(Ed. Note: Ryan Lambert is our resident NCAA Hockey nut, and we decided it’s time to unleash his particular brand of whimsy on the college game every week. So NCAA HOCKEY 101 will run every Tuesday on Puck Daddy. Educate yo self.)
The first half of the Hockey East season was a little weirder than anyone might have expected.
Boston College started out flat. Providence College, picked to win the conference by coaches and media alike in the preseason, did the same. Merrimack surged ahead, Vermont did the same. It didn't make a lot of sense to the pundits who watch the conference on a weekly basis. Why were these mediocre-to-bad teams doing so well, and these good teams so poorly?
The good news for the good teams was that the losing hasn't endured. BC and PC alike have surged ahead since mid-November or so and, while they've endangered their hopes of earning an at-large bid with slow starts, the kind of hot play they've turned in more recently still has them in the conversation. Both for the national tournament and in their own conferences.
For both of these teams, finishing in the top-four in Hockey East is crucial, because the top four teams don't have to play in the best-of-three first-round series that could produce injuries and bad results. (Not that I'd expect, say, UMass to knock off Notre Dame, or whatever, but who wants to play three extra games when you don't have to?) Thus, Providence and BC turn their eyes toward really and truly securing such a spot.
The Friars, for their part, have done a lot of the spadework already; they started out 1-3-1, but have since gone 12-3 — including going 9-1 in their last 10 — to take a tenuous hold on fourth place in this relatively young season. All teams in the conference still have fully half of their 22-game league slates left to play, and some have as many as 14 or 15 left. Providence, unfortunately, is on the higher side of that number with 12 of 22 left, but only 12 points from the 10 they've played to date. Lowell and BU lead the conference with 16 apiece (the latter in 10 games to the former's nine), and Vermont is third with 15 in 11.
And as Providence looks immediately behind it, it will see Notre Dame at two points back with two games in hand, and both BC and Merrimack three back with one in hand. That's a lot of fending off they're going to have to do, but the good news is they really haven't played against the dregs of the conference (two games apiece with eighth-place UConn, 10-place Maine, and 12th-place UMass all await in what looks to be a cakewalk February). And given how they've been playing lately, things should only get better for them.
Their goals-for percentage since Nov. 22 is approaching 70 percent, and their shots-for is a robust 55.4 percent. This is a team getting the kind of high-quality goaltending it should have been getting all year, as well as driving possession. Heck, they're even shooting pretty respectably (9.2 percent) after a dismal first month and a half in which they scored just 19 goals in 10 games. Not that I wouldn't expect the PDO in all situations to come down a little bit from the 104.2 posted in this hugely positive stretch, but the results should keep coming for this team.
Likewise the Eagles at Boston College. They had a lot of questions coming into the year, and answered very few of them with a 4-5-0 start. But then, it's almost like this ultra-talented team full of NHL draft picks realized, “Ah yes, we're all really good at hockey.” The results since? They're 7-2-1 since Nov. 14, with their only losses coming to Minnesota — a very good team that has somewhat weirdly struggled this year, even if they are still in the top-10 in the Pairwise — and Providence. The Friars also played them to a draw. Since they got their heads on straight, all the numbers line up nicely for BC: a goals-for of 60.4 percent, a shots-for of 50.1 percent (okay, they need to get better here), to go with a more sustainable PDO of 103.6 (10.6 shooting, .930 goaltending).
The likelihood that either of these teams catch Lowell or BU isn't very high. They've probably put themselves in too deep a hole for that, and thus a regular-season conference title seems out of the question.
But Vermont appears very likely to clear some space for them in that home ice conversation.
The Catamounts have only lost their last two games, but those were the first truly good opponents they've played since — what a coincidence! — they split with Providence in mid-November. During that time, they've likewise piled up some impressive stats (63.2 percent goals-for, 51.6 percent shots) but look at the middling-to-pathetic teams they've played: UConn, UMass for two, Maine for two, St. Lawrence for two, and Air Force. They went 7-1 in that stretch, with the only loss being in that first one to UConn, 2-1.
Frankly, they should have scored more goals against these teams, and much of that goals-for percentage comes from having scored 14 in two games against Amherst, and 10 in two against Maine. More recently, Providence shut them out 3-0 on home ice, then they went down to Yale and lost 3-1. They're just 1-4-1 against teams I'd consider to be of some actual quality (Providence, Yale, Notre Dame) this year, with just seven goals scored and 16 allowed in those six games. Which speaks to how easy their schedule has been, and how little they do against good opponents.
Vermont has a tough back half too: BU, Lowell, and BC are all on the docket for a pair of games, and the latter two series are on the road. They also host two with Merrimack, which hasn't been an easy out for anyone to this point. The Catamounts may have the third-best winning percentage in Hockey East, but given how hard these two actually good teams are charging up the standings behind them, that doesn't seem like it'll hold for much longer.
WCHA keeps rolling
Earlier this year I mentioned that some of the top teams in the WCHA would probably come back to earth after breathlessly hot starts. And that's been a bit of a mixed bag, in point of fact.
The Pairwise still has Minnesota State — the one truly legitimate club in the conference for my money — at No. 2 in the nation, and with good reason. They're 14-4-1, against the fifth-best schedule in the country to this point. All the underlying numbers dazzle, because they both start with a six: 61.9 percent shots-for and 62.9 percent goals-for. Despite a 100.5 PDO. This is the most sustainably excellent team in the country, and I'm not sure anyone else is even close. They're only 3-2 out-of-conference but thy got super-unlucky with only .843 goaltending. Their goaltending hasn't been any good overall either (.892), but it doesn't matter. If they can come together and actually stop the small number of shots making it through to the net (just 20.95 per game) from going in as often, they might never lose again.
But two more WCHA teams grace the top-10 in the PWR, with Bowling Green somehow still at No. 4, and Michigan Tech at 10. Bowling Green has done it largely behind an unsustainable PDO (103.3) that greatly outstrips its talent level, and Tech (103.4) is in the same boat. But at least the Huskies are really dominating possession, even if their strength of schedule has dropped to 27th.
Now that we're headed back into conference play, there's no reason to believe either team is going to falter down the stretch in a soft WCHA; only two other teams in the 10-team conference even have records above .500; no one else is close. Tech in particular stands to benefit, even after that embarrassing loss to Wisconsin, with only one road game in its next 10 (and that one road date is on Friday). Nine straight at home, almost all of them against soft opponents, will do wonders for the team's record. Bowling Green's slate is a little harder than that in terms of travel, but not opponent.
The WCHA may very well place three teams in the national tournament this year, which would be remarkable. Two of those teams continue to not-impress me, but in a short season, this is what happens when you get the bounces early and play cupcakes for the entire second half.
Eichel is back
Finally, Jack Eichel returned from what I'm sure he feels was a national disgrace of an effort at World Junior. He sat out Saturday's BU tie with Union, and just sat there signing autographs for kids all night instead, but he'll be back in the lineup when the Terriers travel to Madison to pummel Wisconsin this coming weekend.
Which is odd considering he was supposed to be suiting up for the Chicoutimi French Words by now, from what was being screamed a few weeks ago. So weird that those persistent rumors weren't enough to lure him away from a league he is dominating (a CF% between 65-70, and 27 points in 16 games) to play against rowdy teens who are even worse than what he's currently facing.
But I'm sure the Q looked at Eichel's performance at World Juniors and decided they didn't need him after all.
At least, that's about as plausible as the rumors from the CHL were this entire time.
A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)
- Boston University (tied Union)
- North Dakota (won an exhibition against the US Under-18s)
- Minnesota State (took three points at Northern Michigan)
- Harvard (won an exhibition against the Russian Red Stars, then beat RPI)
- UMass Lowell (beat RIT and Merrimack)
- Minnesota (lost to Merrimack, beat RIT)
- Miami (swept RPI)
- Minnesota Duluth (swept two exhibition games at Lakehead)
- Denver (tied Dartmouth, beat Brown)
- Providence (swept Colorado College)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here .
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