My most memorable college hockey game occurred when Brown hosted Princeton during the 2019 ECAC Hockey tournament’s first round.
It was the second game of a best-of-three series, but it was the third consecutive game between the two teams after they played the last game of the season and managed to land in a playoff series against one another. Princeton had won that regular season finale, but Brown won the first game of the playoff series.
A win in the second game – affectionately dubbed the third game of a four-game series – would have eliminated the Tigers, who were defending ECAC Hockey champions that year, and advanced Brown to the quarterfinals for the first time in six years.
A back-and-forth first two periods begat the Bears’ runaway train in the third period, and as they entered the late stages of the third period with a three-goal lead, an intrepid color analyst who must remain nameless (cough cough, it was me, cough cough) outright predicted their trip to the second round of the postseason.
A couple of hours later, my brother and I were still standing in the Meehan Auditorium press box, and we were broadcasting a game that was headed into its fourth intermission and third overtime. When Alex Brink finally scored to give Brown the win, the marathon had lasted over four hours, and scrapped dinner plans quickly converted into as much fast food as a McDonald’s on the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border allowed.
Aside from everything, though, the best part of that game was that the Tigers were simply playing to advance to Sunday. They were the defending league champions, but completing that comeback only meant the two teams would have come back to the rink for a third game the next afternoon.
I thought about that game this week when ECAC Hockey announced its new playoff format because under the new format, that game doesn’t happen, thanks to an announcement scrapping the first-round best-of-three format in favor of a single elimination game that would advance winners to a best-of-three quarterfinal format.
“It was the conclusion of a long review of our league structure, of our playoff structure,” said ECAC Hockey commissioner Steve Hagwell this week. “We looked at everything…and you look at what other leagues have done with single-game [formats]. So we had a discussion, and it was a quite lengthy discussion that started in the spring and went through all summer before finally coming to this decision.”
ECAC Hockey last revamped its postseason at the turn of the century when it shifted from a “Final Five” to the more well-known three-round setup. Ten of the league’s 12 teams made the postseason at the time, and the five winners of best-of-three first round series advanced to a modified semifinal that included a single-elimination game between the remaining fourth-seeded and fifth-seeded teams. The winner advanced to play the top-remaining seed in the semifinals with those winners playing in the championship, a format that necessitated three wins in three days for one of those bottom two teams.
The revamp scrapped that “final five” and introduced two rounds of best-of-three series. Every team advanced to the postseason, and the programs seeded 5-12 paired up in the first round with the top four receiving byes to the quarterfinals. Winners of those best-of-three series then advanced to the final four, which remained single elimination.
That format produced significant amounts of chaos in the postseason, and the top five teams seldom advanced after it was introduced in 1998. The last year of the format included Vermont, which was the last team into the tournament as the No. 10 seed, and the first year saw No. 7 Princeton win the league championship after advancing past No. 8 Cornell in the quarterfinal, four-vs.-five game.
By 2007, though, those Cinderella stories had all but evaporated as the postseason became significantly more difficult, and since 2010, Harvard’s championship in 2015 and Princeton’s title in 2019 stand as the only two banners clinched by teams that started their postseason journey in the first round.
“We really went through a review,” said Hagwell, “and we looked at the history of the previous format and what teams won on opening night on Friday, and, depending on what seed you were or what your record was, if you came back and won the next two games after dropping the opening game. It was very thorough, and at the end of the day, we came up with the format that was announced.”
As a result, the modified structure now in place will utilize the 12-team format but determine its first round winners through a single-game structure. It’s unique to the league but remains similar to the majority of other conferences, which have less numbers but use a best-of-three format to determine the teams playing in the semifinal round, and as of this year, Atlantic Hockey is the only league that won’t include its entire membership in at least the first round of the playoffs.
That said, the response from the league’s membership was tepid at best. Hagwell acknowledged that the coaches were in favor of retaining the older format, and though a quick straw poll of coaches produced limited results in short order, it didn’t feel like too many people supported the new format.
One coach lamented the loss of two possible games for his players’ hockey careers, while another acknowledged the opportunity for the women’s game without saying much about the men’s side. Another coach declined comment, while several others pocket-vetoed their remarks and didn’t comment.
“I think it’s fair to say that the men’s coaches wanted to retain the format that’s been in existence for the previous 20 years,” Hagwell said. “There’s no question about that.
“I think the realities are that [cost savings] are the case,” he later explained. “If a North Country team is going to Princeton, for example, for three games and then they come home and win and have to go somewhere else – Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, wherever – versus a one game scenario, I won’t say it’s simple math, but it’s simple math.”
I truthfully don’t know if the format is right or wrong, so I won’t speculate as to whether it’s a good idea or not; I’ve always taken wait-and-see approaches, so I’ll wait to pass judgment on what happens this year. I won’t readily accept this as being a great thing, but it may introduce more parity and place an emphasis on home ice, especially for that first round. One thing I will readily admit is that I think adopting a consistent format for the women’s game is a major step forward for a league that is quickly becoming significantly more competitive.
I will, though, miss memories of some crazy Game 2 nights in the first round. To this day, the memories from that Brown-Princeton game remain thicker than thick. Our replay technician on the broadcast missed a birthday party at her apartment…for her birthday. Our camera operator broke down in tears after the second overtime.
I developed the flu two days after the game and blamed it on the exhaustion of being at Brown that weekend, but it being a pre-COVID society where I did things like this, I was back in a broadcast booth for an overtime playoff series at Bentley the next weekend.
The best part of that game was how we could have done it again one day later. A decade earlier, I watched Brown win its way through RPI with a three-game series win in the first round, and I slogged into work on that Monday with virtually no sleep.
A year later, fourth-seeded RPI beat last place Colgate before the Raiders won two in a row, and the 2-1, double-overtime win in the third game sent them back to the Capital District one week later for a three-game series against Union (which they won to advance to the semifinals). One year after that, RPI beat Clarkson in triple overtime to force a third game that the Engineers won, 4-1, to advance to the quarterfinals.
Another year after THAT, last place Harvard won the first game at Dartmouth, 2-1, before the Big Green rallied to advance to Sunday, where they won the series with a 6-3 win, and another year after that, 12th-seeded Princeton beat Clarkson in the first game in overtime before the Golden Knights rallied to win the series in three.
That same year, seventh-seeded RPI beat Dartmouth in the first game but lost the series in three games before being pushed to three games the next year by Clarkson, which won the second game at home.
“We have three weekends,” Hagwell said. “We’re sticking with three weekends. We’re not altering team schedules by saying we’re going to two weekends, and we still have 12 teams in the postseason. It’s just that the first round is going to be different in terms of the number of games.”
