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: Well, Paula, we’ve finally made it to the last weekend of the postseason!
For all of the projecting and preseason banter, the excitement surrounding the weekly grind or first weekend of the regular season, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – that tops watching teams hoist a trophy. I’d argue that the conference tournament is even better than the national tournament because of the familiarity between the teams…a thought that I think you first pitched to me earlier this year.
I want to roll back a bit about what I’ve seen in the eastern leagues because the biggest news of the weekend came from Hockey East and Northeastern’s upset over Boston College. The Eagles are still the No. 1 team in the Pairwise Rankings and won’t land anywhere outside of Manchester, but losing to the Huskies added the type of drama associated with single-elimination games. That the best team in the country doesn’t make TD Garden’s semifinal or championship is exactly what the playoffs are all about, and there’s A LOT to unpack about how that happened.
Joining Northeastern are three teams each angling to end some droughts. Maine, for example, hasn’t won a Hockey East championship since Ben Murphy’s triple-overtime goal in 2004, and UMass, the most recent champion, last won it in 2022 to win consecutive championships. Northeastern won the regular-season championship that year but failed to advance to the Garden, keeping the Huskies shortened drought at 2019.
The Minutemen might still have damp grounds from that electric run during the early part of the decade, but my dark horse – Connecticut – is still alive. The 2000 MAAC champions might hang their first Hockey East banner in Boston, which would be sweet revenge for Nutmeggers who harbor a little bit of revenge in their hearts for its ACC neighbor market to the northeast.
Before I get rolling too deep, let’s shift it westward because Hockey East isn’t the only upset-addled league. After a hot streak took the No. 30 Penn State team to No. 12, the Nittany Lions lost in the semifinals of the Big Ten tournament. They’re back to the bubble, now, and I can’t get over how quickly fortunes changed after they plowed through the conference’s second half.
Paula: Penn State’s extraordinary second half is evidence of two things: first is what can happen when all the pieces come together at the right time for a team, and second is how winning builds confidence.
You know, I almost always come back to something that Minnesota coach Bob Motzko has said when I’m looking for perspective, and early in the season he said that while teams can learn from losing, they can also learn from winning. That’s what Penn State did in the second half.
Things began to look up for Penn State when goaltender Arsenii Sergeev returned to action Jan. 3, when the Nittany Lions tied Notre Dame in the Frozen Confines game. Then Penn State won its first Big Ten game of the season against the Fighting Irish two nights later in South Bend. Counting last weekend’s semifinal loss to Ohio State, the Nittany Lions lost just four games in the second half, a run coupled with the strength of the Big Ten that put them in NCAA tournament contention.
It’s a great story, but it shouldn’t overshadow what Ohio State has accomplished this season. The Buckeyes have had some bumps along the way, but they are one of nine teams with 24 or more wins this season, which takes the kind of tenacity and confidence that Ohio State showed in that overtime win against Penn State.
I love Penn State’s story this year, but Ohio State is still standing. The Buckeyes are the only team in the Big Ten that hasn’t captured a playoff championship, and doing so against the defending champs in East Lansing is a daunting task. In fact, Ohio State has two conference titles to its credit. Two. Ever. They won the inaugural CCHA conference championship in 1972 and won again in 2004.
You mention one and done, Dan. The difference between Notre Dame – the last-place team in the Big Ten – and Michigan State in semifinal play last weekend was one goal. Anything can happen.
And, yes, that’s what makes this time of year so exciting. Conference championships are the best thing about college hockey, and that is the proverbial hill upon which I will die.
Switching gears to the NCAA tourney and the PairWise, both Penn State and Michigan sit on that very uncomfortable PWR bubble at 13th and 14th respectively, so each is pulling for favorites this weekend.
I love upsets, though. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Based on what we saw in semifinals last week, do you see upsets that may burst some bubbles – PairWise or otherwise – this weekend?
Dan: The only team that’s likely still fighting the tide is Quinnipiac, which moved to No. 12 with its two-game sweep over Brown. Most scenarios have the Bobcats finishing on the inside of the bubble, but a semifinal loss to Cornell would still hurt bad enough to drop them under the project cut line, which sits anywhere from No. 13 to No. 14.
Penn State obviously stands to gain the most from a Quinnipiac loss because the Nittany Lions won’t lose by not playing, but dropping Quinnipiac as low as No. 14 would open the door for an elimination scenario if the wrong team wins one of the other leagues. That said, it would still take an entirely direct scenario – a good chunk of which still exists – and a large number of those scenarios are buried with a win over Cornell. None of those situations, though, include a second bid for ECAC.
Aside from all of that, Michigan’s loss in the first round of the Big Ten postseason is becoming increasingly more disastrous.
Of this weekend’s games, I know I’m going to be fixated on one in particular – back to that in a bit – but I’ll keep a side-eye on the Minnesota State-St. Thomas game. Jim Connelly took the Tommies as his dark horse in the CCHA tournament, and playing Minnesota State looks a bit like their national championship game because the draconian rules governing the reclassification process will prevent them from advancing to the NCAA tournament. I’m not saying Minnesota State won’t have something to play for (there I go with a double negative again), but the Mavericks are in the tournament with a loss.
Let’s play a hypothetical and let the Tommies win. How would you have extrapolated their chances into the NCAA Tournament since they unquestionably would’ve been the No. 16 seed? Are we missing a chance to watch the underdog make some noise?
Paula: To be honest, the CCHA is somewhat of a mystery to me this season. That no one in that conference has been strong enough to crack the PWR for most of this season is baffling. I know you and I have talked quite a bit about strength of schedule and how that impacts both the CCHA and Atlantic Hockey, but seeing programs like Bowling Green, Lake Superior, Michigan Tech, and Northern Michigan make absolutely no national noise this season has been as baffling as it is disheartening.
Even Minnesota State’s excellent season hasn’t been enough to place them firmly in the PairWise rankings. They had early wins over Michigan and North Dakota and an early sweep of Omaha. They have 18 conference wins and now 26 overall wins.
And yet the Mavericks sit at No. 16 in the PWR. It’s wild.
The Tommies topped the preseason CCHA poll, but that speculation was fairly divided. St. Thomas earned three first-place votes as did Bemidji State, with Michigan Tech getting two and Minnesota State picking up one. I’m not sure I would have had the Tommies contending for the title, but I’m not sure I would have had the Mavericks there, either. But it’s not like I wouldn’t have, either. Like I said, the CCHA makes no sense to me this season.
Another conference that has confused me is the ECAC. You mentioned Quinnipiac – another team that had to work hard to play its way into NCAA tournament territory – but I’d like to know how Quinnipiac is the only ECAC team among the PWR top 15.
Part of what’s happening with the CCHA can be explained by the fallout of the creation of the Big Ten, but ECAC? What happened?
Dan: I wish I had a magic wand to explain what happened to the league that I’m covering on a more regular basis for these pages.
I’m going to fire up a Delorean and hit the accelerator pedal to 88 mph with the intention of going back to 2023. Harry Styles had just won the Grammy for album of the year while Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” claimed Record of the Year honors (remember when literally everyone was doing a TikTok dance to that? Or is that just my….wife…yeah…definitely my wife…)
ECAC had four bids to the 2023 national tournament. Quinnipiac was about to win the national championship as the No. 2 seed with the best record in the country ahead of the tournament, and Cornell was a four seed capable of beating Denver in the first round. Colgate won the conference championship in a stroke of goodwill to Don Vaughan. Things were awesome.
Then things fell apart. Quinnipiac’s success is sustainable as a national powerhouse, but the rest of the league sagged. The bottom four consistently weighted the Pairwise values against ECAC, and Quinnipiac finally took its “downturn,” which really meant it didn’t have 30 wins to anchor a top seed in the tournament.
Why things fell apart is a combination of factors that are being addressed in smaller doses. The transfer portal era really ravaged a couple of teams, and I think the post-COVID struggles finally caught up to Harvard. Cornell wasn’t healthy this year. Dartmouth got better, but the bottom of the conference just weren’t good enough to prevent things from falling. Combined with the overall power of Hockey East, that was a tough ask.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the league’s ability to return to form over the next few years. Ted Donato is a master recruiter at Harvard, and Union is opening up a new building to replace Messa Rink. Cornell will transition to Casey Jones, who was an outstanding coach at Clarkson, and JF Houle’s continued transition should keep Clarkson in the conversation. Combined with Quinnipiac, those have been the biggest surges within the league lately (don’t forget that there was a time when Union was the No. 1 seed). I don’t know if four or five seeds are in the works, but the league should jump back to the two-bid or three-bid conversation sooner rather than later.
Of course, it’s dependent on the power leagues giving up some of their ground, and Hockey East isn’t going to be doing that any time soon. Neither is the NCHC, which looks downright scary. Western Michigan built something special, and it looks like North Dakota is on the run towards a tournament berth. Arizona State is a great addition. CC is right in there. St. Cloud, Duluth, hoo boy that’s a good league, isn’t it?
Paula: Honestly, I think Western Michigan has been the under-the-radar team all season – not within the NCHC, obviously, but to the rest of the college hockey world hyper-focused on Hockey East and the Big Ten.
In fairness to everyone talking about B1G and HEA all season, those two conferences have been deeper than deep and likely in ways that aren’t sustainable for many years. We know how things cycle in college hockey, especially because of how small the field is for the entirety of Division I men’s play, and you just mentioned how recently ECAC hockey was measurably better.
Compared to a few years ago, the NCHC isn’t nearly as dominant as it was overall, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t see the conference produce a national champion this year.
Boston College and Michigan State each have .771 overall win percentages. Western Michigan’s is an insane .792, and the Broncos have the nation’s current top offense (4.06), sixth-best defense (2.06), eighth-best power play (25.5%) and fourth-best penalty kill (87.1%). That quadruple threat – being among the top 10 nationally in all four of those categories – is matched by only one other team currently among the 16 teams in the PairWise, Quinnipiac.
With the possibility of playing either Hampton Slukynsky or Cameron Rowe in net – both of whom were named to all-NCHC teams this week – and a slew of players that can find the net, the Broncos are going to be one of the hardest teams to beat in the NCAA tournament. Given Boston College’s loss this past weekend, I’m surprised that Western Michigan garnered only five first-place votes in this week’s poll.
The NCHC tournament this weekend is the hottest ticket in men’s college hockey. Western Michigan and Denver are already in the NCAA tourney, so they can afford to be dialed in on the immediate prize of the conference championship. Denver plays Arizona State, and at No. 15 in the PWR, the Sun Devils define what it means to be a bubble team at this time of year.
But Western Michigan will face the neediest team in the field, North Dakota, who currently sits at No. 17 in the PWR. To get the chance to play for a conference title, the Fighting Hawks swept Omaha in quarterfinal play after splitting with the Mavericks the final weekend of regular-season play. In mid-February, the Fighting Hawks split a series with Denver and two weeks ago split with Western, and this was after the Pioneers and Broncos each swept North Dakota earlier in the season.
Yes, Dan, the NCHC is a good conference. A very good conference. They’re not as deep this season as the Big Ten and Hockey East are, but it’s easy to imagine two NCHC teams in St. Louis next month – even if the conference advances only two teams to the NCAA tournament.
The one-and-done format from here on out makes everything so much more exciting, and there really is nothing like a conference championship. It seems like a million years ago now, but soon after I began covering the CCHA – some time back in the late 1990s – Bob Daniels told me that the first goal his team set every year was the league title. Now that Daniels has coached his last game at Ferris State, I wish I still had the direct quote. It came in a week late in the season, when coaches of other CCHA teams were pressing me about their chances to make the national tournament. They wanted scenarios, possibilities, probabilities. All of this was before the PairWise was a public thing, when there was still some mystery about it all.
Having picked up on what other coaches were thinking, I asked Daniels about looking past conference play to national play. He was so earnest when he explained why a conference title was a thing never to be devalued at a time when so many people were focusing on bigger crowns.
At another point, Daniels reminded me of something that has never not been true: it’s really hard to end another team’s season. When surviving to play another game is the only option, teams play with a ferocity that they may not have had mere games and weeks before.
Two weeks ago, when Notre Dame took Minnesota out of the Big Ten playoffs by taking that best-of-three series on the road, I am ashamed that I was as surprised as I was. The Fighting Irish were playing for more than mere survival. They wanted to give Jeff Jackson a remarkable sendoff, and they came really close to doing just that against Michigan State last weekend.
Here’s to conference championship weekend. Like everyone, I’m looking forward to seeing who emerges to play another game – and when champions are crowned, I’ll spare a thought for the guys at the other end, especially the ones who will have donned that uniform for the last time, ever.
