It’s been a busy and eventful first half of the season in women’s college hockey. With all the other happenings, there’s barely been time to take in the big picture. But as we head into the final weekend before the winter break, it might be time to ask: What’s going on in Hockey East?
The Northeastern Huskies are atop the conference, as predicted, but that’s about the only thing happening out East that is as expected. The conference often features some of the lower-ranked teams upsetting higher ranked ones, so that’s not super unusual. But especially in their out-of-conference matchups, Hockey East teams as a whole are struggling.
With the exception of NEWHA, every other conference is doing better against its counterparts than Hockey East is. They’ve lost the four games they’ve played against the WCHA and are 14-14-3 against the ECAC. The CHA continues to improve by leaps and bounds, but any Hockey East fan would tell you they expect better than a .611 win percentage against College Hockey America. And I’d bet Hockey East players and coaches themselves would tell you they’re not happy with a 7-2-1 record against NEWHA teams.
We see top-tier teams in the same conference beat each other up throughout regular season play, dishing out losses and blemishing records, but that’s not really what we’re seeing in Hockey East. These aren’t high percentage losses that voters won’t hold against them. These are games where Hockey East teams are losing the shot differential by more than 20 to teams that would be well below them in hypothetical rankings below 10.
It’s a troubling prospect for these teams.
Even as the NCAA tournament looks to expand, Northeastern would be the hockey Hockey East team with a sure bid to the postseason. Providence and Connecticut currently sit on the Pairwise bubble, just on the outside looking in.
Let me repeat that.
If the season ended today and the tournament was played with the proposed 11 team field, Hockey East would have one team in the NCAA tournament.
I feel as though the folks in Hockey East’s front office as well as at each member university would tell you that they expect more from themselves.
There’s not one quick fix or one single thing anyone is doing wrong here, but it’s an overall decline. There are a wide variety of talented players among Hockey East teams, but consistency has become an increasingly big problem across the board in this conference. Sure, Northeastern is firmly ensconced at the top, but that’s about the only thing one can count on from year to year right now.
The level of competition (or lack thereof) does the top team – in this case, Northeastern – no favors. The Huskies’ strength of schedule right now is 23rd in the country. Clarkson is the only top-11 team with a weaker slate of opponents so far. Dave Flint headed into last season’s national semifinal confident his team was prepared based on the season they played, but they struggled in the opening frame to keep up and adjust – something Flint admitted during his first intermission tv interview.
If the trend of this season continues in Hockey East, the team or teams that make the postseason will once again be behind the others in the bracket in terms of tournament readiness and having faced top-tier competition. That’s not a good motivator for the rest of the Hockey East teams – no one is playing to help prepare a team that’s not themselves to do well in the postseason, but it is one of the interesting side effects of the inconsistency and poor out-of-conference performances of all the teams in the league.
With the women’s game as a whole – and the college game in specific – ever evolving, the target for how to be a great team is constantly moving and coaches, players, programs and commissioners are all just doing their best to end up somewhat close to it. But the performance against out-of-conference opponents didn’t happen in a vacuum – they’re the result of a lot of inconsistent play and a failure to address, correct and understand how those erratic results can affect the conference long term.
One positive from the erratic play of top-half teams is that it has allowed lower-ranked squads to get big wins and finish higher in conference standings – both things you can bet those coaches are touting then they’re out recruiting. It’s good for the conference to be more wide open and for more schools to have the pull to be able to recruit bigger and better players. These wins build confidence and only compound upon each other, bringing more confidence and more clout when recruiting.
When strength of schedule, quality win bonuses and records against common opponents are all things the NCAA tournament committee all take into account when deciding on at-large bids, teams, coaches, players and the conference cannot look at the conference’s performance against non-conference teams and do nothing.
I don’t think there’s any one person or team responsible here. This is a storied conference with a ton of history that has to be honest about how the season has gone and start looking for ways to ensure the teams can close out sweeps, turn ties into wins and beat the opponents they are better than.
