This Week in … columns; weekly columns on a league, region or gender-division
It’s been an up-and-down season so far for Connecticut, but coach Mike Cavanaugh is confident his team has what it takes to be in the Hockey East title hunt as the calendar turns to 2024. “We were pretty consistent, we just struggled scoring goals early on,” Cavanaugh said, assessing his team’s play before the holiday … Read more
Last weekend’s exhibition games for No. 20 Colorado College and fifth-ranked Denver were looked forward to by many college hockey fans across the region, wanting to get their fix after the holiday break. I include myself among that number, but those games meant more to me than they probably did to most. Minot State, which … Read more
Michigan Tech’s sky-high ambitions didn’t quite pan out at the beginning of this hockey season. A year removed from finishing just two points behind eventual champions Minnesota State for the MacNaughton Cup and securing an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, the Huskies were picked to finish first in the CCHA this season thanks to … Read more
The holiday season is a relatively dead period in the hockey world, but it felt exceptionally low-key this past week when Buffalo Sabres head coach Don Granato missed a pair of games with an undisclosed illness. It wasn’t contagious per his own admission in the interim period after the team’s loss to Boston, but a … Read more
It was only a month ago when Colorado College coach Kris Mayotte found out that Emily West, the Tigers’ first-year director of hockey operations and video coach, had scored a NCAA national championship game-winning goal on a penalty shot. “No (way),” Mayotte said, shortly before seeing YouTube footage of West’s goal for Minnesota in the … Read more
With the first half of the season in the books for most of the CCHA, there’s been one overarching question for the league on the ice: Does anyone actually want to win the MacNaughton Cup? Obviously, that’s hyperbole. League titles are league titles, and everyone wants to win some hardware. But in the CCHA this … Read more
College hockey was never built to stay in one place for an extended period of time, but the difficulty in finding stability over the past two decades was largely reinforced by two major sides of the same argument. The unprecedented and positive expansion of teams exploded in recent years because of the unprecedented popularity of … Read more
It’s midseason, and here’s what we know about the Big Ten. Overall, it’s pretty impressive – but that may not matter next March. The league is 36-14-4 against nonconference foes for the best (.704) winning percentage among all leagues in interconference play. More good news: the Big Ten is 4-2-3 against the NCHC (.681) and … Read more
This is my final column before the holidays, so in the spirit of the season, let’s take a look at what each team could ask Santa for this Christmas. Air Force: Some WD-40 The Falcons will need to shake off some rust before diving into what should be a challenging tournament after Christmas. Air Force … Read more
It seems the only thing that might slow down Boston College and Boston University at this point in the season is having a lot of time off. A combined 16-4-1 since the beginning of November, the Eagles and the Terriers are beyond red hot, and currently own the Nos. 1 and 2 spots, respectively, in … Read more
The NCHC’s collective nonconference record so far this season has been nothing to sneeze at, winning at a .681 rate, second only to the Big Ten but having also played 15 more of those games. Miami has held up its end of the bargain in that regard, sitting at 5-2-1 in those games ahead of … Read more
When St. Thomas reclassified from Division III to Division I in 2021, it was by necessity, borne out of the fact that their previous conference (the all-Minnesota based MIAC) no longer wanted to play the Tommies. Their athletic programs were too successful, and they were, essentially, kicked out of the league they had helped to … Read more
The first month of the season wasn’t necessarily the best of times for the Union hockey program. The Garnet Chargers had a new logo, a new name and a new identity, but they also had four losses in their first six games. They’d been wildly inconsistent in their results, and they bookended flashy scoring in … Read more
“The one thing you worry about right now is that it’s intense for a lot of our athletes in the classroom.” That, said Wisconsin coach Mike Hastings, is one piece of the focus puzzle as the first half of the season comes to a close. “They’re getting toward finals,” said Hastings. “There’s a lot on … Read more
Robert Morris coach Derek Schooley says that he’s an impatient person, especially when it comes to coaching. Schooley, who has been in charge of the RMU program since its inception in 2004, had to rebuild it after the school eliminated the men’s and women’s teams at the end of the 2020-21 season. It was a … Read more
Opening up the Hockey East notebook as the calendar turns to December… — There’s only one all-Hockey East game this weekend, but it’s a big one as No. 9 Providence makes the short trip up I-95 to take on No. 2 Boston College on Saturday afternoon (4:30 p.m., NESN) at Conte Forum. The Eagles go … Read more
North Dakota coach Brad Berry knows the importance of doing due diligence on recruits from the NCAA transfer portal, but junior forward Cameron Berg’s commitment may have been secured easier than most. A West Fargo native with family elsewhere in North Dakota, including a grandmother living three hours west in the Bottineau area, Berg spent … Read more
After all the turmoil that has surrounded the Bowling Green hockey program this season, it was hard to know where to begin when interviewing head coach Ty Eigner earlier this week. Luckily, it was easy: Eigner opened up right away. “First and foremost, the situation we had with our team in our program early in … Read more
It was almost unfair how the start of the college hockey season saddled this year’s Quinnipiac team with the expectations and overarching shadow cast from last season. In a way, it was ironic because it built requisite pomp around a situation that this iteration never experienced. For the first time in program history, the Bobcats … Read more
What a good weekend it was for Big Ten hockey – and what an interesting season this is already proving to be. B1G teams went 6-2-1 in nonconference play last week, bringing the league’s overall nonconference record to 36-14-4 on the season for the best win percentage (.704) among all conferences in nonleague play. Especially … Read more