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.
Dan Rubin: Happy Tuesday, once again, and welcome back to our next and finest edition of TMQ. For those of you who missed the return, I totally forgot to recap and review what we hope to accomplish by pitting our USCHO minds against one another, so forgive me and let me get it underway this week with help from our resident CCHA columnist — Jack Hittinger.
Think of this as your in-house water cooler college-hockey talk. We’ll spend a little bit more time going over some of our observations, and you’ll get it tinged with our points of view. It’s a great way to get insight from the different corners of our leagues, and we’re increasing our rotation to include different columnists and their own unique perspectives.
In short, it’s a good way for everyone to indict my opinion that Massachusetts is the greatest state in the country, with the greatest hockey players, with the greatest tradition, and the greatest accent… that last one isn’t up for debate.
Welcoming Jack onto the board for the first time, let’s actually start with the CCHA and Bowling Green’s Ice Breaker Tournament championship. I don’t necessarily love overstating the importance of winning a tournament early or around the holiday time, but the Falcons came to New England and defeated both UConn and Sacred Heart to claim the first title for the league since Michigan Tech’s 2017 trophy for the WCHA — and yes, I claim spiritual predecession between the two.
Jack — talk to me about the impact of seeing Bowling Green win a title in Connecticut, and let me know if predecession is even a real word or not. Are we continuing to see a rise from the other leagues, given that Hockey East experienced some issues that we can revisit later on?
Jack Hittinger: Hi Dan, thanks for kicking it off and I’m glad to join the TMQ club after a few years of watching on the sidelines. I’m sure our readers will be glad to finally have some “west of the Mississippi” analysis on TMQ after years of Massachusetts apologia and East Coast bias. Of course, we here in the Midwest are MUCH too humble to openly brag about how much better our hockey is than yours. Instead, we’ll give you a polite “yeah, no,” before changing the topic so you don’t further embarrass yourself. We’re nice like that.
In all seriousness, though: I do think the quality of hockey in the CCHA is much improved this season. Bowling Green is but one example of this. The Falcons’ Ice Breaker win was a good bounceback for a team that was swept by Michigan in a home-and-home the opening weekend.
We saw it elsewhere too, with Augustana getting an OT win and a tie against Minnesota Duluth and Michigan Tech continuing their strong start to the season with a split in St. Cloud. One thing that all three teams have in common (BG and Tech more so than Augustana, but the Vikings have a handful) is an abundance of recruits from the Canadian Hockey League. Having those players available to come and play college hockey gives the CCHA a deeper pool of recruiting talent from which to draw and is a pretty good way to level the playing field, considering most of the CCHA schools don’t have the vast financial resources that teams from the Big Ten and NCHC possess.
Having said that, sometimes, the big teams are just too good. I saw that this weekend too, with a young North Dakota squeaking by a very experienced Bemidji State team and Mike Hastings’ Wisconsin team taking it to his former Mankato squad.
Now, I’m not trying to be too western hockey-heavy, so I’ll ask you: Have you seen the equivalent of this happening in Atlantic Hockey?
Dan: You know, I remember having this exact conversation — I want to say it was probably two or three years ago — with Paula Weston when Atlantic Hockey had one of those phenomenal weekends at the start of a season, but it seemingly faded into the background when the AHA proceeded to get entirely swept over the next weekend. Chris Lerch frequently alludes to this phenomenon in his season preview column, and it’s a bit of ingrained history because the league never won consistently to force their way into the national conversation. The top teams were good enough to capture multiple wins, but the league’s Pairwise and NPI coefficients were never quite good enough.
That said, Atlantic Hockey also had 11 or 12 teams when that would happen, and the current iteration is a nine-team league that’s getting built out with more transfers and CHL players. I watched Bentley open its season with a high-compete level against Vermont on Friday night, and while Vermont isn’t predicted to finish near the top of Hockey East, it was a good win for the league. The next night against Northeastern, not so much.
I’m very interested to see what happens with these teams as the year moves forward. Air Force and Army have their own recruiting restrictions, so the CHL won’t affect those teams as deeply as the other seven, but Sacred Heart played exceptionally well in its 6-3 win over Penn State. Holy Cross took Arizona State to within an overtime loss of a weekend sweep. RIT was a half-second away from beating UMass and still walked out of Amherst with a tie and exhibition shootout win. Air Force absolutely crushed St. Thomas on Friday night with a road split. Bentley is headed to North Dakota for two games over this weekend, and Sacred Heart is playing Ohio State. RIT has Michigan State. These are incredibly crucial games if the league can take extra wins because there isn’t likely going to be the natural depression that occurs with a 28-loss team at the bottom of the league.
And, look, I hate saying that because it blames bigger leagues for being bigger leagues, and I hate the argument behind it. I also can’t deny the math.
Of course, the bigger issue is that these wins have to come at another league’s expense — and you mentioned how the big teams are sometimes just too good. If we’re looking at the three leagues perceived as the best, we’re looking at the NCHC and the Big Ten with Hockey East occupying a tier that’s slightly below that one. Removing Hockey East for a second, where are the potential potholes for the NCHC and Big Ten, understanding that we’re also still at the very beginning of the year?
Jack: Well, if by “potholes” you mean “traditional powerhouses that might struggle this season”, I think you mentioned an obvious one earlier when we discussed Penn State who lost both games at the Ice Breaker. If you’d have asked me before the season I would have guessed they were the favorites to win that tournament but losing Gavin MacKenna, Aiden Fink and Jackson Smith (among others) might affect them more than I would have thought. Their game against Quinnipiac next week is going to possibly answer some big questions about whether this team is a legit contender again this season.
Minnesota fans have also raised some concerns after being swept by Michigan Tech last weekend, but losing on the road to one of the top teams in the CCHA in a place that’s notoriously tough for visiting teams shouldn’t have Gopher fans calling for new head coach Brett Larson’s firing just yet.
In the NCHC, we’ve seen North Dakota, Denver and Western Michigan pick up right where they left off, but I think the more intriguing question in that league is how good the middle teams are going to be. St. Cloud State also has a new coach and has looked mediocre in three games, while Miami and newcomers St. Thomas both split with teams from those “smaller” leagues in their first series (Northern Michigan and Air Force, respectively). How much of those struggles can be attributed to a small sample size, and how much is indicative of something more?
And of course, if we’re going to discuss the NCHC, we really can’t do so without once again talking about Arizona State. On the ice, the Sun Devils have split both series in which they’ve played (at Lindenwood and against Holy Cross at home), which is maybe about as well as the players can expect with all of the off-the-ice stuff happening with their program. It sure seems like Dave Hakstol is going to be ASU’s interim head coach.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (I don’t think anyone really wants to be talking about this every week, especially considering everything Matthew Mayich, his family and his teammate have gone through this year): Do the on-ice results for ASU even matter at this point? That is to say, Hakstol coming in from outside and (one would assume) cleaning house from a staff perspective can only be regarded as a positive step, but it seems like it’s going to take years to undo the damage that the previous coaching regime did to the players on this team. It seems almost like a trite thing at this point to be discussing their scores when there are more important things going on there.
Dan: Last week outlined some of my feelings on the matter, and I came to the conclusion that advancing through the correct steps are more important than outlining a power play. All I care about is that the administration at the university does right by the kids, by the family, by the program, by the Mayich family’s wishes, and by just doing the right thing. Honesty, integrity, transparency — they’re the only words that anyone over there should value at this point. And then, and only then, can the players focus on winning and losing games. The scores might not matter, but they can make them matter by pushing the program in the right direction. What happens now is going to echo for the coming years and decades, and that includes making sure that this cannot ever happen again while also looking at how it even got to this point in the first place.
As a last point, I’ll rehash a question that Ed Trefzger posed in last week’s TMQ because Hockey East had a really, really, really bad Friday. A 2-4-1 record with that one tie coming because UMass scored with less than a second remaining in the third period. Boston College’s loss to Alaska. UConn losing the Ice Breaker. Maine getting a win over Quinnipiac, but absorbing a second loss after losing to Holy Cross last week. UMass-Lowell losing to Clarkson.
At least Northeastern had a good opening night, but the Huskies are going to deal with the conversation about what happens when the literal mileage starts to accumulate over the course of the season. That entire program seems to be embracing it — playing in Hockey East is going to help the situation because the bus-type league is shorter on the road trips — but has the margin of error now completely shrunk for that league?
Jack: I gotta say, I can’t imagine any team in any of the Western leagues not having a home rink to play in, especially considering the nature of series here out west. Northeastern seems to be in really uncharted territory here, but the good news for the Huskies is that road wins are weighted slightly higher than home wins. That should at least slightly mitigate the effects of being on the road each and every week.
Aside from Northeastern, it does seem like Hockey East has already dug itself a small hole with a few of those results; they’re currently 10-10-1 through the first two weeks of play. That’s not terrible but compared to the NCHC’s 15-7-1 it means the league might end up having more comparison points with the ECAC and CCHA down the stretch instead. Obviously, we’re still just two weeks into the season, so it’s a small sample size, but they need to start getting some wins quickly.
It always shocks me when I look at the schedules and see how few nonconference games there actually are for each team. You’d like to think a few stumbles early in the season, when a team hasn’t figured out its identity yet, won’t hurt them too much, but in reality the margin for error is thin in general.
There’s a few of those nonconference series this weekend that I’m really looking forward to because I think they’ll set the tone for which conferences are poised to have success in the NCAA tournament.
First, I want to see how Minnesota and Minnesota Duluth bounce back after difficult road series. The Bulldogs will host the Gophers in their rivalry series, and if either of these teams get a sweep I think it might put the opposing fanbase in (probably premature) panic mode.
Second, Minnesota State heads to Merrimack for one of the few head-to-head meetings between the CCHA and Hockey East this season (I’m pretty sure Bowling Green’s game against UConn is the only other one). If the CCHA wants to be a multi-bid league, they need to win series like this. Obviously CCHA teams heavily schedule Big Ten and NCHC teams due to proximity and rivalry, but taking one of the new opportunities to win against some unique teams can only be a positive. (The same goes, by the way, for Merrimack. It would be much better for Hockey East to win this series.)
Finally, there’s St. Cloud State at Boston College. We talked previously about both of these teams, but it seems like the Eagles need this one way more than the Huskies do at the moment. That loss to Alaska at home really shocked me, especially when I saw how thoroughly Union dismantled the Nanooks the next day. It’s possible that it’s just a blip and the Eagles just needed a wake-up call, but they also don’t have a ton of nonconference opportunities to begin with. After this weekend they head to Denver and then have one-off games with Notre Dame and Stonehill later in this season to complete the nonconference slate (aside from the Beanpot).
The Huskies, on the other hand, have a new coach in Nick Oliver. Both of their losses were in overtime against opponents they see fairly often (Bemidji and Michigan Tech). A win (or two) against Boston College would really show the rest of the NCHC that they are for real.
Obviously there’s so many more I could talk about but I’m afraid I’ve overstayed my welcome here for the week. Thanks for the back-and-forth, it’s going to be a fun season!