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.
Paula: Two weeks ago, Dan, you asked me about potential chaos in the Big Ten playoffs and I said that I didn’t foresee anything out of the ordinary. I also said that the most interesting regular-season race was Hockey East. Well, I was half right – or three-quarters correct, if you look at who’s playing for the B1G playoff title.
What a wild couple of weeks it’s been.
As our friends Jimmy Connelly and Ed Trefzger noted in this space last week, the end of the regular season was chaotic not only for Hockey East but for the NCHC, with huge PairWise implications. I suspected that Boston College would take a game two weeks ago from Massachusetts, but I didn’t foresee that the Minutemen would be swept, opening the door for Northeastern’s first regular-season Hockey East title.
Since Northeastern prevailed over Boston College in the single-elimination Hockey East playoffs last week, we now have an upcoming Huskies vs. Huskies semifinal game in HEA, as Northeastern hosts Connecticut after those Huskies won their first-ever Hockey East playoff game when they beat Boston University.
The only two top-10 DCU/USCHO.com Poll teams to lose in the playoffs last week lost to other top 10 teams when then-No. 8 Notre Dame was eliminated from the Big Ten playoffs by Michigan – marking the first time the Wolverines beat the Fighting Irish this season the first time that Michigan defeated Notre Dame at Yost Arena since 2018 and when then-No. 9 was swept in two games in its best-of-three series against Minnesota Duluth.
Now we have a couple of bubble teams waiting to see how everything plays out and some very good hockey teams waiting until next season to play.
Dan, what struck you about the first full weekend of playoff hockey?
Dan: You know, I have long trumpeted parity in college hockey, but this weekend really kind of kicked that idea to the moon. I was so ready for complete chaos, but it didn’t totally come to fruition based on the seeds.
To your yin, the yang: every league saw its top-seeded team advance to the conference semifinals, and every league except for Atlantic Hockey sent at least its top three teams. The Big Ten championship will pit the top two seeds against one another this weekend. So will the CCHA.
Since we last spoke, ECAC Hockey’s playoffs went 1-8 into the quarterfinal round. So did Hockey East.
Atlantic Hockey, of course, bucked the norm. Bentley swept Niagara on the road to advance to the quarterfinals, and from there, everything went haywire. AIC swept Bentley, but second-seeded Canisius and third-seeded Army both lost to Mercyhurst and Air Force – somewhat ironic that those are their chief history rivalries.
As a result, the Atlantic Hockey championship will be decided between top-seeded AIC, No. 4 RIT, sixth-seeded Air Force, and No. 7 Mercyhurst, and if sports betting were legal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I wouldn’t be putting confident money on the Yellow Jackets.
But let’s double back for a bit. Because the high seeds all advanced, we can really get a good idea of what’s going to happen with the Pairwise. Clarkson, for example, likely needs to win its way into the tournament by at least advancing to the ECAC championship and then hoping a team like UConn doesn’t bust out of Hockey east.
Northeastern is in a similar predicament, though the Huskies are at No. 14 and have a little bit of space. Still, that “space” can’t really be quantified when you’re down to the final two games of the season. Lose to UConn, and a team like Northeastern is probably out of the tournament. Win two more games, and you’re in anyways.
That’s the way the tournament is meant to feel. You’ve gotta win your way in, which is all we can ask.
I’m curious of your perspective for that sizzle because it feels much different than recent history where the majority of regular season league champions have had their easy way into the tournament. Even for a noted anti-Pairwise guy, that’s fun to see.
Paula: I have absolutely loved the playoff tournament games that I’ve been able to catch and for the very reason that you state. I know that teams value an easy ride, but this should be the hardest-fought, toughest-played hockey of the year and for the most part, it was. As I’ve said before, the conference championships are my favorite hockey to cover; it’s passionate and it’s personal.
You mention the rivalry games in Atlantic Hockey, and I can’t imagine anything more exciting for fans of those teams. Canisius and Mercyhurst are separated by less than 100 miles on I-90 along the shore of Lake Erie. That’s personal. The Air Force-Army series is, for obvious reasons, as personal as it gets.
I had to move to southeast Michigan to understand fully the rivalry between Michigan and Notre Dame. I knew that the schools were less than 200 miles apart. I knew that Jeff Jackson had coached Lake Superior State against Michigan in the old CCHA. What I didn’t know was that the football rivalry between the schools began in the late 1800s and that there some serious mutual, um, athletic aversion between the schools. Add to it the nature of the streak that the Irish had heading to Yost for that semifinal game and the fact that the game was really spectacular hockey, and you have – in my really biased opinion – everything that hockey is all about. The fact that Notre Dame remained in NCAA contention after losing doesn’t hurt the overall Big Ten fandom, either.
I’ve been covering college hockey since 1995, and in that time, one of the things that I’ve seen the sport struggle with most is losing sight of a pretty good big picture – a conference championship – for the even bigger picture of the NCAA tournament. One of the things I always found so endearing about Ferris State coach Bob Daniels is the emphasis he put on a CCHA playoff championship every year when I covered that league. He really taught me the importance of that goal and how it can propel a team all season long.
Of course, that brings me back to your point about the NCAA field, which certainly has clarified given all that transpired last week. There are teams that played really good hockey this season – Merrimack, Boston University (in the second half, at least), Cornell, Providence – whose seasons are over. Meanwhile, there are seven teams playing this weekend that must win their conference playoff titles for an NCAA berth:
Air Force, Bemidji State, Colgate, Connecticut, Harvard, Mercyhurst, RIT. Clarkson and Connecticut, Nos. 16 and 14 respectively in the PairWise – need at least a win apiece. That should make for some even fiercer conference playoff action.
All four NCHC teams still contending for that conference championship and both Big Ten teams vying for the B1G league title are guaranteed a national tournament invitation. I’d like to think that makes conference hardware the focus for the time being in those leagues, that no one succumbs to thinking beyond that trophy – yet.
Dan: I’m not disputing that the NCAA tournament means the most to the sport, but I agree, there’s something to winning a conference tournament that hits differently. I think it’s because of several reasons, but two in particular stand out in my mind.
The fact that these teams play each other all year is probably the biggest on that list. I don’t feel like there are any surprises in a conference tournament. You can make the case that a team catches fire at the right time or needs to play its best hockey in March to win a league tournament, but those teams play each other all season.
Even if there are only a couple of matchups, there’s recent history, and the rivalries that are forged by those games are more intense and more personal, which in turn makes all of this happen. It’s like the Beanpot on steroids, and trust me, there was a period where I used to criticize the Beanpot, though I realize how deep it runs. It’s like facing an Original Six team in the playoffs (sorry, Chicago). It just hits differently.
The second part stems from my belief that teams truly earn their way into the conference semifinals by winning a best-of-three series. Hockey East was the only league to use single elimination throughout its format this year, and while the semifinals and championships are one-and-done games, the quarterfinals in the remaining five leagues are all best-of-three. That means teams have to be the better team over the course of a full weekend. Call it the right matchup or what have you, but winning two games where there aren’t shootouts or ties or 3-on-3 overtimes is pure. I love it.
But within that are the stories of a team coming out of nowhere to win and the tales of teams that suffer heartbreak. I think about North Dakota two years ago when the two losses to Denver knocked a very good team out of the national playoffs with a series sweep while Boston College nearly swept its way into the NCAA Tournament by rallying to beat Providence in three games (with two overtime games sprinkled into that series) before beating UMass at TD Garden. A one-goal loss to Northeastern separated the Eagles from the tournament, but imagine what would’ve happened if they won that tournament.
On a personal note, Brown’s 2003 win over Yale is one of those things I’ll never forget, least of all because I’ll never forget a Yale football player dressed like Superman and waving a Yale flag in the stands. Still a most electric three-game series, and Brown won it in after winning first and third games. And let’s not start about the infamous triple overtime game against Princeton from a couple of years ago that I mention at least once per week.
Anyways, we’re not here for story time, but that’s really the big two for me: 1) you play these teams all year and now have a chance to claim supremacy against them and 2) you have to win a best-of-three series to do it, unless you’re in Hockey East this year (not that there’s anything wrong with the single-elimination format!).
Switching gears, there were a couple of things I saw thrown around the trusty Internet last week that got me interested. One was a switch to best-of-three series in regionals, which I don’t think is feasible but interesting to think about. The other was the possibility of a NIT-style tournament or postseason tournament for teams that don’t play in the NCAA Tournament. I find it most interesting that teams in the NIT often use the tournament as a springboard for future success.
In most years, a regular-season champion that doesn’t win its conference tournament would gain an at-large bid to the national tournament. But I would be intrigued to see if there’s a chance for teams seeded 16-21 or who just missed the tournament to play a quick get-together.
Maybe this is just another of my crazy ideas?
Paula: If you mean a best-of-three for national regionals, I think that’s a terrible idea. I love the one-and-done format of the national tournament. Also, the potential for a three-game grind that increases the odds of injury, even with the week between regionals and the Frozen Four, is enough to nix it. Also, it’s just not feasible timewise or financially.
Just no.
The NIT is another non-starter. D-I hockey doesn’t have the enormous field that D-I basketball has. It would feel like a has-been tournament for four or five teams, one that would incur unnecessary expense – and for what? I don’t see the point of it.
Having said that, I fondly remember a Frozen Four weekend in which some people – I’m not going to name names here – persuaded the person who was likely an intern in charge of the ESPN crawl that there was, in fact, a college hockey NIT happening and that the persons in question were calling in actual scores in actual NIT games. ESPN caught on pretty quickly (sadly) and the scores stopped scrolling along the bottom of the network’s screen. For those of us who witnessed (or perhaps participated) in the prank, it was a funny moment in contemporary college hockey history.
And even though you said this isn’t story time, the mention of the NIT brings up the fictional NIT tournament that fans on the USCHO message boards set up years ago. In fact, the night I met George Gwozdecky in the lounge of the Amway Hotel in Grand Rapids, Mich., during a Midwest Regional weekend, the first thing he did after shaking my hand was ask, “Paula, how are we doing in the NIT?” By “we,” he meant Denver.
Dan, all of this illustrates how small our sport is in so many ways. The hockey community worldwide seems connected and finite, but college hockey is downright familial.
Weeks ago, Lindenwood University announced that it would take all of its sports to the Division I level. The school, located near St. Louis, already has a women’s hockey team playing D-I hockey, and it’s expected to announce a men’s team. Should things remain as they are, that will add a fourth independent school to the D-I scene. I’d welcome another team to the D-I level, no matter who they are and where they play. Beyond that, I don’t know what to think.
Dan: I think we’re at an interesting point of inflection with respect to realignment.
I believe I discussed this with Ed a while back, but at this point, the seeds that are planted don’t really have much geographical alignment. So either something’s going to give or something’s going to break. Assuming Lindenwood remains independent, it would join Arizona State, Alaska and LIU as schools unaffiliated with a conference. None of those schools have logical fits for a conference, though people love to tell me that LIU belongs in Atlantic Hockey.
At this point, I’d believe Atlantic Hockey should get off its duff and add Robert Morris back already. The Colonials reassumed their position in women’s hockey in the CHA, but there hasn’t been a formal announcement regarding the men’s team. This remains completely and unabashedly ridiculous, so again: would Atlantic Hockey add RMU already and end what’s been drawn out longer than it should? End of story.
Besides that, I don’t quite know where we’re going. Augustana is the fifth team I’m going to add into that mix, but Sioux Falls also doesn’t help any of the schools I already mentioned. Alaska Anchorage is due back next year after the Seawolves were saved, but no league is going to take on both Alaska schools after what happened with the WCHA’s breakaway programs. I’m very confused at what’s to come, and we know that independence is not the most viable option. Conferences and leagues lead to guaranteed home games, and not everyone can get an NHL team to set up shop in their arena for a few years.
So where do we go? I still have no idea. I do know that Lindenwood is in the CHA and has relationships with the Atlantic Hockey schools sponsoring women’s hockey. Adding RMU and Lindenwood, to me, makes the most sense and I could picture giving teams a stop-over in St. Louis on the way to Colorado or vice-versa. I do know this – Lindenwood and LIU are the first teams I’ve seen to elevate men’s hockey after adding women’s hockey. That’s not to say there weren’t others, just that they’re the first for me to see. That makes me think that women’s hockey is helping push the decision. I’m all for that since it also shows that women’s hockey is incredibly viable and is on the verge of a talent explosion.
More hockey is a good thing, but with more hockey comes more responsibility for the rest of us to save those teams and ensure the ones that are added are as viable as possible.
