Arlan: It’s been about a month since you and I last chatted, and obviously, there have been some changes to the puzzle, although not so much at the top. It still looks like Wisconsin followed closely by Ohio State, and then a bit of a gap to the rest of the pack. Just how that pack is ordered, or if it even is a pack instead of a sequence of ones and twos with some separation, changes from week to week.
For the Ivy League, which was just getting underway when we last spoke, the variance has seemed to be greater than normal. That makes sense. Consider Cornell.
The Big Red were the top-seeded team heading into the NCAA Tournament that never was in 2020, but that was a senior-heavy team, especially in terms of impact players. This year, of the seven players who have more than two points through the team’s first 10 games, only senior Gillis Frechette and junior Izzy Daniel belong to the upper classes. The three defenders who have registered at least a point are in their first or second year. To be successful, Cornell will need senior goaltender Lindsay Browning to be on top of her game, as she was in a 37-save, 2-0 shutout over Princeton on Saturday, by far the team’s most impressive result to date. Earlier, the Big Red allowed 15 goals as they dropped their first three ECAC contests to Harvard, Dartmouth, and Yale, and Cornell needed a late extra-attacker goal from Claudia Yu to salvage a 3-3 tie with Brown on home ice.
The Bears don’t figure to be in the playoff hunt; their only other positive result in their eight league games to date was a 1-0 win over Dartmouth. From the Big Green’s perspective, the loss to Brown was discouraging as it figured to be a winnable game mixed into a rugged early schedule in Liz Keady Norton’s first season in charge. From a glass-half-full perspective, Dartmouth did manage to defeat St. Lawrence in addition to Cornell. It sits at 2-5-0 with opportunities to add more points versus Rensselaer and Union, two more teams that would be on the outside looking in if the playoffs started tomorrow, during the first weekend of December.
Harvard is above .500 and tied for fifth with 14.5 league points. While solid, that league record is nearly considerably better, as the Crimson fell in overtime to both Colgate and Clarkson. The best of the Ivies through the early going are Yale and Princeton, who are tied for second place with 16.5 points after eight games.
The Bulldogs’ ledger looks more impressive, as Yale has scored three times as many goals as it has allowed. However, that is deceptive, due to a 15-0 scoring advantage in a couple of non-league games versus NEWHA opponents.
The Tigers, whose first foray outside of the ECAC comes this weekend when they clash twice with Northeastern, enjoy only a 16-11 composite scoring advantage. Nearly half of Princeton’s goals have come off of the stick of Maggie Connors in Sarah Fillier’s absence.
What have you gleaned from the Ivy League teams thus far?
Nicole: I’m still unsure of what to expect long term from Harvard. I have been high on them in recent years based on their roster and some early results, only to watch them finish in the middle of the pack. I think that’s what’s holding me back from being more excited about them at this point. I’d just like to see sustained winning over beatable opponents before I find the bandwagon, I think. When I saw them two years ago at the first Nashville Thanksgiving tournament, I thought they looked better than their final scores would have implied. They have so many great pieces and somehow they don’t seem to add up to become greater than the sum of their parts. They seem closer/better at it this season, but since they’ve only been playing about a month, I’m still unsure what to believe.
Yale has been fun to watch. We saw immediate improvement from them when Mark Bolding took over the program in 2019 and they seem to be taking another big step this season. The Bulldogs had just two winning seasons in program history before he took over and went 17-15 in his first as head coach. They achieved top-10 rankings for the first time ever this year and look poised to earn the program’s first-ever NCAA bid.
When I spoke to Bolding around this time of the year in 2019, he talked a lot about giving the players more ownership and how he didn’t want to show up and impose his philosophy on players he hadn’t coached or recruited. I think that light touch and being conscious of the turmoil that created likely helped the team through the upheaval of Covid and left them in a good spot mentally to take the ice this season.
I love seeing the immediate improvement at Dartmouth. So many people have had overwhelmingly good things to say about Liz Keady Norton and how it was about time she got the chance to lead a squad and I think we’ve seen her immediate impact. I hope we continue to see this program grow and improve.
Those are the Ivies on their own, but what are your feelings on how these schools match up in the ECAC, since that’s the league who’s standings and tournament will determine a lot of what happens in March.
Arlan: I’m not sure if it is a surprise that the team leading the ECAC with a 7-1 mark is Quinnipiac. The Bobcats’ only loss is a 1-0 decision to Princeton in the back half of a home-and-home series, but they had some narrow escapes leading up to it. The only other blemishes are back-to-back ties with Providence, but Quinnipiac also squeaked by Maine, Saint Anselm, Union and RPI by a single tally. The Bobcats only allow about a goal per game, so it looks like they’re well-positioned to contend to the finish, even though they may not always impress.
I’m not able to predict with any confidence who will finish highest among the other ECAC teams outside the Ivy League. The battle should be confined to Colgate and Clarkson, but each has had results that cause concern. The Raiders started fast, winning their first eight games out of conference, but their 5-2-1 league mark includes three overtime games and one-sided losses to both Yale and Quinnipiac.
Meanwhile, Clarkson only has one league loss to Yale, but some of its other results, like a winless trip to Bemidji, are less than inspiring. The standings jousting between those two will likely be won by the team that stays healthier and gets better goaltending.
St. Lawrence should be able to do enough to reach the playoffs, but its league wins are over RPI, Union, and Brown. The one encouraging sign that the Saints may be able to continue to earn points from higher-ranked teams is a 4-4 draw ith Yale.
Rensselaer should at least have a fighting chance of getting into the playoff picture. For Union, it figures to suffer the all-too-familiar fate of seeing its hockey end with the regular season.
Has the ECAC as a whole surprised you in any way? Or do you think that the order of the final standings will look nothing like the current positioning? If nothing else, there should be a team for everyone, as six of the league’s teams are ranked in this week’s USCHO Poll.
Nicole: The ECAC surprises me every week!
Thanks to Kirsten Whalen, my coworker at Victory Press, I’ve had my eye on Quinnipiac for a little while as she let me know the young Canadian talent they were bringing in were game-changers. I really like how they’ve looked so far, but I think their ceiling is actually much higher. They have a lot of players that aren’t fully at the top of their game yet.
I get so much more out of games watching them in person versus on a stream, so I’m excited I get to see Quinnipiac play in Madison for New Years and really get a better read on the Bobcats there.
As for the rest of the leagues, the unpredictability from week to week has been great from a fan standpoint, but as a journalist makes me feel like I have no idea what I’m talking about as I try to forecast and preview games. I don’t think any games are given outcomes at this point.
In terms of league results, I think Colgate is the most surprising. As you said, they were rolling and scoring pretty much at will. With their roster almost entirely intact from last year, they had the advantage to start the season, but I expected them to be able to keep it up. It’s not that they’ve lost or tied, but how fully they were pulled out of their game in those losses.
As an aside, in the preseason call, the coaches were pretty universally in favor of the conference dropping shootouts after overtime. The conference has also introduced half points. I hate both things and I feel like based on what we’ve seen so far, we’re going to be going deep into tiebreakers to figure out final standings.
I have no idea if other conferences love the shootout or not, but what the shootout does is help separate teams when a number of them are bunched together in the standings – it was a necessary step to try and keep postseason play come down to goals scored or not scored early in the season. Three conference games have ended as ties so far, but it’s something I’d like to remember to check at the end of the season. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it just feels like with all the chaos we’re seeing is going to show in close standings at the end of the regular season.
Regardless of what the answer is, I wish all the conferences were uniform in how they handled overtime. If for no other reason than the Pairwise uses one calculation. The way conference standings shake out could end up being different than rankings because of these discrepancies. It’s one of those things that we’ve needlessly complicated and frankly it makes it harder for fans to understand. Everyone loves to talk about growing the game, but then they make decisions like the use of half points in just one conference.
You picked apart the ways teams have confounded in the ECAC, but for my money, the most head scratching is coming out of Hockey East.
The teams with the biggest wins have some of the most baffling losses.
Arlan: I may have complained about the ECAC being unpredictable, but of course, even the CHA looks downright orderly when compared to the chaos that is Hockey East. Leading the way in the head-scratching results department are the Maine Black Bears.
Through October, I thought I had a handle on Maine. To that point, it had a record of 3-8, and I had this written off as a lost season in Orono. At least half of the setbacks were entirely forgivable: Quinnipiac twice, Northeastern, and Boston College. Many teams are looking at an 0-4 mark in those games. The Black Bears also fell to Saint Anselm and were shut out by Merrimack, and their only wins to that point came over Long Island twice and Holy Cross. Then the calendar flipped over to November, and they seemingly woke up from their early hibernation. Maine posted a regulation win and a shootout win over Connecticut, a convincing 5-1 beatdown of Boston University, and a win over Providence. I get that Maine has one of the best goalies in the league in Loryn Porter, and she likely stole the first victory from UConn, as her team was outshot 29-9 in that one. Next, Maine closes out 2021 with series against Clarkson and BC, and it could win all four games or none of them, and I don’t know that either result would surprise me.
It’s not just the Black Bears. Boston University has won all three games it has played with the trio that made last season’s NCAA Tournament: Northeastern, Providence, and BC. Meanwhile, in addition to the defeat by Maine, it has been stopped by Rensselaer and Holy Cross, and the Terriers were swept by UConn.
How about the UConn Huskies? They lost only once in their first dozen games, that to a Merrimack team that they’d already dropped twice. Now they’ve lost four straight, although admittedly, the difficulty has ramped up and two of the losses were via the dreaded shootout.
No discussion of HEA can be complete without touching on BC. The Eagles started out 6-0, with the first five wins being by a single goal, and the first four by identical 2-1 scores. It was stretching reality to think that trusting defense first was going to be a sustainable model for the gang from Chestnut Hill, especially once the schedule toughened. After allowing only eight goals total during that early winning streak, BC opponents lit the lamp a dozen times in the next three games, and the Terriers converted five times in BC’s most recent skate. The Eagles’ top offensive threats are more in the point-per-game range at this point of their careers, so they’ll have to figure out how to put the goals-against genie back into the bottle.
Bottom line, slow start and all, Northeastern figures to run away with the title, although the Huskies are currently only seventh in the PairWise. Who is the HEA team most likely to find a way to join NU in the national tournament, if the expansion does occur this season?
Nicole: I actually think UConn might have the edge at the moment, though their second half schedule is pretty brutal, including three against BC and closing out the regular season with home and home series against Providence and Northeastern. In a tight race, they might struggle to get points in those final crucial games. If they’re going to be in the conversation, they have to build up a bit of a cushion before they get to those games, I think.
I feel like I could go back and find old WW columns where I lament Boston College’s lack of consistency and how they seem to lack that killer instinct to close out games and claim their spot in the national rankings. The Eagles are as dynamic as they’ve been in a few seasons thanks in large part to Abby Newhook. They have good scorers, but she seems to have that elusive “it.” As a rookie, she is tied for the team lead in points. She has scored the game-winner in four of the team’s eight wins. You don’t want to look away when the puck is on her stick. Presumably she’s only going to get better as she gets more comfortable on the ice. If BC makes the tournament, it will be on her shoulders. There are players who look at a tied game or a game where her team is down late in a game and think “eff it, I’m going to do it myself.” They simply refuse to let their team lose. My early impression is Abby Newhook is that precise kind of player.
I think Providence is the dark horse. With a 4-5-4 record, they aren’t exactly blowing anyone away, but I really like their determination. When highest scorer Maureen Murphy left for Northeastern, it was unclear who would be able to step up and take on a bigger role and score goals. They still don’t have anyone on the roster who’s name casual fans would recognize, but I actually think it’s pretty cool that the answer to, “who’s going to pick up the slack” has been “Everybody.”
They feel like a team you can never count out or look past and like they’re capable of causing problems for whoever they’re playing. It helps that they have Sandra Arbstreiter in net, but I think there’s just a team ethos here that helps them believe in what they can do. They’re getting contributions through multiple lines and feel about as close to steady as any Hockey East team does this season.
Another group that’s struggled with consistency skate in the CHA. Are you feeling like you understand the way that conference is going to shake out?
Arlan: After some of the other leagues, the CHA is starting to look very straightforward to me, especially RIT. Despite losing its first 16 games, RIT did manage to secure a conference point in an overtime loss at Syracuse. My complaint with the Tigers starts with their schedule. The braintrust must have suspected that RIT was going to struggle this year, as it had only one game where it scored multiple goals in last year’s abbreviated campaign, and the team that yielded that three-goal explosion is no longer in existence. Why isn’t this team playing a series with either Post or St. Michaels, just to provide a feel-good moment, instead of spending a weekend in Minneapolis facing a 131-shot barrage or yielding 20 goals in the Colgate series? I had a ton of respect for Celeste Brown as a player, but as a coach, you can’t let your team suffer nonstop abuse. I will give props to junior goaltender Taylor Liotta, who played very well versus the Gophers and kept that from becoming a debacle.
Elsewhere in the circuit, Lindenwood has played more games with the WCHA (six) than the CHA (four), and three of its next four series are against the western league. Thanks in part to that schedule, the Lions are yielding an average of 5.4 goals per game, and never less than three.
That leaves the remaining trio of Penn State, Syracuse, and Mercyhurst to compete for the crown. These teams figure to beat up on each other but enjoy enough success versus Lindenwood and RIT to finish with winning records.
The Nittany Lions haven’t had as easy a time of things as they did last season. Their record is buoyed by sweeps of Lindenwood and Holy Cross, and a series win over Brown, but the rest of the slate has been a slog. PSU did manage to take points on the road at both Mercyhurst and Syracuse, so the schedule shapes up well in the second half.
The Orange can be thankful that they don’t play in the CHA. They were able to dispatch Union, but went 0-5-2 against a combination of RPI, St. Lawrence, Clarkson, and Colgate, and their trip to Cornell was wiped out due to “police activity.” As if Covid wasn’t enough.
It looks like it might be Mercyhurst’s year again. The Lakers boast an impressive 11-4-2 overall mark, but they’ve played over half of their games that look destined for the bottom third of the rankings. That, and an offense with a return to a higher number of producers, has helped Mercyhurst score three goals for every two that it allows.
In the NEWHA, LIU looks positioned to back up its tourney title of two years ago with one in the regular season this time. So far it is winless against teams from the other conferences, but do you think that having the confidence to schedule these games sends a positive message to the team?
Nicole: I think it says a lot about coach Rob Morgan and his plans for the future, as well as his confidence in his players to be able to handle these situations and not get discouraged. From the get-go Morgan hasn’t treated this like a new program. They haven’t eased themselves in. They have been strong and confident and really took the idea of “act like you’ve been there before” to heart. The Sharks immediately played like an experienced team and were never bogged down in the semantics of being a new program and what they should or shouldn’t do.
I really appreciate this approach. I think it’s clear that Morgan isn’t content with his team being the best team in the conference and has been thinking bigger than that from before his team first took the ice. Scheduling these games will only help them grow themselves, but also is a great way for the players to see the teams they are aspiring to be similar to. I remember former Robert Morris coach Paul Colontino saying something similar when his team played at Wisconsin in the NCAA Quarterfinals. He didn’t want to talk about the game and loss, he was focused on what his team could take away from the experience. The rink, the atmosphere, the demeanor – those are the things he wanted this team to see and aspire to.
It sure seems like Morgan has a similar view. The only risk in it is if the players take the losses hard. But if they can compartmentalize and see the bigger picture on what those games can accomplish and mean long term, I think they’re a great idea in moderation.
For me, this is very different from what is happening with RIT. Obviously neither coach knew exactly how their team would be this season when they started scheduling things years ago, and I’d assume a lot of these games were on the schedule before Celeste Brown took over as Head Coach. The difference is LIU is getting other wins. These losses aren’t demoralizing because they’re games they “should” lose at this point and there are clear goals and objectives for playing these games. With RIT, they just spent a ton of money, not to mention time, to fly out to Minneaota for that series.
It just seems like there is some strategy involved behind the scenes for LIU that doesn’t seem to be present for RIT. But I’ll also give Brown the benefit of the doubt that it will take some time before her plans and philosophy are fully entrenched.
Writing through this definitely makes me wonder if LIU is the team we should be looking at as likely to try to move to the CHA. I spoke with Bob DeGregorio about plans to get the CHA back to six teams. He said the conference is looking to elevate a program or move one school from another conference. Morgan’s clear hunger to grow and get bigger and better means it would make a lot of sense to see the Sharks make the conference jump. It’s an interesting thought, anything.
Arlan: It is an interesting question in our current landscape of women’s hockey as to which type of situation is more difficult for a new program looking to contend for NCAA Championships sooner rather than later. We’ll never see another Minnesota-Duluth, winning an NCAA title in its second season, nor likely a Minnesota, who claimed a national title in year three. It took Wisconsin seven years, and Clarkson 11, if I’m counting correctly. Perhaps we will see a new program, or one new to Division-I, achieve that rapid success again. Can it be done again in a new league, as LIU is attempting? Or is there a better chance to strike gold for a program like St. Thomas that will have to skate through league arenas where the rafters are cluttered with championship banners?
Anyway, the Tommies have managed to clear the first hurdle in the lane of new programs: prove that you can compete at the D-I level. They’ve certainly demonstrated that versus the bottom half of the WCHA, going toe to toe with those teams and earning their share of the points. They’ve played eight games against three teams that not only advanced to the NCAA Tournament last season, but won games once there. While they haven’t gotten closer than three goals to any of those teams at the final buzzer, they haven’t been totally embarrassed in any of those losses. Like most new teams, and frankly, most teams period, St. Thomas can struggle to score but has done well at limiting goals allowed, yielding an average of four per game. They look to have found a keeper in first-year goaltender Saskia Maurer, who was honored as the conference’s Rookie of the Week for the second time for her efforts in keeping Wisconsin in shouting distance.
And while we’re acknowledging goalies facing a slew of shots, the story of Avery Stilwell deserves a mention. She enrolled at Minnesota State intending to play only tennis for the Mavericks, but the hockey team ran out of healthy goalies, and she became the emergency starter in the series versus Ohio State. A lot of the lessons learned in college aren’t taught in the classroom, and the experience of putting herself in an uncomfortable situation on a big stage will serve her well, pardon the pun.
It could have been worse — the Mavericks could have been playing Wisconsin. The Badgers have the dynamic sophomore duo of Makenna Webster and Casey O’Brien leading the country in scoring and Daryl Watts continuing her assault on the all-time record books. As if all that offense isn’t enough, Wisconsin is allowing less than a goal per game and has only twice allowed multiple goals in a game. The surprise may not be that the Badgers are undefeated as their regular season nears its halfway point, but that they’ve wound up in overtime three times, costing them a shot at perfection.
Looking ahead, is there anybody on the Badger’s schedule with a chance to knock them off? They still have to visit the Beavers in Bemidji, the team that managed to hold them off the scoreboard and earned a tie, but I’m not sure that BSU can score on Wisconsin. UMD, whose top line of Elizabeth Giguere, Gabbie Hughes, and Anna Klein is as dangerous as anyone in the country put a scare into the Badgers right up until OT, but the rematch will be in Madison. Minnesota is another team that can score, especially with Taylor Heise performing at the level that she’s found this year, but it’s been awhile since the Gophers have proven that they can shut a top team down. Quinnipiac is nearly as stingy as Wisconsin but doesn’t have the thunder up front. Ohio State usually manages to figure the Badgers out for 60 minutes at some point, and the Buckeyes figure to get at least three more chances to do so again this season.
Anyway, I’d like to wish a wonderful Thanksgiving to all of our readers, and like the players that we follow, may they find a way to make the best out of a situation that is still far from ideal.
Nicole: I think it will be interesting to see how the Badgers react to Quinnipiac’s defense. Bemidji State showed Wisconsin can be stymied, so there’s that. I also think Quinnipiac’s defense plays different stylistically. One place I’m interested to see how they fare against each other is down the line sheet. I’m not sure the Bobcats are used to fending off 3-4 lines as strong as the Badgers. The fact that there’s little to no respite is part of the problem when facing them. Even if opponents do a good job of corralling Daryl Watts and Casey O’Brien, there’s still Sarah Wozniewicz’s puck handling skills and Caitlin Schneider’s speed on the third line. The Badgers possess and move the puck differently than say Clarkson or Colgate, so I really think these will be two great games to watch. The details are going to be important here.
It’s unlikely the Badgers will sweep Ohio State – or Minnesota for that matter. Wisconsin closes out the regular season in Columbus. The outcome of those games could have implications in both the WCHA and Pairwise.
On a different note, the idea of “celebrating” Thanksgiving is complicated and is further compounded here by the fact that many of the players, coaches and fans we talk to and about had their day of thanks a month ago. But despite the fraught history of Thanksgiving, it’s always a good idea to take time to be grateful and mindful. It’s been harder to find the good stuff over the past 18 months or so, so I wanted to take a second to be thankful for things running relatively smoothly this year. All the teams are playing, we haven’t had any stoppages and the student athletes are getting to have the experience they signed up for.
Thanks to Arlan for pushing his hockey writing retirement off a little longer every year to continue writing this column with me. I’m forever amazed at the things you remember off the top of your head. Folks, Arlan’s forgotten more stuff than most of us will ever know about this game. That he sticks around here and in the forum is a gift. Beyond his extensive knowledge, he always offers great context for things that are happening.
Thanks to our readers. Thank you for spending time with us every week.
Thanks to all the Sports Information Directors who make it immeasurably easier – and better – for me to cover this sport. They’re the major unsung heroes of college sports coverage.
I believe family is what you make it and I’m so thankful for the friends I’ve made through this sport that have become my chosen family. There are times this sport drives me batty, but I’ll never be upset about all the amazing people it has brought into my life. We’re a small community here in women’s hockey and I’m so happy and proud to be a part of it.
Be safe, take care of yourselves and make sure you take time to watch some awesome non-conference matchups this weekend.
