Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) Down goes No. 1, but does No. 1 go down?
The intention this week was to start another conversation about how Boston College and Boston University steamed towards one another as the undisputed top two teams in the country in both the weekly voted-on national poll and the ongoing PairWise Rankings, but a Providence College victory on Saturday night upset the top-ranked Eagles one night after the Friars self-immolated at Conte Forum with a 7-1 loss. The regulation, 4-3 win at Schneider Arena was five minutes away from overtime before Chase Yoder’s second goal of the night finished a third rally for PC, and it dropped the Eagles into second place in the PWR once the weekend finished sorting itself out from other games.
BC and BU are still the top two teams in the nation in the Pairwise, but the question remains if pollsters penalize the Eagles for a loss to a top-10 team when the majority of teams with resumes for the top of the poll absorbed their own tough results. The Terriers are the logical successor in that regard, but their identical record to BC split the perception of having played an inferior opponent this weekend in their sweep over New Hampshire. The Wildcats are, without question, a worthy opponent, but how voters weigh the Providence series against the UNH sweep remains to be seen when it comes to determining which side of the Green Line Rivalry grabs the No. 1 spot in the poll.
2) Doo, doo, doo lookin’ out my back door
The wildcard to that conversation is a Michigan State team that smoked its way past Penn State with a pair of road wins in Hockey Valley. The aggregate 12-3 score more specifically staked Sparty’s claim to the top spot in the Big Ten with Wisconsin playing out-of-conference games against Lindenwood, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where some first-place votes don’t land on the Mitten.
Wisconsin, after all, failed to sweep the Lions and wound up dropping to fifth in the Pairwise after the BC loss opened a path to the No. 1 spot. Michigan State subsequently elevated to No. 3 with an overall record that’s slightly better on overall percentages to the Eagles and Terriers, but the two losses to BC won the Eagles a key comparison despite occurring before the Halloween holiday.
Even looking outside those three to teams like Denver and North Dakota revealed some possible holes, but the NCHC is likely to siphon some votes, as is Maine, which lost to Connecticut but remains a force that could have also given Hockey East three teams within the top four spots in the Pairwise.
3) Into the lion’s den
Tying a team to its losses in January isn’t necessarily a disaster, but Wisconsin’s tie against Lindenwood incurred some fallout that had a downstream impact on the national tournament’s seeding. The Badgers’ RPI likely would have taken a hit regardless of outcome in both games against the Lions, but the Pairwise stipulates that wins over those types of teams where just appearing in a game lowers the RPI regardless of results are subtracted from a team’s overall rating. Ties and losses are counted, and that meant the Badgers, who were in the No. 2 spot throughout Saturday night, fell three spots despite having a nation-leading 19 wins.
It was their first tie of the season, and it would have been worse had Owen Lindmark not scored twice in the third period to reverse a 2-1 deficit. The Lions then received a Coltan Wilkie goal with a little over five minutes remaining, and the ensuing result was a 2-2 tie that dropped Wisconsin into the No. 2 seeded area.
3) PairWise fallout
Wisconsin’s slip-up against Lindenwood enabled Quinnipiac to slide into the No. 4 spot after the Bobcats won their way past Princeton, their ECAC travel partner, but moving into a No. 1 seed for a regional means the defending national champions are looking at a scenario where they’re sent to a far-away land for their regional appearance. The two regions out east include sites in Rhode Island and Western Massachusetts, but the Connecticut-based team would see a scenario where BC and BU, the top two teams, would earn the right to stay closer to home. Instead of playing as a No. 2 seed in a regional in New England, Quinnipiac would then get sent to either Missouri or South Dakota.
Both are very good hockey markets, but incumbent eyeballs for all teams are likely to look at where the host sites wind up sending their respective teams. Wild cards are still abound, including a Brown team that both hosts the Providence regional and moved its way into second in the ECAC with a weekend sweep, but it remains to be seen how their fallout would wind up impacting the top-4 if three of the seeds are from the east or, in Maine’s case, specifically from the same league.
For what it’s worth, though, all of those seeds are still up for grabs, and the Black Bears had an inside track to a top-4 spot before their loss to Connecticut. North Dakota and Denver likewise failed to gain ground when they absorbed a loss and tie in their respective series, and Providence, an outside team without an entire second half run, split its weekend set with BC.
4) Big Red ending
Talk is going to shift to the entire Bracketology before long, but the rest of the Pairwise didn’t change much outside of Arizona State’s sweep loss to Cornell. Nobody gained or lost significant ground, but the Sun Devils might have completely lost their opportunity to play in the national tournament as an independent after the losses to the Big Red dropped them to No. 17 in the most recent rankings.
Cornell had been down into the 30s at one point, but the Big Red entered the weekend as the No. 20 team before elevating to No. 16 with the two wins on the road. Winning in overtime on Friday certainly didn’t hurt, but following up the 3-2 victory with a 4-1 win on Saturday dropped a team hovering around the No. 12 region down to the outside of the national bubble.
Two main thoughts on that. One, Arizona State now has to essentially run the table through its last dozen games, none of which are against teams ranked higher in the Pairwise, in order to utilize the correct RPI and have an outside shot at moving back inside the bubble. None of that is a guarantee without crunching the numbers, and this weekend certainly felt – to outsiders, at least – that the games were a must-win.
The second thought is that Cornell is now the second-highest ECAC team in a Pairwise scenario where the league slipped its way into one-bid status if Quinnipiac won the conference tournament. The two teams will meet in a game at Lynah Rink next weekend, and a win for Cornell, while possibly ensuring ECAC of a shot at two bids, would also possibly derail the Bobcats’ shot at a No. 1 seed.
5) SOS means someone help me
Not to get caught up only on Pairwise talk, but the number of one-bid leagues makes it possible and probable that good teams are going to miss the national tournament. One of those teams – Massachusetts – is a host school for the regional hosted in Springfield, Massachusetts, and its status as the No. 14 team in the statistical rankings throws a possible wrench into Hockey East’s ability to send one of its two juggernauts to a region in their home state. Because they wouldn’t be allowed to play the Minutemen in the first round, avoiding the Hockey East matchup would open the door for a team like Quinnipiac to play closer to home.
The bigger issue, though, is that the Minutemen might lose a shot at the tournament if Quinnipiac doesn’t win ECAC. The highest-ranked team from the CCHA and Atlantic Hockey is RIT at No. 21, and that translates to the No. 15 team (currently Michigan, which slaughtered Stonehill over two games) and No. 16 team (the aforementioned Cornell) being eliminated by the respective league tournament champions. Any other team winning its way into the tournament would then knock out the No. 14 team, and remembering that Quinnipiac only has one ECAC championship to its name despite running roughshod over the conference for the bulk of the past two decades is a warning to both the Minutemen, who slid into the spot after splitting with Merrimack, and St. Cloud, which had a two-goal lead in the third period but wound up tying Denver before winning a shootout for league purposes.
6) Hail Brunonia
I mentioned Brown as an earlier wild card, and at the risk of staying in the eastern leagues a little too much, it’s worth noting how the Bears followed up Yale’s jump to fourth spot by sweeping Harvard and Dartmouth for a leap into second place. Their six points moved them from just outside the bottom three and into a one-point advantage over Clarkson, and the Bears are now just over a hard weekend’s work away from reaching Quinnipiac provided there’s a little help from some friends.
They were especially impressive on Saturday after a little bit of a slower start produced a 12-5 shot disadvantage in the first period against the Big Green, but Alex Pineau’s power play goal in the second period and Ryan Bottrill’s third period goal was enough for Bruno to upend its Ancient Eight rival within the ECAC.
Brown hasn’t hosted a quarterfinal series since a third place finish in 2004 ended with a two-game sweep at the hands of Harvard – a regular season that ended with an ECAC win over Vermont – but even with a long way to go in the 2023-2024 season, the Bears are poised for a run with a road trip to the North Country teams at St. Lawrence and Clarkson on the horizon.
7) Snowstorm forces postponements
Every year has that one weekend when Mother Nature shows up and wreaks havoc on the carefully-articulated league schedules. In Western New York, the blizzard that produced a postponement of the NFL playoff game in Buffalo likewise forced reschedulings across Atlantic Hockey after Canisius-RIT and Niagara-Mercyhurst couldn’t drop the puck due to weather safety concerns.
The start time for the Niagara-Mercyhurst game on Saturday was initially moved to 5 p.m. to account for the weather, but the forecast didn’t improve before the puck dropped. Instead, the game was postponed with a date to be determined for the rescheduling of a one-off game of a three-game series scheduled for its finale on the last weekend of the season.
Canisius-RIT, meanwhile, moved Saturday’s game to Tuesday with a season finale home-and-home for the three-game series slotted, like Mercyhurst-Niagara, on that final weekend.
8) Tournament races intensify
Most eyes are on the national tournament race, but much of that attention span is going to shortly shift to the conference radars once February draws closer. When they do, a number of teams are going to find themselves with a hot-under-the-collar, close race built on the parity that exists in virtually every conference.
St. Cloud, for example, is currently teetering on the national bubble, but the Huskies have a two-point lead over North Dakota for the top spot in NCHC. Denver, a potential top seed in the national tournament, is instead in third in its own conference and is tied with Western Michigan. In the Big Ten, Notre Dame is on the outside of the bubble status on Minnesota and MIchigan, but both the Gophers and Wolverines are behind the Irish in the standings with a six-point differential splitting fifth to third.
Even Atlantic Hockey, where RIT is battling for a top-20 spot in the Pairwise, is watching Sacred Heart and AIC lead the Tigers for the top two spots in an on-campus tournament that reseeds in each round, and ECAC’s two teams that are over .500 and not named Quinnipiac – Clarkson and Cornell – are third and ninth in the league standings.
9) Milestones
Congratulations are in order for a few milestones achieved over the weekend.
Harvard’s win over Yale on Saturday night broke the schneid for the Crimson while simultaneously giving head coach Ted Donato his 300th career victory, making him one of three coaches in the team’s program history to reach the mark. He was joined by Princeton women’s coach Cara Morey, who won her 100th career game with a 3-1 win over Harvard.
Sacred Heart likewise reached a wins plateau with its 400th program win as a Division I program, which might not seem like much in comparison to the storied histories at several, more national brands, but with the team’s new arena at the Martire Family Arena, it’s worth noting the growth of the program.
10) Thumbs up for Dec
One last note on the weekend. I know I spent ample time this week discussing national rankings and talking about some of the teams, and a number of stories were probably omitted or missed. I look forward to hearing which ones should have made some noise in here, as is the weekly custom, at least.
I wanted to close this week with a note, though, about Bentley and Sacred Heart’s game on Friday night in Waltham, Mass. The matchup featured two of Atlantic Hockey’s oldest and closest rivals but was played in honor of three-year old Declan Lyons, a Waltham boy currently battling an aggressive form of brain cancer. Hosted amidst a sea of friends and family, the night raised close to $25,000 for the family and cause associated with Declan’s fight at Boston Children’s Hospital.
I know games like this exist throughout college hockey but becoming a father over the past couple of years really put this into perspective. Seeing the support firsthand struck a nerve located within my soul, and it really, really, really brought me into a community that rallied around a game. From a pure hockey perspective, I couldn’t have been prouder to see two teams fight one another for league points while honoring a cause that was something much bigger than everyone in the arena.
Declan’s biggest thing is a thumbs up. It’s his way of telling everyone he’s doing alright, and it morphed into a movement around Boston’s Metrowest region where people can let him know that they have his back by simply putting their thumb up. “Thumbs Up For Dec,” as the hashtag is referred, is, in my mind, about as pure as it gets, and I look forward to hearing about the causes that college hockey continues to inspire on a regular basis.
