Each week during the season, we look at the big events and big games around Division I men’s college hockey in Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
JIM: Dan, it’s great to “converse” with you here for our first TMQ together of the season.
And well, I’ll jump right into it with a not-so-bold statement: The state of Michigan owns college hockey right now.
Maybe that would’ve been bold if I said that a month ago, but since Michigan State, Western Michigan and Michigan are now 1-2-3 in the USCHO.com poll, this is nothing more than stating the obvious.
But what a time it is for these three programs. Western Michigan is coming off its first-ever national championship and just swept UMass Lowell on the road, outscoring their opponent 8-1. Michigan State is in the middle of its rebirth under Adam Nightingale and just swept last week’s No. 1 team, Boston University, on the road. And Michigan, though many had questions about this team coming into the season, is maybe the scariest team, now 6-0-0 and averaging 6.67 goals per game.
“The Mitten” has always been a hockey hot bed (and we’re leaving out half of the Division I teams in the state in this discussion right now), but I don’t think that 6-8 years ago I could’ve seen this trajectory coming for the Great Lakes State.
DAN: You aren’t kidding.
I remember interviewing former NCHC commissioner Josh Fenton and Minnesota Duluth head coach Scott Sandelin in the aftermath of Duluth’s national championship in 2019. Each of them remarked about how nobody could have envisioned the NCHC’s overall success when the league formed in 2013, but Sandelin, in particular, compared the league’s then-run of championships to the old WCHA’s successful banner party of the 2000s. Having remembered and looked back at that stretch between 2002-06, it was hard to envision teams anyone catching the run produced specifically by teams in Minnesota and North Dakota since each went to the Frozen Four in every season between 2002-08 with a dual-feature in 2005.
Comparatively speaking, it was impossible to get the Michigan schools into the same conversation. Michigan and Michigan State were among the nation’s elite, but Western’s elevation through the NCHC in the mid-2010s coincided with both of those two other schools’ inherent decline.
I think about 2017, for example, when Western Michigan won 22 games and got into the NCAA tournament for the third time since 2011, which had been the first time in the tournament since 1996. Michigan had been to a national championship in 2011 but slowly slipped to under .500 within two seasons before failing to reach the NCAA tournament over the next four years. A 2016 Big Ten championship helped pierce the doldrums, but truly elite seasons didn’t exist until the post-COVID era. Ditto for Michigan State, which won the national championship in 2007 before backsliding through 20-loss seasons nearly annually in the 2010s.
Getting one team in gear required one or two others to cease their own success, so putting them all together on the great and grand scale is nearly impossible to fathom. Maybe it’s a sign of how much college hockey’s changing, but finding another state that enjoyed this type of success requires a bit of additional context that even my Massachusetts-based brain can’t handle.
Sure, we’ve had three top-ranked teams out here, for example, but look at the sheer volume of programs in the Commonwealth. Maybe Minnesota? But even then, it’s hard to quantify success when we normally combine the Gophers with that highly-successful team from the Dakota next door.
JIM: You brought up Minnesota and North Dakota at the end, and those two teams were able to renew their old WCHA rivalry this past weekend in Grand Forks. The series ended up a split, which is probably appropriate given the back-and-forth history over the years. But the win for Minnesota on Saturday must have felt like the proverbial 800-pound-gorilla off the back.
The Gophers start to this season has been less than ideal. After an opening night win against Michigan Tech, Minnesota was winless in four (0-3-1) heading into Saturday’s game. And Friday’s 5-2 loss where the host Fighting Hawks scored three times in the third to break open a 2-2 game had to feel like an early-season rock bottom.
As much as what I just said sounds critical of Minnesota, it’s not. I think the ability to dig deep and win Saturday’s game in arguable THE toughest road environment is impressive and might be the character effort that Bob Motzko’s team can look back on in the second half as a pretty crucial game for his team. How do you feel at this point about the Gophers?
DAN: I would’ve been a lot more freaked out if the weekend hadn’t been a split.
I can’t remember if it was here or not, but I was pretty hard on Minnesota for losing a home series to Boston College. I didn’t necessarily love what I saw out of BC against Quinnipiac, so losing at home could have really come back to haunt the Gophers if they hadn’t picked up a win at North Dakota. It was, in my mind, the equivalent of playing a pocket pair of fives on a Texas Hold ‘Em table when the turn gave you Ace-King. You’re basically praying for a five on the river, or you’re hoping and praying that the guy across from you doesn’t have Ace-King. Getting the five to win the hand was a stroke of luck, and while I don’t think it’s luck that Minnesota split with North Dakota, I do think that it was maybe an early-season-saver against the odds.
It’s always hard to determine, though, how a team’s final hand plays out. We all talk about Quinnipiac from last year, at least.
On an individual level, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the newer names that are jumping off of the early page. Charlie Cerrato is 15 points deep into his sophomore year at Penn State, and Minnesota Duluth’s Jayson Shaugabay is already halfway to matching his entire point total from last year’s 36-game season. In Boston, Dean Letourneau looks like he’s starting to break out as a point-per-game player at BC, and Miami has three scorers in the national top 20, including Kocha Delic, who is averaging a goal per game since arriving from the CHL.
Flipping it to you – give me someone that you’ve noticed that’s been a pleasant surprise on anyone’s roster.
JIM: I will admit that I don’t know that one player stands out, but the youth in net who are having early-season success have opened my eyes.
Take a look at the top 10 goals against averages in the country (albeit with a very small sample size – heck the Ivies haven’t played yet). But in that top 10, five are freshmen, led by Denver’s Quentin Miller, who has allowed just a single goal against in his two starts, four are sophomore and you have to go down all the way to 10th on the list to find Miller’s counterpart at DU – Paxton Geisel, a junior, and the only upperclassman on the list.
Goaltending across all of college hockey feels younger this year. Not necessarily by age with the ever-increasing age of freshman hockey players. But you don’t have many seniors in the nation carrying their team. There are a few among the nation’s leaders – Tyler Muszelik at UConn, Chase Clark at Canisius (who is playing on his fourth team in four years), Alex Tracy at Minnesota State and Kaiden Mbereko at Colorado College to name a few. But this feels like a season where, if we get to the Frozen Four and have four freshmen start the national semifinals, we shouldn’t be shocked.
DAN: That’s the beauty of college sports, isn’t it?
For all of the talk about transfer portal, NIL impacts, new roster turnovers, NHL contracts and year-over-year changes, we’re always guaranteed for even the most experienced team to change its players every four to five years.
Maybe that’s why these nonconference games are so important. Beyond the NPI implications, and back to the Minnesota point, these games are perfect for teams to forge their young players together in a way that comes back later in the year. Even Nathan Airey, who has seen more time than Luca Di Pasquo, hasn’t played nearly as much as the typical junior or senior in college hockey. He’s now played against Michigan Tech, Boston College and North Dakota. At some point, those big game atmospheres are going to carry him into the NCAA tournament.
The gamble is being there at the end and not wasting TOO much time, but we have to assume that a team like Minnesota might get its way into the tournament. Even if it doesn’t, these games will eventually pay off for the next player or the next player after that, and for these young guys, if they can continue to grow, I think this might – or hopefully does – touch off a new trend of seeing younger players thrust into big spots.