For all the parity, all the times that teams leapfrogged one another and stumbled into each other over the course of a six-month season, the 2024-25 ECAC Hockey season ended without a single team tied with one another.
A clean Cleary Cup championship race produced minimal drama on the season’s last day, and Quinnipiac added to its growing trophy case with a 4-0 win over St. Lawrence.
The overtime loss to Clarkson added a nice highlight to the season’s final race, but the Golden Knights truthfully needed to win Friday night’s game in regulation to really put pressure on the annual defending top seed in the playoffs. Not vanquishing the Bobcats in the third period with a one-goal lead essentially ended the threat, and the rest of the dominos began falling into place shortly thereafter.
We’re left with a postseason template that begins this week. For reference, let’s take a look at how the coaches voted, how I voted and how the season really turned out:
(Kudos to Chris Lerch for formatting here. The one major benefit to having Atlantic Hockey finish its regular season prior to ECAC was being able to use his postseason format as a template, so thanks to my USCHO big brother – as opposed to my actual big brother, who is also in college hockey… things get weird around here.)
Some quick hits:
-Everybody thought this was Cornell’s year, but nobody accounted for the injury bug. The Big Red finished sixth but rarely had a full roster for the full season, so we’ll never actually know if a healthy Cornell team could have pressured Quinnipiac. Regardless, coaches always talk about moving forward without excuses, so Cornell finishing sixth was probably the hardest thing to take into account.
-I’ve cracked this joke several times: stop picking against Quinnipiac. There’s an annual commentary about the team’s overall lack of postseason ECAC banners, but the Bobcats are always in the NCAA tournament conversation because of their ability to win the league’s regular season. Even this year, they’re right around the bubble despite the conference’s lack of Pairwise strength against the other conferences.
-Dartmouth reasonably delivered on its expectations and was in position to clinch a first round bye during the final weekend of the regular season. Given the immediacy of how the Big Green exploded onto the scene last year, finishing fifth, even without the bye, is a continued step for a team that was 11th and 12th in Reid Cashman’s first two years. In four years as a head coach, the team’s finishes balance each other out pretty well.
-The coaches expected Clarkson to return to form. I apparently did not. The coaches were right and proved, once again, that I know nothing about preseason predictions.
-Brown and Union each overperformed the coaches. I expected better finishes but still undersold their final slots. If this were a poker game, I called and raised the pot, but the modest raise was enough to protect my interests if I was wrong.
-Because of those factors, the rest of the teams finished right around where everyone expected but slotted within a place or two of our own predictions. The lone exception was St. Lawrence, which finished 12th despite producing some positive results. The Saints couldn’t string regulation wins together, but beating Cornell in late January, earning a shootout win over Princeton, and taking two points from an overtime win over Dartmouth stand out as building blocks into the postseason. Also, a bottom-three seed advanced out of the first round in 2020 (right before the world shut down), 2023 and 2024, with the No. 12 seed advancing from last year’s single elimination first round.
On to the first round:
The future
Quarterfinals, held March 14-16 on campus sites (best-of-three series)
Lowest Remaining Seed at No. 1 Quinnipiac
Second-lowest Remaining Seed at No. 2 Clarkson
Second-best Remaining Seed at No. 3 Colgate
Best Remaining Seed at No. 4 Union
Semifinals, held March 21 at Lake Placid’s Herb Brooks Arena (single elimination):
Lowest Remaining Seed vs. Best Remaining Seed
Second-Lowest Remaining Seed vs. Second-Best Remaining Seed
Championship, held March 22 at Lake Placid’s Herb Brooks Arena (single elimination):
Lowest Remaining Seed vs. Best Remaining Seed
First Round Matchups
No. 12 St. Lawrence at No. 5 Dartmouth
Head-to-head result: SLU swept the season series by beating the Big Green with a pair of 3-2 victories. The first was in New Hampshire in December before the return bout in the North Country went to overtime on Valentine’s Day weekend.
Last playoff head-to-head meeting: Fifth-seeded Dartmouth beat No. 12 St. Lawrence in three games during a 2019 first round series featuring an overtime winner by the Saints. The Big Green won an 8-0 third game to clinch a trip to Harvard for the quarterfinals, but the result came after a pair of one-goal games split the first two results in Hanover.
Things to watch: It’s easy to discount any team with the lowest seed in an all-inclusive league tournament, but St. Lawrence twice beat Dartmouth by playing its best hockey in the third period. Their mid-February meeting featured three goals in the first three minutes, but the Saints scored with 30 seconds left in the game to force overtime before scoring the game winner with under two minutes remaining in the 3-on-3 period.
It’s incredibly difficult to beat a team three times, but it’s also weird that we’re saying it about the No. 5 team having lost twice to the No. 12 team in the postseason. That said, expect special teams to play a huge role in this one: SLU’s potency on the power play produced a goal in four of the team’s last seven games, but opponents scored six goals over the last nine games of the season. Dartmouth, meanwhile, broke a nine-game power play drought by scoring against both Brown and Yale, but the Big Green boast a penalty kill ranked sixth in the nation that finished the year with a 5-5-1 record when allowing a power play goal.
No. 11 Yale at No. 6 Cornell
Head-to-head result: The Bulldogs tied the Big Red before winning a shootout in the teams’ first meeting at Lynah Rink, but Cornell answered the bell in the road game by scoring three unanswered goals in a 5-3 win at the Yale Whale.
Last playoff head-to-head meeting: Yale and Cornell haven’t played one another in the postseason in 14 years, which means their last head-to-head matchup in the ECAC Tournament was the 2011 championship game in Atlantic City. They haven’t played a campus site game since the Final Five format from 2002, which was my junior year of high school and two Trumps, two Obamas, a Biden and one-and-a-half Bushes ago.
Things to watch: It’s hard to pinpoint which line of thinking is the better motivational tactic. Cornell’s a candidate for “continuing momentum” after gathering steam with a 5-3-1 clip that produced a shootout win at Clarkson, but Yale can erase a key end-of-season slate that failed to generate a regulation win after January 18. For what it’s worth, the one victory came over Colgate, but dragging Union, Princeton and Harvard into overtime games only leave so many positive roots against a Big Red team angling for its 95th all-time win over its Ancient Eight rival.
No. 10 RPI at No. 7 Harvard
Head-to-head result: Harvard swept the season series when it beat the Engineers on its Senior NIght on February 22, and coupling it with a January 17 win in the Capital District gave the Crimson six points over an RPI team that was one away from ninth place and five points away from hosting a first round game as the No. 8 seed.
Last playoff head-to-head meeting: Third-seeded Harvard returned to the ECAC postseason with a three-game series win over sixth-seeded RPI in 2022. Perhaps most memorable in that series was RPI’s ability to push the series to three games with a double-overtime win after Harvard won the first game with a mirrored 4-3 result, also in overtime.
Things to watch: Harvard’s 3-7-2 record at home included a tie and shootout loss to St. Lawrence and an overtime loss to Princeton, and the regulation win over RPI represented the Crimson’s first win at Bright-Landry Hockey Center since the January 10-11 sweep over Brown and Yale.
Neither team has been great down the stretch, but the three RPI wins over Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth included two offensive breakouts. The goaltending conversation between Ben Charette and Aku Koskenvuo adds a fun layer to the head-to-head matchup against Noah Giesbrecht, who stopped 40 shots against Colgate and Dartmouth with 35 additional saves against Harvard, Princeton, Colgate, Yale and Brown.
No. 9 Princeton at No. 8 Brown
Head-to-head result: Brown scored a shootout win in November at home and won the head-to-head matchup by beating the Tigers, 3-2, in overtime during the second-to-last weekend of the season.
Last head-to-head playoff meeting: Brown swept Princeton in the 2019 first round, a series best remembered for an erstwhile color commentator who must remain nameless (cough cough) proclaiming that the Bears could “make reservations for the second round” after scoring an empty net goal to take a 5-2 lead in the third period. What transpired after that color commentator (it definitely wasn’t me) made that remark was a comeback for the ages, a triple overtime game now ranked 21st on the list of longest college hockey games ever played, and a replay on Alex Brink’s game winner that lasted far longer than anyone anticipated.
My brother and I still talk about broadcasting that game deep into a Providence night, and the stories are alternatively awesome and a bit too close for comfort.
Things to watch: Lawton Zacher’s .920 save percentage puts him second among ECAC goalies, but the sophomore allowed more than two goals in four of his final six appearances during the regular season. Prior to that stretch, he’d only allowed three-or-more goals on five separate occasions while off-setting those games with two shutouts. When he allows two-or-less goals in a game, Brown’s 11-2-3 record puts it on pace to compete with anyone in ECAC.
Princeton, meanwhile, went 6-5-1 away from home and is arguably one of ECAC’s best road warrior programs. Beating Clarkson in overtime in the season finale helped clinch the Cleary Cup for travel partner Quinnipiac, but the previous night’s win over St. Lawrence improved the Tigers to 4-2-0 in their last six road games.
Neither team can afford to take penalties, but Princeton’s power play is at least nudging over 20 percent. Both teams are killing under 80 percent, but Brown’s 17.9 percent power play largely rests its second half on the two goals from the season finale against Harvard and the three goals in the 5-1 win over Yale. Between the two games is a five-game drought that alternatively surrendered five power play goals, including a trifecta against Quinnipiac. Compare that to Princeton’s seven power play goals in five-of-seven games to end the year, though it doesn’t help that the Tigers surrendered eight special teams goals across the final eight-of-10 games.
