Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) No. 1 finally be-Devil’d
It finally happened.
For two months, defending national champion Denver sat atop the USCHO.com rankings without anything more than a token challenge from any would-be challenger. The undefeated and undisputed top team in the land would eventually lose a game – there hasn’t been an undefeated national champion since Ned Harkness’s 1970 Cornell team, at least – but smart selectors and analysts refused to think anyone would beat the Pioneers.
Arizona State certainly didn’t fit the playbill for would-be upset bids, but the 4-7-1 Sun Devils went into the altitude and defeated Denver in front of 6,000 fans at Magness Arena with a dramatic 3-2 victory that featured the game-winning goal in the last 45 seconds. One night later, Sparky rallied from a 1-0 deficit at the end of the first period to score three straight goals in the second frame and win, 5-2, after adding an empty netter in the last two minutes.
It doesn’t mean the No. 1 team is going to drop a spot anytime soon, but losing two games in conference play had its fallout after Omaha, Western Michigan, Colorado College and St. Cloud all gained points and space on the Pioneers. In one of the weirdest stats of the year, a 12-2 team likely to maintain its No. 1 standing is now tied for sixth place in a nine-team league while a three-win team is three points ahead of it in the standings.
2) Beanpot champs reclaim pride
Boston College appeared likely to replace Denver when it swept Maine and edged into the Pioneers’ first place votes in a poll that occurred two weeks ago, but the Eagles’ loss to Connecticut changed the complexion ahead of their weekend home-and-home series with Northeastern. Always a tough out among Beanpot teams, the defending city champions lost by a commanding 3-0 margin in Friday night’s game at Conte Forum before ricocheting a 4-2 victory off of Matthews Arena’s fabled walls.
BC had been prone to slow starts earlier in the year, but not even third period heroics from Ryan Leonard were enough to draw the Eagles back within the Huskies’ two-goal lead, and the 3-1 advantage from the first period stood up when Dylan Hryckowian added a late empty net goal. It was his second goal of the game, and a separate assist on Jackson Dorrington’s first goal in a Northeastern uniform allowed the team to win just its second game of the season while BC slipped to 9-3.
3) Bentley “Has” a bit of history
Bentley goaltender Connor Hasley made history this week when he broke his program’s career shutout record in the dueling clean sheets against Air Force. Already tied for second in shutouts after blanking American International in last Saturday’s game, he moved into a tie for first with a 2-0 win on Friday before breaking the 20-year record set by early Division I backstop Simon St. Pierre.
He didn’t play on Friday, but the 180 consecutive minutes puts Hasley in line to pass numbers posted by Maine’s Jimmy Howard and Notre Dame’s David Brown at the start of the century and within range of Shane Madolora’s most recent stretch of 200 straight minutes in Atlantic Hockey America’s history book. Among active goalies, the seven career shutouts now in Hasley’s back pocket ties him with Dominic Basse and Cameron Rowe, but it’s worth noting that aside from Cornell’s Ian Shane – the active career leader with 11 shutouts – none of the top five goalies other than Hasley started at their current locales. Wisconsin’s Tommy Scarfone, North Dakota’s TJ Semptimphelter, Basse and Rowe all transferred at least once, and both Mathieu Caron and Beni Halasz – the players right behind the Hasley encampment – started their careers at schools other than their current programs. Providence’s Philip Svedeback, meanwhile, started with the Friars and has five shutouts.
Dating back to Friday’s win over AIC, Bentley enters its Thanksgiving weekend road game at Northeastern with 195 shutout minutes, but it more specifically puts Hasley and a streak that began with Max Beckford on watch for a fourth straight shutout, a mark that hasn’t been reached since Blaine Lacher recorded 375 straight shutout minutes during a five-game stretch in 1994 – which itself shattered a 40-year record set by North Dakota’s Spike Schultz.
4) The Bees are back
The story encompassing American International was shocking, sad and any other number of antonyms for a happy ending, but how the Yellow Jackets responded, even in defeat after dropping three straight games after the university announced it would move the program away from Division I status, exuded class and chemistry in the wake of unimaginable on-ice hardships. Just 10 days after the announcement, AIC stepped on the ice at the MassMutual Center and defeated Niagara with a resounding 5-2 decision.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the team doesn’t wrestle with the issue on a nightly basis, but the Yellow Jackets built a lead against the Purple Eagles when former Niagara defenseman David Posma scored his first goal of the season in the first period. Josh Barnes and Noah Serdachny added two more in the second period before Brett Bamber and Timofei Khokhlachev negated Niagara’s two goals in a 5-2 win.
5) Michigan scored in the time it took to write this
It wasn’t that Penn State played poorly in its two-game series against the big, bad victors of the West, but it’s hard to find a team that played better over the weekend than a Michigan team with 16 goals to its docket.
Forget about the 6-5 win on Friday for a second. Michigan actually trailed Penn State on Saturday after the Nittany Lions scored twice in the first 65 seconds of the first period. The Wolverines then surrendered a third goal with eight minutes left before gaining one back, but they entered the last three minutes of the first period with a 4-1 deficit after Aiden Fink added an even strength goal.
The next four goals went to the Maize and Blue, and after JJ Wiebusch offered a tying goal with under four minutes remaining in the second, another two goals and three power play hits down the stretch finished the 10-6 explosion featuring a Texas-sized hat trick for TJ Hughes.
Hughes actually scored a hat trick just on the power play, but going 6-for-9 as a team in a game where there wasn’t a major penalty until the latter half of the third period highlighted the inherent power of the Michigan team. Over two nights, it went into Hockey Valley and decimated Penn State’s defense to improve to 9-2-1 with a perfect 4-0 record in Big Ten play.
6) Bemidji builds dam around CCHA
From offensive explosions to the damming of CCHA waters in northern Minnesota, where Bemidji State and St. Thomas combined for the same amount of goals as Michigan or Penn State likely could have scored on any single night. Five points went to the Beavers after a shootout win on Friday begat a 2-1 win over the Tommies on Saturday.
The teams combined for just eight penalties over the course of the weekend, but it was still enough for Eric Martin to hit a game-tying, 5-on-3 goal in the second game of the weekend before Reilly Funk scored the game-winner in the come-from-behind victory. It amounted to a second straight head-to-head type of game between the teams after St. Thomas relieved two separate one-goal deficits on Friday but lost the second point to the narrow margin of a Jere Vaisanen shootout goal.
7) Oh my, Omaha
The Omaha Mavericks entered this past weekend with a six-game losing streak still hanging freshly over last weekend’s split against Arizona State. They hadn’t won at home at all, and nearly every series featured a one-goal or two-goal loss to the degree that the record would never accurately reflect the team’s overall effort in those close games.
Then came the Miami series and an 11-1 aggregate breakout that included the Mavs’ first shutout since last season’s February series against Colorado College. They added a 6-0 lead in the second period of Saturday’s game before leaving the frame with a 7-1 lead on Jimmy Glynn’s last second goal, and an eighth goal halfway through the third period came moments before a dozen different players absorbed misconduct penalties for a wild period featuring a whopping 11 unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.
8) Border War to Black Bears
Maine and New Hampshire are known as the friendly northern New England outposts until they battle one another in the colloquial Border War that still ranks as one of college hockey’s angriest and most fervent rivalries. On Friday night, one week after the reeling Black Bears revived their season with four points against Boston University, New Hampshire hosted the first iteration of the rivalry with a 3-1 Maine victory that saw Lynden Breen and Owen Fowler rally Orono from a 1-0 deficit in the second period.
An empty net goal aside, this amounted to a one-goal game with superb play on both ends, and both goalies combined for 55 saves after Albin Boija outdueled Jared Whale. Perhaps most important, though, were the three points staking Maine into first place while New Hampshire sagged into 11th with games in hand still to count against everyone.
9) #BerardForSpencerPenrose
The best team nobody’s talking about remains a Stonehill squad that’s pleasantly surprising the field of Division I Independents. The Skyhawks aren’t turning heads in the Pairwise Rankings and won’t challenge for a national tournament spot unless societal order completely breaks down over the next few months, but their 3-1 win over Lindenwood elevated their record to 5-11.
This team’s been very good at times, and its victory in St. Louis illustrated how it’s capable of beating anyone on any given day. The 4-3 overtime win over Merrimack earlier this month, for example, was the second win over the Warriors and followed a 4-0 blanking of St. Lawrence. Winning three games in November is more than even the two overall wins from last season, and the team’s three road wins are the first Division I wins aways from its municipal home rink in Bridgewater, Mass.
All of these numbers are worth a strong look at head coach David Berard because his construction project at the university is inciting a significant change in a program essentially forced into Division I status. This weekend’s home game against Army is scheduled for Warrior Ice Arena in Boston – the practice home for the NHL’s Boston Bruins – and just six of its eight remaining home games at the Bridgewater Ice Arena are against Division I opponents. Circle a two-game set at Maine and a January 6 game at Quinnipiac with a January 18 date at UMass-Lowell for potential pratfalls for teams that aren’t careful of a squad that earlier dragged Dartmouth to just one even-strength goal.
10) Give thanks for Pairwise
Unpopular opinion says to avoid checking the Pairwise Rankings until the midseason point, but late November seems like a good check-in spot for teams currently jockeying for national seeding. Points now are worth the same as points later in the season, so it’s important to remember that these games matter even if it doesn’t make sense to people to overly care about a result around Thanksgiving time.
Boston College and Michigan State remain the leaders in the clubhouse for No. 1 seeds, and No. 4 Maine is an easy choice for the last remaining top seed in the nation. But it’s maybe Dartmouth that remains a complete shock at the No. 3 spot with its 5-0-1 record while Western Michigan and Michigan State sit just behind the teams with a combined 17-3-2 record. Even Minnesota and Denver, two teams with 12-2 record, currently can’t touch the undefeated Big Green.
Cornell is the team currently situated directly on the bubble with its 4-2-2 status, and Connecticut, Arizona State, Quinnipiac and North Dakota are staring at the Pairwise’s lower limits. The last team in, Bentley, is the top-seeded Atlantic Hockey America program, which would make a potential Bentley-BC game fun for a writer and broadcaster who has worked for both teams (cough cough not sure who that would be cough cough).
We obviously all expect the standings to change before the season ends, but pleasant surprises like UMass-Lowell and Minnesota State enter semester break with a chance to control their own destiny while other teams like Colgate – currently tied for first place on ECAC points with Dartmouth, though the Big Green have a better percentage point – are outside with quick opportunities remaining to make up ground.
