Last week’s first round came and went with few of the ripples associated with a hockey postseason.
All four home teams from ECAC Hockey’s single-elimination series advanced to create the first chalk-based quarterfinal since 2022, but beyond the higher-seeded victories sat games devoid of the normal drama associated with winner-take-all scenarios.
The lone exception came when Brown’s 2-1 lead dripped into traded goals in the last minute of a 3-2 victory, but the Bears never surrendered their lead. Still, it was more than what Dartmouth, Cornell and Harvard delivered after the trio of Ivy League schools blistered past their respective opponents.
Pardon the double-negative – or even the triple-negative – but the weekend excitement didn’t stack up against a postseason known for producing one or two upsets from its first round. A shift into this week’s best-of-three quarterfinals now offers a more natural setting for the teams to throw more caution to the wind, but knowing a team is two wins away from achieving a trip to Lake Placid’s Herb Brooks Arena is balanced by the introduction of the four best programs from ECAC’s regular season.
Maybe there’s a dramatic flair or two in store for the end of this year’s campus-based hockey, but before we look at those matchups, let’s take a look back at some of the facts and fun from last weekend’s two-day event:
First-Round Fallout
-The first offseason domino dropped on Monday when RPI announced its intention to replace head coach Dave Smith. Few expressed shock at the decision, but replacing the former Canisius head coach requires a reset for a team that’s faced its own share of headwinds over the past three decades. Smith previously won a conference championship while leading Canisius to the 2013 Atlantic Hockey postseason crown, but his job with the Engineers advanced little beyond a fourth place finish in his third season. To be fair, RPI joined Union and the Ivy League institutions in opting out of the 2020-21 season, but the sixth-place finish in 2022 steadily backslid through two finishes in the league’s bottom four.
-Smith won a playoff game last year with the Engineers, but RPI still hasn’t advanced to the league semifinals since the institution of a four-round setup. An at-large bid to the 2011 NCAA Tournament is the only trip to the national tournament since Buddy Powers and Dan Fridgen engineered consecutive berths in 1994 and 1995, and the only finish better than fourth place over the past 30 years occurred when Seth Appert finished second during the 2012-2013 season. Positioned to clinch a potential at-large bid during that year, a three-game loss to Brown dropped the Engineers outside of the Pairwise Rankings’ overall bubble.
-As for the rest of the playoff weekend, deciding three games by three-plus goals flopped the weekend into its most lopsided ending of the short, three-year tenure of single-elimination games. The two four-goal games were the most since Colgate and Union eliminated Yale and Princeton by four goals during two sweeps in 2022, coincidentally the last time that all four home sides advanced.
-Brown’s win over Princeton officially means that all 12 teams have appeared in at least one quarterfinal series since the eight teams opted out of competition during the COVID-19 season in 2020-21.
-Four Ivy League teams at Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth and Harvard all won and advanced to the quarterfinal for the first time since the league expanded its playoff to include a first round. Gaining four Ancient Eight sides to the quarterfinal is one less than the five teams that qualified in 2019, but it’s worth noting how seeing all six teams play through the first round is incredibly rare. In Cornell’s case, for example, playing in the first round hadn’t happened since 2016.
The Lerchies, Pt. 1
I’ve had an incredible college hockey career spanning 10-plus years and all three eastern conferences, but covering all Hockey East, ECAC and Atlantic Hockey America in some capacity is nothing compared to the interpersonal relationships fomented over the years. More specifically, this site keeps me coming back for more on an annual basis because I love working with the people, both at the schools and on our pages, and spending the past four years as the ECAC columnist reconnected me with the league that started my college hockey media lifestyle (shoutout to my brother, Mike, for taking me into the Brown press box while I was a teenager).
Atlantic Hockey writer Chris Lerch is among one of my closest confidants and a former tight colleague from when we split AHA coverage, and I took special pride in torturing him with our postseason award season. Dubbed “The Lerchies,” I drove him nuts by naming the postseason awards column after him, after which he maneuvered the schedule and renamed the awards after me. Since I’m now covering ECAC, he really can’t do anything to stop me from naming the awards after him.
I’m pretty sure he hasn’t covered an ECAC game since joining the USCHO crew, but I don’t really care. My awards column is named for him, it’s an inside joke, and nobody can tell me to change it.
So there. The Lerchies. Let’s hit it with the first group before we move into next week’s second team and first team all-conference names, along with individual awards.
All-Rookie Team (players are listed alphabetically by school)
F: Brian Nicholas, Brown
F: Mick Thompson, Harvard
F: Ben Muthersbaugh, Union
D: Michael Neumeier, Colgate
D: Hayden Stavroff, Dartmouth
G: Ben Charette, Harvard
Third Team
F: Tyler Kopff, Brown
F: Nikita Nikora, Dartmouth
F: Jack Ricketts, Quinnipiac
D: Tim Rego, Cornell
D: John Prokop, Union
G: Andrew Takacs, Colgate
Now onto the quarterfinal round and the return to a traditional best-of-three world:
The future
Quarterfinals, held March 14-16 on campus sites (best-of-three series)
No. 8 Brown at No. 1 Quinnipiac
No. 7 Harvard at No. 2 Clarkson
No. 6 Cornell at No. 3 Colgate
No. 5 Dartmouth 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
Quarterfinal Matchups
No. 8 Brown at No. 1 Quinnipiac
Head-to-head result: Brown failed to beat Quinnipiac in either of their two meetings, but the first matchup in October at least produced a one-goal game in Rhode Island. The later rematch in Connecticut offered a 4-0 blowout that concluded a four-game winning streak for the Bobcats, a streak that later served as the foundation for the final run to the No. 1 seed in the league.
Last trip to championship weekend: Nobody really needs to dive into Quinnipiac’s well-documented postseason results – or lack thereof – because the Bobcats are still a mainstay in Lake Placid. They’ve qualified by winning their way through the quarterfinals for three straight years, and even the 2020 team held a No. 3 seed before the pandemic canceled the overall postseason. The 2021 team earned a bye to the finals when St. Lawrence and Colgate entered the conference tournament outside of Clarkson’s opt-out, so the last team to fail to advance to a semifinal by losing a best-of-three series was the 2019 team, which lost to (pause for dramatic effect)
Brown.
Yep, Brown. Since Quinnipiac replaced Vermont for the 2005-2006 season, the Bears have been to three semifinals. Each one was held at a different site (2010: Albany. 2013: Atlantic City. 2019: Lake Placid), but each postseason run required a win over a No. 1 seed at some point during the postseason. Without fail, that No. 1 team was from Connecticut, and the 2013 and 2019 runs specifically occurred when the Bears upended Quinnipiac.
Some notes about the playoff head-to-head history: Brown’s three matchups with Quinnipiac spanned all three rounds with the 2019 win in the quarterfinals currently standing as their most recent head-to-head matchup. The 2013 win in the semifinals occurred after No. 7 Brown eliminated No. 2 RPI during the second round, but their lone meeting in the first round ended with fifth-seeded Quinnipiac blowing No. 12 Brown out of the postseason with 6-1 and 5-1 wins.
Things to watch: Quinnipiac handled the last month of the season with a championship mentality, but the Bobcats still don’t have a path to the national tournament with two losses against Brown. The No. 13 Bobcats are still above the cutline, but losses to the No. 43 team in the conference tournament would critically damage their 74 percent chance of making the NCAA Tournament. The recent surges by Penn State and UMass aside, it wouldn’t hurt if Arizona State and North Dakota slipped on a banana peel. A cherry on top would be a New Hampshire win over UMass-Lowell before losing to Boston College.
Shifting to the on-ice product, it’s pretty difficult to beat a team three times, but the Bears offered a direct-yet-formulaic method towards earning its wins over the past two months. Nearly every occasion since late January required goalie Lawton Zacher to stop 25-35 shots while the Brown offense generated an equal number of attempts, a number that played right into Quinnipiac’s sweet spot. Over that same time period, the Bobcats produced a 12-3-1 record whenever a game landed in that same range.
No. 7 Harvard at No. 2 Clarkson
Head-to-head result: Clarkson snuck by Harvard with a one-goal win in an earlier matchup in Cambridge, but the 6-0 blowout in the North Country in mid-February allowed the Golden Knights to sneak back into the national tournament conversation as they started climbing north of the No. 20 spot.
Last trip to championship weekend: Clarkson advanced to the 2022 semifinals before losing to Harvard, but the following year’s trip to the semifinal ended an era for the post-COVID success enjoyed by both teams. Both missed the semifinals last year, and now both stand to break a short drought while extending the other’s inability to reach Lake Placid. By the numbers, Harvard’s pre-pandemic performance sent the Crimson to the semifinals more frequently, but the Golden Knights won the 2019 championship.
Some notes about the playoff head-to-head history: Clarkson earned one of the early ECAC’s most notable upsets with a win over third-seeded Boston College in 1969, but an 8-6 loss to second-seeded Harvard ended the Cinderella bid ahead of the league championship game. Two years later, a rematch in the championship game ended with the Golden Knights winning, but Clarkson’s No. 2 seed shut down the upstart bid from the No. 4 Crimson after previous wins over Brown and Boston University.
Things to watch: Clarkson forward Ayrton Martino is the highest-end scorer in the entire league, but the Golden Knights run deeper than his 45-point season. Nine other players scored at least five goals on the year, but what happens away from the goal scorer is almost as important for a team with seven players holding 10 assists. The power play was especially lethal for Ellis Rickwood, who scored six of his nine goals on special teams, and Kaelen Taylor is arguably the league’s best defenseman.
Facing Harvard is intriguing because the Crimson peaked in the aftermath of the aforementioned 6-0 loss. Last week’s 5-2 win over RPI gave them a win in an offensive-minded track meet featuring 70 shots on goal, and 36 saves from Aku Koskenvuo shook off whatever tournament-style rust existed during the Beanpot loss to Boston University. Throw in a dash of the Harvard top scorers and their ability to go pound-for-pound with anyone in the league on a per-game basis, and this increasingly draws closer and closer to the kind of heavyweight battle expected from both teams.
No. 6 Cornell at No. 3 Colgate
Head-to-head result: The early December home-and-home between the Central New York travel partners ended with the home team winning each night – Cornell won on Friday, 3-2, in overtime before Colgate earned a 6-3 win in Hamilton.
Last trip to championship weekend: Colgate won the 2023 championship before Cornell drove its bus to last season’s title.
Some notes about the playoff head-to-head history: The two most recent defending champions haven’t played one another since Harvard (2015) and Quinnipiac (2016) played one another in the semifinals in 2017, but the odyssey surrounding Colgate and Cornell subtweets a rubber match between the Central New York travel partners.
For starters, this certainly looks like the end of a four-year odyssey that started with their head-to-head quarterfinal in 2022, but consider that crossing paths in the playoffs hadn’t happened since a Third Place game in 2012. Until 2022, they closest they came to one another was on opposite ends of the semifinal in 2014.
Things to watch: No team wants to play a single elimination first round game, but Cornell got right by scoring four times in the third period of its 5-1 win over Yale. Ian Shane’s 11 saves in the second period was a throwback performance after his numbers dipped during the regular season, and the offense steamrolled the Elis after failing to outplay the No. 11-seeded team through two periods on home ice.
Now comes the realest possible test for the preseason favorite because Colgate is a legitimate dark horse candidate within the league. Few are giving the Raiders a chance to outright win the league, but the second-highest overall offense jumped Quinnipiac’s output when the nonconference schedule was removed from consideration. They’re the most accurate-shooting team with goals on roughly 12 to 13 percent of their shots, and the defense allowed more than a half-goal less per game than Yale. Goalie Andrew Takacs saw more ice time than any other goalie, and the top of the offensive chart is as good as the top of Cornell’s scoresheet.
No. 5 Dartmouth at No. 4 Union
Head-to-head result: Dartmouth swept the season series by crushing Union with a 4-0 win at Messa Rink and a hard-fought, 2-1 battle at Thompson Arena.
Last trip to championship weekend: Dartmouth’s snapped a seven-year, five-tournament semifinal-less streak by sweeping the Garnet Chargers at home last year. Those losses prevented Union from advancing to the semis for the first time since 2017.
Some notes about the playoff head-to-head history: Last year’s series in New Hampshire was the first head-to-head postseason meeting since a 2014 quarterfinal series that seemed impossible after a 20-loss Dartmouth squad lost its first game to RPI. Two straight wins over the Engineers clinched a consecutive weekend pass to the Capital District, though top-seeded Union bulldozed its way to the 2014 championship by first sweeping the No. 10 Big Green. Folks of a certain age also likely remember how both teams held some ignominious history by missing the 1992 tournament after their 13 combined points still fell five points less than RPI’s No. 10 spots, a feat somewhat replicated when they missed the 10-team brackets in 1998 and 1998.
Things to watch: Farewell, Messa Rink
Union’s 9-7-2 record at home wasn’t as good as the 11-win season from two years ago, but few teams mastered winning in their own confines quite like a team that produced exactly one sub-.500 season in Schenectady over the past decade. Dartmouth, in particular, struggled with heading to the Albany region through those years, and a seven-game losing streak stamped a 1-13-1 record dating back to the 2011-2012 season.
The good news for Dartmouth? The Big Green beat Union five straight times over the last two seasons and specifically won two games at the Achilles Center since the start of the 2023-2024 campaign.
Looking at this weekend, Union needs to capitalize on whatever opportunities exist because Dartmouth is one of the league’s best teams at avoiding mistakes. Both teams are capable of scoring goals, but the Big Green produced a third-best 2.36 goals against average in ECAC play and killed penalties to the tune of an 89 percent success rate. Union’s power play is good enough to compensate for even a slight rollback, but Dartmouth’s 52 percent faceoff success rate should allow the Big Green to dictate a little bit more pace unless the Garnet Chargers can hold those one or two extra zone entries.
