The majority of ECAC Hockey teams have spent the second half of the season trying to catch Quinnipiac.
As recently as last week, as the last of the regular-season weekends crested on the horizon of college hockey’s last month, six-point weekends sent teams flying towards the top of a league hoping to catch its three-time defending Cleary Cup champions. Each path was clear, but they all depended on a potential slip-up by a team that wasn’t quite the invincible monarch of years past.
It wasn’t a guarantee, but the seedling still planted and hatched enough for a bit of exploration and interest.
As it turned out, none of it really mattered.
A six-point weekend against RPI and Union clinched at least a first round bye for a program that hasn’t played a first round game since 2018, and if all goes according to plan in Friday’s one-game weekend series at Brown, the Cleary Cup will once again reside in Hamden, Connecticut with a team that’s made a habit of playing at the national level.
“I’m big on focusing on the controllables,” said Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold. “And we need to win every game that we play in. It’s not about winning this many before we clinch. I probably [thought] about it when I was younger, but I think now it’s just focused on the controllables – how we can win, how we can early and position ourselves for the NCAA tournament.
“A third piece of that is how we can get as high up in the Pairwise as possible because you can get last change and maybe a better regional, but if we focus on the controllables and where we are as a team, we’ll still have a little ways to go [but] we’ll get better on those things [that need improvement].”
Sweeping the Capital District teams didn’t end those conversations, but the Bobcats stamped their ticket to the quarterfinals by stomping through their opponents on home ice. They used three different goal scorers to establish a 3-0 lead in the first period of Friday night’s game against Union before jump-starting the offense to a six-goal outburst that marked the most explosive game since a 9-2 win over Princeton in mid-January. Thirteen different skaters recorded at least one point, and two goals in the third period zapped any drama created from the Garnet Chargers’ two-goal second period that cut into the lead twice despite a response from Christophe Fillion.
It only looked like a serious threat, and on Saturday night, the 12th consecutive win at M&T Bank Arena included both a hat trick from Collin Graf and a highlight-reel goal from Travis Treloar. Both had registered points against Union with Treloar scoring one of the team’s first period goals, but the headline-stealing performance buried the Engineers’ short-lived 1-0 lead.
“We played well on both nights,” Pecknold explained. “Guys were locked in. The rink was sold out, and there were just a lot of positives. I thought we’d played well against Clarkson in that win after the St. Lawrence game, which we didn’t play well. They’d taken advantage of our struggling a little bit and created those struggles, but I thought we’ve been really good since that loss.
“A lot of things came together for the Union-RPI weekend,” he added. “We were running, we were playing well, and the crowd was rocking. And from there, we got a lot of bounces that were going our way.”
The bounces included Graf’s second career hat trick and a Hobey-like statement from a player often operating in the shadows of the bigger, more well-known players in Hockey East. A First Team All-America selection last year, he earned Hobey Baker top-10 honors for a season in which he tied the program’s Division I record with 59 points. He won ECAC’s scoring championship and finished third in total points, and it was his goal with under three minutes remaining in the national championship game that forced the overtime face-off that won the program’s first-ever crown.
The NCAA leader in assists, his return to the program after spending his first year as a breakout influence automatically gave Quinnipiac one of the most dynamic skaters in the nation, and his 1.62 points per game pace has him second nationally behind Boston College’s Gabe Perrault. His scoring clip is equal or better to Ben Steeves and Ryan Leonard, and his hat trick against the Engineers marked the ninth time he had at least three points in a single game.
“He was probably a 60-foot player [when he transferred to Quinnipiac,” Pecknold said. “He was really good from 60 feet, and I got on him hard and worked him hard with the staff to tell him that he had to round out his game. He had to become a tutor for players. He’s not the first guy we’ve said that to, but he was so committed and bought into it that he became a great 200-foot player. He defends and competes, and he’s ready to go on face-offs. His first goal against RPI came from his defending, and he made a great defensive play to send himself on a partial one-on-one. All of that happened because he defended and competed.
“When you compete defensively, you get to play more offense.”
Being able to count on players like Graf, Treloar, Jacob Quillan, Sam Lipkin and others allowed Quinnipiac to mold the newer half of its roster into a cohesive unit over the course of the season. There were hiccups – more so this year than some might remember due to the team’s overall dominance in the last few years – but the result on the back end is practically the same: if the Bobcats win on Friday night, the Cleary Cup race is over.
None of that means Quinnipiac is bound for Lake Placid, and requisite debates still exist about the team’s ability to win its first conference championship since 2016 because, well, there’s been a different team winning a league postseason title on an annual basis since the Bobcats beat Harvard with a 4-1 winner in the third year after ECAC moved back to Herb Brooks Arena. But the idea of Quinnipiac playing with momentum in the postseason is a big lift for a league battling for a second or third national tournament berth between Cornell (No. 14 in the Pairwise) and any team that isn’t the Bobcats or Big Red.
“We’ve had some peaks and valleys,” Pecknold said. “We got really good in late November and December but then had the break, and then we struggled a little bit out of break. We struggled a little bit to get back to realizing how hard it was to win at this level, but if there was one thing that stands out, it’s just how high character this group is. That’s what we’ve had in the past. You bring in 12 new guys, you just don’t know how they’re going to acclimate to our culture, our identity, and how we want to play. You have freshmen, you have kids from North Dakota Ohio State and different places transferring, they’ve all played under different systems. So that’s the biggest thing.
“This is a great group of really high-character guys, and that’s a part of why we’ve won as much as we have this year.”
