For all the parity, all the times that teams leapfrogged one another and stumbled into each other over the course of a six-month season, the 2024-25 ECAC Hockey season ended without a single team tied with one another. A clean Cleary Cup championship race produced minimal drama on the season’s last day, and Quinnipiac added … Read more
Arriving at the last weekend of the regular season is an enjoyable process for me. No, it’s not because I’m finally close to enjoying time off after spending the last five months in full blown college hockey mode (shoutout: the earlier start for half of ECAC Hockey’s teams). It’s not because I’ve spent close to … Read more
My brother and I used to travel a lot for college hockey. This was way back in the mid-2000s, an era identified by its lack of available video streaming services. Internet broadcasting was still in its infancy, and Brown, his alma mater and the school for which he’d started broadcasting at the turn of the … Read more
The Hockey Commissioners Association has announced the semifinalists for this year’s Mike Richter Award, given annually to the top goalie in men’s NCAA Division I hockey since 2014. Ten goaltenders have been chosen by a panel of voters from across the hockey community. The panel includes coaches from each conference as well as members of … Read more
The Hockey Humanitarian Award Foundation announced the five finalists for the 2025 Hockey Humanitarian Award, presented annually to college hockey’s “finest citizen” for leadership in community service. For the first time ever, four of the five finalists are female student-athletes. Keri Clougherty, Boston College (Sr., D, Lynn, Mass.) Throughout her four years at Boston College, … Read more
The ride between Clarkson and Princeton is one of the longest bus trips in college hockey’s eastern conferences. It covers more than 300 miles between its North Country and Southern New Jersey locations, and the distance from Potsdam, N.Y., to the Canadian border crossing in Ogdensburg is nearly equal to a Princetonian’s trip to Philadelphia. … Read more
The Gridiron Club of Greater Boston has announced that 26 players are semifinalists for the 72nd Walter Brown Award, presented annually to the best American-born Division I college hockey player in New England. The nation’s oldest nationally-recognized college hockey honor, the Walter Brown Award was established in 1953 by the members of the 1933 Massachusetts … Read more
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
The Hockey Commissioners Association (HCA) has announced a watch list of 35 goalies who will compete for the Mike Richter Award, given annually since 2014 to the top goalie in men’s NCAA Division I hockey. The 35 goalies come from the United States (16), Canada (12), Sweden (3), Slovakia (2) and one each from Czechia … 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