Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) I’m gonna fight ‘em off. A seven nation army couldn’t hold me back. – The White Stripes
It’s rare to make the biggest story of the college hockey weekend about a game that didn’t include teams fighting for postseason content on either a national or conference level. It’s even rarer to look at teams playing well after the majority of college hockey fans were fast asleep, and it’s rarer still that the programs from Arizona State and Alaska would produce the story as the result of an intense rivalry forged by frequently playing one another as Division I independents. Yet here we are, looking at the biggest stories of the week, and starting things off with the last 16 seconds of Friday night’s game between the Nanooks and Sun Devils.
What had been a scoreless game through two periods erupted for four goals in the third, but after Chase Dafoe and Anton Rubtsov twice gave Fairbanks a one-goal lead by sandwiching goals around Brandon Tabakin. Tabakin later took a two-minute cross-checking penalty with about two minutes remaining that was upgraded to a five-minute major five-minute major, and after Dafoe scored to give the Nanooks a two-goal lead, tensions that had been building over the course of the night exploded into full-on line brawls, the largest of which occurred after a face-off sent a puck into the corner to the right of Arizona State’s net.
The players themselves skirmished and broke into customary scrums that involved further facemasking before Arizona State’s Tucker Ness and Alaska’s Dawson Bruneski, who had previously been assessed penalties for roughing, left their respective penalty boxes to trade fists at center ice. Over two dozen additional calls were assessed, after which officials determined to end the game with 11.1 seconds remaining on the clock.
The final number resulted in 131 penalty minutes for the Nanooks with 116 minutes assessed to the Sun Devils, but while the 247 minutes were the most in a game in almost 20 years, the teams skated to an entertaining and intense overtime game on Saturday with Arizona State gaining a 4-3 win after eradicating a two-goal deficit. The lingering conversation, though, remained on the result of the disqualifications and misconducts from Friday night – and about any and all fallout expected to remain in place through the week.
2) I love that dirty water. Boston, you’re my home.
Boston College is, at this point, the team to beat in college hockey. The undisputed No. 1 team in the nation shouldn’t lose any first place-votes when the weekly top-20 poll is released later today, and the 22-5-1 record that’s approximately three games clear of Boston University and North Dakota adds space for the Eagles to even slip over the next couple of weeks before heading into the Hockey East postseason with an assumed No. 1 seed in the national tournament.
This past weekend did nothing to dispel any opinions of the Eagles, who swept Vermont with a blowout win on Friday and a harder-fought, 4-2 victory on Saturday that marked the team’s 10th straight victory. That last loss was against BU in the Beanpot semifinals but fell after two straight wins over the Terriers, and BC hasn’t lost a Hockey East game since dropping a 4-3 decision at Providence in mid-January. Moving even further back, the Eagles haven’t lost at home since a 5-3 loss to Northeastern on Dec. 1. Three games remain, two of which are on the road with a home-and-home against New Hampshire preceding a single-game season finale at Merrimack, making it all the more likely that BC will enter the playoffs with a chance to assure itself of the No. 1 overall seed.
3) I can see Cleary now, the rain has gone
College hockey handed out its first two sets of regular season hardware this weekend with the first coming during Quinnipiac’s lone weekend game against Brown. Having played Yale in a conference game during the CT Ice Tournament, the Bobcats traveled to Providence before scoring four first period goals against the Bears in a game that clinched the team’s No. 1 seed in the ECAC postseason after Cornell lost to Clarkson in overtime.
Riding home with the Cleary Cup is nothing new to Quinnipiac, which became the first team in ECAC history to win four straight outright regular-season championships with its eighth overall title in the last 12 seasons, but beating Brown built some space for the Bobcats’ hunt to a No. 2 seed in the national tournament. Minnesota – the No. 8 team in the tournament – stood idle while the seventh-seeded Bobcats avoided a loss to a team situated in the bottom 10 of the Pairwise, and losses by Maine, Colorado College, Western Michigan and others avoided pressure building from teams other than Providence.
4) Bob-ba oo-mau-mau
Quinnipiac was technically the second team to clinch a regular-season championship after RIT, the leading Atlantic Hockey team, earned its sixth conference championship and second consecutive crown when Bentley defeated Holy Cross on Thursday. The Tigers moved through their weekend by sweeping Canisius with a 9-2 win on Friday and a 3-2 win on Saturday, but the Falcons’ win allowed the team to hoist the Bobby Degregorio Trophy in front of its home crowd at the Gene Polisseni Center.
Clinching the No. 1 seed in the Atlantic Hockey postseason additionally means the Tigers won’t ever have to leave their home ice, and though last year ended with a three-game loss to Holy Cross during the semifinal round, RIT enters this season needing to win five games at home to clinch a championship against an expanded postseason format that includes all 11 teams.
5) Fly, Falcon, fly. Up up to the sky!
Expanding the postseason to an 11-team format means Atlantic Hockey wrapped up its regular season this week to move into a four-weekend postseason across the entire month of March. Almost every spot remained up for grabs through at least Friday, and even Saturday began with eight of the 11 seeds undecided when nearly everyone stepped on the ice.
Some of the drama was vacuumed out of the day when AIC dispatched Army to clinch a first-round bye, but the logjam involving Bentley, Niagara and Air Force failed to produce which teams were going to which location until the night ended with the Massachusetts-based Falcons clinching a come-from-behind shootout win over Sacred Heart. Having earlier trailed by two after the Pioneers scored two goals, a Robert Morris goal in Colorado kept the western Falcons in flux while the Purple Eagles scrounged for a shot at fifth place.
The end result sent AIC to Air Force after the Falcons rallied past the Colonials, and Bentley’s shootout win sent Robert Morris to the Boston area next week for the single-elimination game while Army, which placed 10th, heads to Niagara Falls. By also coming back, Sacred Heart was denied a shot at second place, which in the on-campus format means that Holy Cross is the next-highest team if RIT falls in the quarterfinals.
6) They DO play hockey out west, ya know
And they’re pretty good at it.
The Pairwise Rankings will show that Colorado College is on the verge of missing the national tournament after gaining a single tie from its two-game series at Omaha, but it’s hard to avoid the conversation about the Tigers’ chances when St. Cloud, a team arguably behind them in the national poll, remains ahead in the Pairwise. Sandwiched between the two is Western Michigan, which split with the Huskies and established a logjam around the drop from a No. 3 seed to the Broncos’ current holding in the No. 4 spot.
All conversation surrounding the No. 4 seeds will inevitably involve UMass because of the Minutemen’s host site status, but seeing two NCHC teams and an elevated performance out of Michigan, the No. 14 team in the Pairwise, means there’s plenty of stiff competition for spots in both Sioux Falls and St. Louis. The games between St. Cloud and Western, in particular, showcased some of the best in the West after the Broncos rallied from two separate two-goal deficits to tie the game in the third period before winning in overtime on Friday, to which the Huskies responded on Saturday with a 3-0 shutout.
7) The cream of the crop
The pressure of watching those teams battle for seeding isn’t lost on anyone with a pulse on college hockey because, frankly, there are some really good hockey teams scrapping for even a slot in the national tournament. North Dakota was No. 4 in last week’s voted-on poll, but the Fighting Hawks overcame Minnesota Duluth for two wins at home to remain third in the Pairwise Rankings.
Denver, meanwhile, blew past Miami on Saturday after misfiring a 3-3 tie on Friday. The Pioneers still gained five-of-six points by winning the shootout, but the two-goal rally by the Redhawks left the 2022 national champions in sixth place after Michigan State’s split with Ohio State. The razor-thin margin between the teams further included Wisconsin, to which less than two one-thousands of an RPI point separated third from sixth. Of the four teams, two are likely going to travel as No. 2 seeds, and with UMass sitting as a possible fourth-seeded wildcard, it likely means one or more of those teams could be moving east to play in Massachusetts.
8) Lost opportunities
None of those teams want to lose points in key late-season matchups, which is why Ohio State’s 6-2, Friday night win at Munn Arena rang so deeply through the Big Ten ranks. The Buckeyes that were once winless in conference play picked up their third straight win by winning their first conference game on the road, and after ending a seven-game losing streak by sweeping Wisconsin last weekend, Bucky won its first road game since a 4-2 victory over Bowling Green on January 6.
More importantly, the streak – though broken by Michigan State’s win on Saturday – had the unintended effect of seeing the Big Ten race tighten at both ends of its standings. Removing three possible points from Michigan State brought Wisconsin within a regulation win of moving ahead of the Spartans with the season finale this weekend, while the last two games of Ohio State’s season represent a way to pull ahead of Penn State with the Nittany Lions coming to Columbus this weekend.
The battle for third place remains wide open between Minnesota, Michigan, and, to a lesser extent, Notre Dame, so the possibility for a chaotic finish is creaking at an open door as the season draws to its final games.
9) Rut roh
Michigan State’s slip-up could ultimately cost the Spartans a shot at the Big Ten’s bye spot or a No. 1 seed in the national tournament, but another misstep, this time by Cornell in the ECAC, significantly damaged the Big Red’s chances at playing in the NCAA Tournament altogether.
The conference standings will show that the Big Red gained three points and all but assured themselves of the No. 2 seed in the ECAC postseason, but losing to Clarkson in overtime moved Cornell down the Pairwise after it sat in the precarious No. 13 spot when the weekend began. A tie against St. Lawrence further damaged those odds as the tradewinds swirled, and while they gained the extra point with the shootout win, the Big Red are now in 16th spot, which ultimately means they might have to win their way into the NCAA Tournament by claiming the Whitelaw Cup.
10) Who’s in? Who’s out?
Jimmy Connelly will have an updated Bracketology this week, but the regular season’s final stretch makes it worthwhile to check in on the different conferences and where their respective teams sit in the race for clinching NCAA Tournament berths. This is a conversation that’s really picked up steam, so we’ll more or less look at some key players who are floating around some key areas.
Cornell’s drop came as Colorado College fell into a statistical tie with the Big Red, but moving both to No. 15 and splitting it between No. 15 or No. 16 moves both away from the national tournament with the Atlantic Hockey and CCHA champions each coming from outside the top rankings. The highest ranked AHA team is RIT at No. 22, while the CCHA-leading Minnesota State Mavericks are in the No. 30 spot.
The Mavericks still don’t lead the CCHA standings, but first place Bemidji State is No. 35.
Aside from those teams, Hockey East’s continued stranglehold gives the conference two of the top-four seeds with BC at No. 1 and BU at No. 2. Further back, Maine’s recent slip and a loss to Northeastern on Saturday means the Black Bears, a one-time No. 1 seed, is on the cusp of falling into the No. 3 block as the ninth-place Pairwise team. Providence and UMass were once afterthoughts to the powerhouse in Northern New England, but each are now breathing down the Black Bears’ neck in the conference standings with the Friars additionally sitting in 10th.
Sitting outside the Pairwise Rankings, New Hampshire has a golden opportunity to jump into the top-14 if it produces a good result against Boston College this weekend, and Omaha’s recent three-game unbeaten streak gives the Mavericks an opportunity with a series against North Dakota looming in two weeks – provided they don’t slip against Miami this weekend.
