With the first half of the season in the books for most of the CCHA, there’s been one overarching question for the league on the ice: Does anyone actually want to win the MacNaughton Cup?
Obviously, that’s hyperbole.
League titles are league titles, and everyone wants to win some hardware. But in the CCHA this season, no single team has separated itself from the rest of the pack.
Only three teams (St. Thomas, Michigan Tech and Minnesota State) are above .500 in the conference, and of those three, only the Tommies are over. 500 overall. St. Thomas (7-5-0) is technically in first place with 21 points through 12 games, but both Tech (6-4-0, 19 points) and MSU (5-4-1, 17 points) have two games in hand on the Tommies.
The league standings are so jumbled at the moment that overall, just six points separate the first-place Tommies from the three teams currently tied for fifth (Northern Michigan, Bowling Green and Lake Superior State).
But the standings might not stay that way after this weekend. Although most conferences have stopped for the holiday break, CCHA teams will play three more conference games before stopping for the first semester: Bowling Green will travel to Bemidji State for a Thursday-Friday series, while Ferris State will host Lake Superior State for a single game on Saturday evening.
Bemidji State coach Tom Serratore put it best in his weekly media availability on Tuesday: League parity makes it tough to put together a consistent string of victories for everybody.
“I think probably if you look at us, probably our biggest hurdle has been ourselves,” Serratore said. “Just trying to get consistency. And I think the league is dictating that too. It’s the parity of our whole league. Somebody’s got to figure it out. We’ve all got to try to put back-to-back games together. It seems that whoever wins on Friday, Saturday is a dog fight. That’s just the way it is, and the other team has so much more desperation.”
Just take a look at last weekend’s results, which were pretty indicative of how the league as a whole has been playing. Serratore’s Beavers beat Lake Superior State 7-1 on Friday night in Bemidji but couldn’t win on Saturday despite outshooting the Lakers 28-23. Lake State won 6-1. Elsewhere, results were similar. Rivals Michigan Tech and Northern Michigan split their home-and-home series, as did St. Thomas and Minnesota State.
The lone team to actually pick up a sweep on the weekend was Bowling Green, who knocked off Ferris State, 1-0 and 4-3. It was their first sweep of the season and caps a solid eight-game stretch in which the Falcons have gone 5-3-0.
“We put ourselves in a position for the last month, four straight weeks of winning on Friday, which is a great way to start the week, don’t get me wrong. But we haven’t been able to do what we did (on Saturday), so for the guys to be able to do that, it was special,” BGSU coach Ty Eigner said after the Falcons completed the sweep on Saturday.
If the Beavers sweep this weekend, they will move into first place in the conference standings at the break. If the Falcons were to take all six points, they would move into a tie with the first-place Tommies at the break.
“These are big games,” Serratore said. “We are going to be saying that every series the rest of the year, especially in a 24-game season. In the second half of the year, we’re on the road more than we’re at home, so these are huge for us.”
