The dog days of college hockey’s regular season usually hit around January’s latter weeks.
Conference tournament races are well-shaped for teams facing postseason contention, and even the national picture within the Pairwise Rankings won’t shift frequently after results between its highest contenders. Everything is starting to fall into place for February’s mad dash to the playoffs, but it’s still far enough away for obligatory matchups that don’t move too many needles.
The Northeast historically bucked that trend by installing several infamous rivalries along the stretch of calendar leading directly into the playoffs. Historic matchups between longtime rivals dot ECAC Hockey in particular, and the high likelihood of a dramatic ending or weirdly unprecedented finish helps build a league race increasingly centered around its emerging parity.
For the Harvard Crimson, late-season hockey is exactly the perfect time to begin moving along those story tracks. The team representing arguably the world’s most famous university still isn’t tracing the steps from its more recognizable finishes within the territory of NCAA Tournament at large teams, but the dark horse status behind the first-place teams is starting to move its way towards Cambridge as the program’s battle-tested growth barrels into one of the nation’s most famous college hockey tournaments.
“There are certain details and fundamentals that allow you to play winning hockey,” explained Harvard coach Ted Donato. “I think we’ve done a better job of staying away from a costly penalty or a costly turnover. We want to close out games on our toes, not on our heels, and we want to continue to be aggressive, but we also recognize that we have to do a good job defending, so we don’t give up outnumbered rushes and power plays at crucial times during the games.”
The Beanpot is not a run-of-the-mill midseason tournament for its four schools, but the buildup to playing its first round requires a balancing act unlike anything else in college hockey. The pre-tournament media event from this past Monday, for example, brought the four coaches together under a single roof for the first time since last year’s Beanpot, and throngs of media quenched a Beanpot thirst by putting representatives under isolated microscopes as questions about playing at the famed TD Garden began flying.
Yet for all four schools, the days ahead of the Beanpot aren’t exactly loaded with pre-tournament preparation. Harvard, for example, has a scheduled game against Princeton on Friday night before playing Boston University in Monday’s first round, and the three possible points from a home game against the Tigers are more critical to the Crimson’s postseason hopes than the matchup with the Terriers.
“Our guys are pretty focused on Friday night,” said Donato. “I think we’d be lying if we didn’t say that we weren’t excited about the opportunity that’s ahead, playing in the Beanpot, but there’s a lot of respect in our locker room for Princeton. We played them in the playoffs last year, and we played them earlier in the year in a game that went to overtime. There’s a real understanding that it’s important to stay focused and play our best hockey because we’ll need to have success against Princeton.”
Harvard’s 12-7 record in its final game between the Beanpot illustrates the criticality of that point. With the exception of the COVID-19 season that canceled both Harvard and the Beanpot in 2021, the Crimson rode a six-game winning streak ahead of consecutive losses to Quinnipiac in 2023 and 2024, and they’ve rarely been on the receiving end of a losing streak longer than a couple of games. The 2010 and 2011 losses to Princeton and Yale aside, 2013 and 2015 results against Union and RPI built a 3-5 record dating back to a 2008 loss to Brown.
Claiming those league points is paramount, and this year’s ECAC race is much tighter and much more compact than how previous seasons presented themselves. The three points from beating Colgate over this past weekend launched the Crimson into a sixth-place tie with Union, which was idle in league play while playing its non-conference Mayor’s Cup game against RPI, while preventing Cornell, which beat Harvard on Friday, from climbing closer after the Big Red dropped a 6-1 decision to second place Dartmouth.
Eleventh place Princeton, meanwhile, is a three-point swing away from gaining home ice in the first round, though the same three-point swing puts Harvard on a path towards a first-round bye after last year’s eighth place hiccup.
“This is a great group of guys that are committed to trying to improve and push each other to be their best,” said Donato. “We’ve seen bigger contributions throughout the lineup, and whether that’s lower down in the forward group or lower down in the defensive pairings, we’re very aware that we need everybody to have [our team] have sustained success. We need those contributions up and down the lineup, and I think we’ve started to see people grasp their roles and do things that allow us to have more success.”
None of the team’s numbers necessarily jump off the page, but Harvard’s success stems from its ability to play even-keeled hockey in any situation. From a pure rankings standpoint, the No. 33 scoring defense and No. 46 scoring offense wouldn’t translate to those even numbers, but the Crimson are averaging within one-third of goals scored versus goals allowed and are separated from opponents by less than a shot per game. They remain one of the nation’s least-penalized teams, but the number of penalties taken and number of faceoffs won all align with exactly how each game seemingly plays against them.
It’s almost uncanny how much there’s a yin to every yang on this team. Casey Severo’s team-leading eight goals totals half the number of league-leader Ayrton Martino, but a little under a dozen players have multiple goals on the stat sheet. Nine different skaters have positive plus-minus ratings, and both Aku Koskenvuo and Ben Charette have goals-against averages (2.80 versus 2.34, respectively) rivaling one another’s save percentage (.903 versus .926, also respective) and full save numbers (250 for Koskenvuo to Charette’s 275).
Whether or not that translates to a Beanpot win won’t become clear until next week, but Harvard ran top-ranked Boston College to the limit of its 3-1 loss from two weeks ago and previously shut out first-place Quinnipiac with a 3-0 win on the road. The six-point weekend over Brown and Yale got the team’s juices going in the right direction to start the second half of the year, and last weekend’s win over Colgate continued thrusting the Crimson forward with a game against Dartmouth lurking on the horizon between the two Beanpot weekends.
“We’ve certainly seen some improvement,” Donato said. “And I think we’re generating good zone time and good scoring chances. We’re trying to improve our special teams since it’s not where we want them to be. That would allow us to be more dynamic, and if we become more dangerous, particularly on the power play, there are positive signs that our best hockey could be coming.”
