As those who have followed the conference currently known as the CCHA for the past decade know, things in this conference are rarely easy.
Even though Minnesota State had previously won six consecutive MacNaughton Cups, the path to the MacNaughton is rarely easy. Championships are usually won by a few points here and a few points there. It typically follows that any team can beat any team on a given weekend.
Last weekend’s regular-season finale was the epitome of this. Going into the final two games of the season, two teams were still alive for the MacNaughton Cup, and six teams had the possibility of finishing in home ice slots.
In the end, Bemidji State ended up winning the MacNaughton by nine points, while second place and seventh place were separated by just five points.
But–as most coaches will tell you–it’s a new season now. Previous records don’t matter. Every team has the chance to win four games and make a run to win the Mason Cup.
Take it from Bemidji State coach Tom Serratore, whose top-seeded Beavers, coming off their first MacNaughton Cup championship since 2017, will host eighth-seeded Ferris State in the first round of the CCHA’s Mason Cup playoffs.
“The first round of the playoffs is always stressful for everybody,” Serratore said. “They’re tight games, and typically there’s always many games in one. You just have to keep an even keel. Now we’re at the point where it’s win or go home.”
Win or go home is right, especially considering that this season, nobody in the CCHA is going to be an at-large NCAA tournament team. The team who wins the Mason Cup is moving on to the national tournament (aside from St. Thomas, who is ineligible for the tournament as they transition to Division I…. but we’ll discuss that more in-depth if it happens).
For reference, here’s a list of the first-round matchups, with the teams’ final conference record and total league points in parenthesis:
1. Bemidji State (15-7-2, 48 points) vs. 8. Ferris State (6-17-1,19 points)
2. St. Thomas (12-11-1, 39 points) vs. 7. Lake Superior State (11-12-1, 34 points)
3. Michigan Tech (12-10-2, 39 points) vs. 6. Bowling Green (11-12-1, 35 points)
4. Minnesota State (12-10-2, 38 points) vs. 5. Northern Michigan (10-10-4, 36 points)
That’s a lot of matchups between teams who could have been on the other side of the home-ice cut line if a single result had gone their way. In such a tightly-contested league, every coach is expecting a battle in their quarterfinal round.
Take, for example, Bemidji’s matchup with Ferris. On paper this looks like the easiest to predict. However, there’s more than meets the eye: The Bulldogs beat the Beavers once in Big Rapids and forced overtime in one of their games in Bemidji. All four matchups between them were in doubt until the final buzzer.
“I don’t look at anything, what place they’re in, their PairWise, anything,” Serratore said. “If you start looking at that kind of stuff, your mind will start playing tricks on you. All I can tell you is that we’re 2-1-1 against them this year. They beat us (in Big Rapids), we went to an overtime game when we were here, and they’ve all been tight games. They beat us in the playoffs here before. Really, it doesn’t matter. Any matchups in college hockey, every game is going to be a nailbiter.”
St. Thomas head coach Rico Blasi pointed out that his team’s matchup with Lake Superior State could have gone the other way.
“This is a really good hockey team. They play hard, they’re really well structured. They really took it to us the second night here…. There’s a lot of good things that they do, and they’re a really good hockey team,” Blasi said in his media conference on Monday. The Tommies and the Lakers split their lone two-game series in Mendota Heights in November. “Second to seventh place, it could easily be flipped right now, and we could just as easily be going to Lake State, so this is a big time challenge and a step for our program.”
The Tommies, in their third year after moving up from Division III, have taken great strides since their inaugural season and had a chance to win the MacNaughton before injuries started to pile up in the second half of the season.
“As I look at the regular season overall, with the adversity that we’ve had since January 1, not having a full lineup, we’ve lost I think 150 man games,” Blasi said. “I’m really proud of how we finished the regular season. But now we’ve got a new season and all bets are off.”
The Tommies finished tied for second along with Michigan Tech, who was the team most picked to win the CCHA at the start of the season. Tech also had to deal with some injuries and adversity throughout the year but played their way into a home ice spot in the final six games of the season, taking 12 of 18 points.
“When I look at the whole grand scheme of things, we were picked to win the league, and we finished tied for second, with a pretty good finish. In our last three weeks we played teams that were all ahead of us. I give our guys a ton of credit.,” Tech head coach Joe Shawhan said in his media session this week. “There were a lot of expectations, and I like that. I like those expectations, but when all is said and done my message to the group was that you had a really good run of consistent hockey to end the year.
“We went through the top of the league in the last three weeks, all of them playing their game, on a roll, playing for a championship. we were really the only team that was fighting from the outside… We were five points out of a home ice playoff berth. Two games out with four games left, and we ended up finishing second place. I look at all the positives. It’s the end game we’re after. The journey helped us grow, and to get where we are right now, I like where we’re at (going into the playoffs).”
The final playoff series is a rematch of last season’s CCHA Mason Cup championship game, which was hosted by Minnesota State. This time, the Wildcats are heading back to Mankato a few weeks earlier, but NMU head coach Grant Potulny said that wasn’t the first thing on his team’s mind.
“Things work out the way they’re supposed to work out, and it worked out that we’re supposed to play Mankato in the first round this year,” Potulny said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it, they finished four we finished five and you’ve got to go win two games on the road, which is no easy task. If you’re thinking about last year, it’s not going to do you any good for this year.”
