The semester break often sits silent for college hockey teams.
The World Junior Championship ramps into gear around the holidays, but aside from the occasional four-team tournament, movement almost never occurs within conferences until players return from their individual and collective layoffs. Standings don’t change, and only the limited game offers the rare opportunity for a team to make up a game-in-hand or gain ground on teams sitting idle.
Last weekend was the rarest of those chances. A first half packed ECAC’s standings to the degree that a six-point weekend could rocket someone up the standings, and the only two series between travel partner sides had two teams deadlocked in a three-way tie for seventh place. Even with a long way remaining, it felt like Brown and Union would play Friday for a chance to join Clarkson or Princeton atop the race for teams situated under Quinnipiac, and the Rensselaer-Yale consolation prize would move someone past Harvard for an improved track when the second half began in earnest.
The complexion looked simple but the Bulldogs, the team that won a combined 16 games over the past two years as they fought their way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, instead crashed the party by sweeping a six-point weekend that vaulted Keith Allain’s team into fourth place with a front row seat to the second half of the season.
“Both of the games this weekend speaks a lot to the team,” Allain said. “We had the lead in the third period [of both games] and gave it up, so we had to respond to that adversity, but coming back and finding a way to win the games, I give a lot of credit to our senior class. It’s a group that had their freshman year ripped away completely, and their sophomore year was touch and go with COVID restrictions, but they’ve stuck with this program and continue to stick together and work hard.
“They’re the backbone of the success we had this past weekend and the success we might have moving forward.”
Yale was once a tentpole franchise for the ECAC’s overall hockey league, but the aftermath of COVID-19 arguably decimated the team to a degree that wasn’t felt anywhere else. The Bulldogs that won the 2013 Frozen Four national championship were a decade removed from their legacy as a No. 1 overall team with two regular-season championships and two postseason tournament crowns, but their ability to finish around first round bye territory took a massive hit when the Ivy League canceled the 2020-2021 season.
The five other impacted ECAC teams – Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton – were joined by RPI and Union in their absence, but next to a Dartmouth team that changed coaches prior to rejoining college hockey, no team experienced a delta drop like Yale. A sixth-place team that twice advanced through the first round of the playoffs immediately fell to 12th with a roster boasting approximately two dozen newcomers to college hockey, and despite improving to the No. 10 seed with a win in the first round last year, preseason predictions from the experts didn’t exactly fortune tell a run towards the top of the league.
“We lost some players through the COVID [years],” Allain conceded. “And we’ve lost some recruits as well. But this group that’s committed to Yale was committed to seeing things through. They believe in what we’re doing, and it’s really important that they’ve been able to stay together and go through it. They’ve been in school for four years, but this is really only their third year of college hockey. They still aren’t an experienced senior class in terms of games played, but the games they have played and experiences they have had developed their resiliency.”
Even the most hardened Yale supporter can soften with that theory, but Allain’s ability to develop a nucleus finally struck dirt this year when the Bulldogs began fighting significant battles against more-heralded teams. The majority of results broke against the Bulldogs, but few teams matched their ability to pressure opponents into one-goal games.
Right from the start, a one-goal, overtime win over Brown preceded a two-goal loss to Cornell that featured an empty net goal by the Big Red, and an overtime loss to Princeton coincided with a hard-fought game against Quinnipiac that pumped two goals past the Bobcats.
The 2-1 loss to Clarkson was one of the last vestiges of bad luck or bounces or whatever happened in those games, and after losing 3-1 to Long Island with another one-goal game that included an empty netter, Yale finally blasted past a couple of games by beating Merrimack and winning the return match against the Sharks.
“I mean, it’s always comforting to play with the lead,” Allain said. “So we don’t enjoy being behind, but I think when I spoke to the type of adversity that our senior class faced, all through their careers here at Yale, they’ve overcome enough to have that confidence that the next time they’re in a situation, they know they can do it. That’s what’s happened with this group. We don’t lose our composure. Our bench stays calm. Guys know we can get our job done.”
The scariest part about the weekend was that Yale started to resemble those teams from the bygone pre-COVID era. The Bulldogs of those days always seemed to pair a top line that could score at will, but Allain managed to pair NHL-level talent with a depth chart designed to weaken and pepper opponents. A stingy defense helped turn goaltenders into brick walls (and vice-versa), and the numbers all eventually shook down in a way that made Yale impressive – even as Ivy League teams typically produced lower total amounts because of the late start or six-less games.
Comparing the teams is unfair, but Yale beat Union after it received goals from both David Chen and Niklas Allain, players with whom Briggs Gammill and Teddy Wooding notched goals or assists throughout the game. Ryan Conroy added an assist to Chen before assisting on Allain’s goal against RPI, and he scored the game-winning goal over the Engineers with an assist from Wooding. From a production standpoint, that means the top five players on Yale’s stat sheet were involved on every goal on the weekend with an added empty netter from Ian Carpentier, who tied for second on the team with his fourth goal.
The numbers won’t jump off a page when the nation-leading scorers all have 10 goals or more, but the fact that Yale didn’t start its season until the end of October is combined with the fact that seven different players have multiple goals. More than a dozen different players have at least one goal this year with 16 players holding at least an assist – the overwhelming majority of which appeared in the 15 games on Yale’s 6-9-0 overall record.
“Our team really started to play better before Christmas,” said Allain, “and a big part of it was that our fourth line scored two goals against Merrimack. They’ve started to contribute and become a line that we can put our trust into, and I think that gives everyone confidence. We can pretty much roll four lines. There are some situations where we don’t have that superstar player, and we need everyone to contribute, but that’s really fostered unity within this group. They know they’re relying on one another and aren’t relying on one guy.”
Finding the right chemistry has Yale poised for dark horse status in the second half of a season that’s already turning into a Quinnipiac-sized runaway train. The 22 points credited to the Bobcats haven’t included a regulation loss, and it’s easy for them to be the clear-cut Cleary Cup favorites unless some unfortunate collapse occurs between now and the postseason. The remaining 11 spots, though, are up for grabs, and Yale’s six-point weekend illustrated the inherent danger in overlooking any of the remaining teams.
Rising from the ashes of the postseason race, the Bulldogs now enter a weekend series against Ancient Eight rivals with the inside track on fourth place. Four of the 13 remaining league games will actually require them to leave New England, and the trips to the North Country and Colgate-Cornell are spaced around home games at the fabled Yale Whale at Ingalls Rink.
A home game against Quinnipiac is part of the Nutmeg Classic in Hartford, but the larger bulk of remaining games are against teams that enable Yale to control its fate. There’s a return trip to Southern New England from Union and RPI and a separate trip to Harvard and Dartmouth that ends the season, and even the Cornell-Colgate trip around Valentine’s Day is flanked by single-game home weekends against Brown on Feb. 9 and Princeton on Feb. 23.
None of this means Yale is heading for a boat-rocking home series in the second round, but the very real possibility of seeing one of the conference’s premier teams return to a home ice playoff series is out there for the taking.
