Men’s D-I: ECAC

February is usually a month wrought with hand-wringing within the college hockey community. Teams and programs need points more than ever to advance their postseason dreams into optimal positions while teams hanging around the national Pairwise Rankings bubble can’t let their own clutch results slip through fingertips. One or two missed opportunities is the difference … Read more

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 … Read more

The 2023 NCAA tournament returned ECAC Hockey to one of its highest watermarks in college hockey’s storied history. Alongside the Big Ten, the conference claimed four of the tournament’s 16 spots and represented a full quarter of the teams entered into the competition for the national championship. Two teams – Quinnipiac and Cornell – advanced … Read more

It sure didn’t take long for college hockey to start celebrating over the fallen giant. For years, the Quinnipiac-established juggernaut ruled ECAC. The Bobcats won Cleary Cup after Cleary Cup and while they didn’t claim a conference championship, trips to the Frozen Four and the first ECAC national championship since Union and Yale’s consecutive titles … Read more

The college hockey season doesn’t typically shift into overdrive until the calendar shifts into the new year. The “first half,” loaded to the gills with its high-profile nonconference matchups, holiday tournaments and pleasant surprises, doesn’t truly yield its heat until league play and trophy season crests over the horizon. Early-season rivalries aside, coaches and players … Read more

A happy and hearty holiday season to you and yours in the college hockey world. I’ve found through the years that holiday and semester break is well-placed for a college hockey season that rumbles through the fall and early spring with an unsurpassed pace. We spend our weeks in October and November in the same … Read more

Mike Harder looked at his bench during Colgate’s weekend series against Cornell with the realization of how deeply injuries impacted his roster. He was without skaters on his top lines or his special teams, and the Big Red’s vaunted defense made it exceptionally hard to prepare for those individualized situations before the team’s MASH unit … Read more

Ben Syer had been around the block a few times. The first-year head coach possessed no prior experience as the leader behind the bench of a college hockey program – or at any other level, for that matter – but his 20-year journey through ECAC Hockey rinks made him uniquely qualified for Princeton’s forefront position … Read more

One glance through Brown’s men’s hockey record book is all it takes to understand the greatness once possessed by goaltender Yann Danis. The one-time Hobey Hat Trick finalist litters every page of goaltending stats with multiple entries into the program’s top single season numbers for goals against average, shutouts, saves and save percentage, and while … Read more

A couple of years ago, I scanned the Internet and found myself in a wormhole of older college hockey stories. It killed a good couple of hours while I sat in a nursery room with a rambunctious infant refusing to sleep, but it opened the lid on a time capsule capturing how we looked at … Read more

The ride from Dartmouth to Princeton is one of the longest in ECAC Hockey. It’s certainly the longest commute between hockey-playing members of the conference’s six-team Ivy League contingent. The drive is nearly a straight shot traversing the north-south poles at either end of the league’s geographic footprint, but the 315 miles between New Hampshire’s … Read more

Every year, the debate surrounding the Ivy League schools in college hockey ends with one of the more mind-boggling stalemates among the sport’s followers. It seldom advances beyond their unique or quirky scheduling arrangement limiting the six hockey-sponsored schools to six fewer games than the rest of college hockey, a debate that’s almost never accurately … Read more

The average college hockey fan wouldn’t view Jean-Francois Houle’s career path for a potential return to his alma mater. The former Clarkson scoring wizard in the 1990s returned to the Golden Knights after ending his on-ice career but jumped on an arc within earshot of a bench boss job within the NHL. He spent five … Read more

For 20-plus years, Matt Dubrey’s voice provided the backdrop to Union College’s rise as a college hockey program. The mainstay of the Dutchmen and their Garnet Charger successors, he lived the team’s growth away from ECAC Hockey’s perennial bottom rung, and he’d been with the team as it pinballed through its Cinderella story over the … Read more

College hockey rinks aren’t the same anymore. They aren’t the old barns built during the 1970s. They’re more antiseptic and devoid of character than the old buildings lacking heat or modern comfort, but they represent the soul and fabric stitched by generations of slap shots and millions of body checks. Even ones owned by corporations … Read more