The conversation about on-campus regionals and conference championships is nothing new to college hockey.
It’s a near-annual exercise, much like the Pairwise Rankings, that enables fans and analysts to debate and coalesce around how to improve a postseason known for its ability to generate organic thrills at a moment’s notice. Much like realignment, NIL, and the new transfer portal, the exhaustive exercise of arguing over neutral site placements or on-campus venues is a near-guarantee to show up in the public forum.
Ed Trefzger and I debated the national merits in this week’s TMQ column, but the conversation surrounding ECAC Hockey and the possibility of an on-campus tournament took its own turn in the public sphere in the aftermath of the NCHC’s decision to move its playoffs on campus in 2026. The unanimous decision, approved by the board of directors in mid-December, stipulated that the playoffs would move to a three-week process with the single elimination semifinal and final splitting from its current Frozen Faceoff format.
The move left Hockey East and ECAC as the only two conferences with neutral site championship weekends, and with the overall conversation raging, colleague Ken Schott from The Daily Gazette in New York’s Capital District spoke with commissioner Doug Christiansen about the possibility of moving the conference championship away from the Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid.
“I think every conference has their own pluses and minuses to it,” Christiansen told Schott. “You look at the NCHC, they obviously have some really large buildings, but they have some of the geography issues that come along with that. We [are] a little bit different, in terms of some of the capacities in our arenas are a bit smaller, but we don’t have the geography concerns. I think it’s something that we’ll continue to look at.”
I asked several pointed questions during the debate with Ed over the possibility of abandoning neutral site regionals in the NCAA tournament, and I’ll make clear – again – that I don’t stand in favor or against a particular move. I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to scheduling tournaments, and I believe conferences are much more unique than adopting a universal method for scheduling any postseason arrangement.
Hockey East, for example, probably shouldn’t ever shift its championship away from TD Garden because its geography lends perfectly to the utilization of a neutral-site championship. The Beanpot kicks off at the start of February and serves a perfect appetizer before the Hockey East main course, and nearly every school is within driving distance of a semifinal and championship game. I would never see a scenario where the league wouldn’t come close to a sell-out at the arena, and even a year like the 2014 championship between UMass Lowell and New Hampshire was capable of drawing well over 10,000 fans to the spoked-B home of the Boston Bruins.
ECAC has long differed since leaving Boston Garden in 1993. The league formerly featured the Garden during its three-division setup between the East schools that eventually broke away and formed Hockey East, the West schools from New York (and Vermont), and the Ivy League schools, but a move to Lake Placid allowed the reconfigured conference to play its championship at one of the most iconic venues in hockey history. It remained there until a move to Albany’s Pepsi Arena – now the MVP Arena – before a three-year stint at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, N.J. In 2014, ECAC returned to Lake Placid.
“I think Lake Placid has been a fantastic host,” Christiansen told Schott. “It’s a city that symbolizes hockey in our country, and it has a ton of history in our league. So for us, we’ll obviously continue to look at all of our options, but I think Lake Placid is a really good home. We’re looking forward to continuing to grow it, and I’m looking forward to adding some of my own and our own thoughts and processes as to how we can make it better.”
Pushing aside the national conversation for a minute, the move to on-campus sites for a conference championship has become more than just a trend.
The WCHA’s move in the aftermath of losing the Xcel Energy Center to realignment proved wildly successful and eventually split the semifinals and championship across two separate weekends, and the Big Ten eventually moved on-campus in 2018 after alternating its first four championships between the Twin Cities and Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena.
Atlantic Hockey subsequently followed suit after moving its conference championship from campus sites to Blue Cross Arena in Rochester, New York before shifting to the HarborCenter in Buffalo. A one-year experimental trip to Utica, N.Y., in 2022 preceded last year, which ironically led to Canisius hosting the championship at HarborCenter.
Those switches proved wildly successful in their own right, and granting teams an opportunity to hoist championship trophies in front of their own crowd opened the doors on new revenue streams and policies. The image of watching a team potentially win a title either in their own barn or in someone else’s barn goes along with the overall drama associated with postseason hockey, and I’d be wrong if I denied having dreams of celebrating a hockey championship with one of my teams and the fans who I see on a regular basis.
ECAC, though, is a unique case, and Lake Placid a unique venue. Last year’s attendance wasn’t necessarily off-the-charts between Harvard and Colgate, but the arena itself carried a certain amount of atmosphere at half-capacity.
Anyone who hasn’t been to Lake Placid – and even the seasoned veterans – receive the requisite goosebumps when they walk into the arena and see where Mike Eruzione shot the game-winning goal past Vladimir Myshkin. I know that my brother made the trek about 25 years ago, and I still remember feeling Lake Placid in the column. As a younger hockey fan, the idea of visiting an Olympic town in the Adirondack Mountains was almost mythical.
Unlike the national radar, though, the move to campus sites has been more undeniable than the conversation about moving the national tournament. Conferences are, to an extent, more localized, and the big-game feel doesn’t require the big, neutral site. I long believed that every team should play in a conference tournament because that’s how conference tournaments are played, but leagues should also incentivize earning a higher seed.
Right now, I don’t necessarily believe there’s an incentive to finish higher than any other team in the top four spots of ECAC. I don’t like the single-elimination format of the first round, but I’ve noticed that other leagues are starting to increasingly move towards the play-in style. Even by tamping down that argument, gaining a top-four spot to avoid the first round is an accomplishment, but winning on campus before moving to Lake Placid removes, in my mind, a piece of what makes it more important to finish second over third.
Seeding needs to matter, and while there’s a hypothetical advantage to playing as the better seed, the depth and parity of a league also strips a bit of that away. I believe that any team can beat any team in this league, but I also think there’s an element of drama associated with potentially watching Harvard march into Cornell for a semifinal or championship match. I’d love to see Clarkson host a championship game at Cheel Arena, and I’d be interested to see how a title game could boost the overall atmosphere at places where attendance lags.
The thought of piling fans into ECAC buildings for a championship is, naturally, utopian, but it does beg the question of attendance among members. I’m not picking on any one team, but nearly half of the conference’s institutions are currently drawing at 50 percent or lower capacity. Proportionally, it’s hard to judge a team by that metric, especially if they play in a more-outdated or bigger barn that accommodates major events. Attendance figures are sometimes harder to judge because a certain number of fans can make a building seem louder than its capacity might show.
I guess what I’m saying is that the conversation is incredibly nuanced, but it feels like conference tournaments are heading in that inevitable direction (except for Hockey East). As facilities are becoming more and more updated and modern, it’s becoming harder to keep championship atmospheres away from school-based rinks. The amenities that used to make neutral sites more unique are disappearing, and that’s a credit to the leagues, the schools, the players, the coaches, and everything else that makes things possible.
Color me intrigued, and if there’s a way to make the ECAC tournament more exciting, I’m certainly for it. And Ken, from one overtime guy to another, that heart attack you mentioned from 2002, I hope the doctors blamed that on double overtime.
