with just over one minute remaining in the extra session.
Getting nipped in those games felt decidedly un-Quinnipiac-like for a team that infamously won its national title in the first 15 seconds of overtime against Minnesota, but the results forged the roster together prior to the three-straight weekends of ECAC play in November. A 2-2 tie against Dartmouth ended with the Big Green earning a second point in the shootout, but the Harvard game the next night found the mojo in a 6-0 victory that enabled the team to rear its head over the following sweeps of the Brown-Yale and Cornell-Colgate weekends.
“We’re really resilient,” Pecknold said. “I liked our confidence in both games [over the Cornell-Colgate weekend], especially in that Cornell game. We let them back in, but when it was 5-4, there was just no panic at all, and I liked that a lot. But we need to continue to work and get better at defending and become a better defensive team, and probably possess the puck better. I think that’s the thing we’ve done really well over the last few years [because] when you have the puck, you don’t have to defend, and we just haven’t had the puck enough.”
Quinnipiac’s success on the back end makes it easy to forget how good the Bobcats played over the years, but they still maintain the seventh-best scoring defense in the nation despite being winless in the four games where they haven’t scored three goals. The penalty kill is third-best in the nation at .920 – one of four teams killing at a 90 percent rate or higher and one of three that’s higher than both .905, .910, and .915 – and goaltender Vinny Duplessis is 14th in the nation with a 2.15 goals-against average.
That 15-goal outburst against Cornell and Colgate also came after 10 goals scored against Brown and Yale and the aforementioned six-spot against the Crimson. Combined with the performances from earlier in the year, Quinnipiac left even the 3-2 loss last week to fifth-ranked Boston University averaging just under 4.5 goals per game, a number that’s second only to Denver’s 5.5 goals per game, with an absurd 9-1 record when scoring three or more goals against opponents.
It’s incredibly unfair to measure any current team against an older team’s great numbers, but this year’s Quinnipiac roster is starting to grow into the hard truth of its changeover. Mason Marcellus, the goal scorer on opening night, had a three-game, four-goal streak snapped against BU but registered an assist to keep a revelating first season going with 14 points, and he’s tied for the team lead in goals with Jacob Quillan, a third-year player who was fourth on last year’s teams with 38 points.
Both Collin Graf, a returning First Team All-American, and Travis Treloar, a transfer from Ohio State, missed time with an injury – Treloar is still out of the lineup – but both registered five goals for the explosive offense. Even in their absence, six different players have at least that number, including the aforementioned team leaders.
“The interesting thing for me is that you’re going to have issues with new players [playing together] because you have to acclimate them [to each other],” Pecknold said. “It’s a wake-up call for freshmen when they get to college hockey because the way we play isn’t junior hockey, and the transfers are coming from all different things that they’ve done at their last place. So you have to create new habits.
“The interesting thing to me is our returners,” he said, “because I don’t know if it’s a hangover from a national championship or what, but our returners have struggled with their buy-in a little bit. They’re great kids and have great work ethic, and I think we’ll get there. We’re getting closer. That was a huge struggle in the month of October, and I get it because when you make a Frozen Four, you think it’s going to be easy, but it’s not.”
Playing as the “defending national champion” is wonderful pressure for any program, and facing opponents’ best on a nightly basis is something this year’s Quinnipiac team is embracing. Pecknold, his coaches, the players – they all know their uniform and the tradition holds something every team is playing to win, and despite all of the changes, the Bobcats are right back where they’d expect: No. 2 in the Pairwise rankings, undefeated in ECAC play, No. 5 in the latest national poll.
“Every game is a grind,” Pecknold said. “This has been three, four, five years, maybe more or longer running, but I can’t tell you how many times goalies have their best game against us. They play really well because they’re all fired up, so I think we have to get better with that and embrace the grind. It will come, and we’re on the path, and even this BU loss was probably, in the long run, something that will get better.”
