College Hockey Update:  Last weekend presented two top-fifteen matchups, and boy did North Dakota get ambushed at Denver, as the Pioneers prevailed in a convincing sweep, dropping North Dakota a couple of spots in the poll to #4, and lifting Denver up three rungs to #10.  Boston University managed a win at home against UMass-Lowell, and then lost at Lowell, and BU, hot on the heels of it’s 1-0 OT loss to BC in the Beanpot earlier in the week, dropped a couple of pegs to #9 on the week, while UMass-Lowell held at #11.

Meanwhile Quinnipiac had its hands full of St. Lawrence Friday night, losing a squeaker in OT to the Saints, and then nearly repeated the same fate Saturday night against Clarkson, but prevailed this time in OT; Quinnipiac held at #1 on the weekend.  In Quinnipiac’s only other loss this year, they were soundly beaten, despite scoring a sole early goal, and mounting a late blistering offensive assault.  Friday night was different as there was no scoring until the second, and then the teams traded goals evenly and in spurts; three goals were scored in eleven minutes late in the second, and three goals were then scored in the first two minutes of the third.  Quinnipiac always wins, and always wins close games, but this time, a minute and-a-half into OT it was Brian Ward of St. Lawrence with the assist by Drew Smolcynski (I can’t resist printing a name like that) and Jacob Pritchard, scoring in a sort of mad scrum around a ricochet, to give seemingly unbeatable Quinnipiac its second loss of the year.  Because he felt that play on the winning goal was not legal, Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold kept his team off the ice for the traditional post-game handshake.  Wow, this wasn’t the Super Bowl.  And even after the Super Bowl, it seems that a lot of fans and spectators rush to judgment about what they perceive as bad sportsmanship.  For St. Lawrence, this was a huge night, given that they tied Quinnipiac the only other time they played them this year.  Saturday night’s game for Quinnipiac was very much the same as Friday’s, with no scoring in the first, and the team trading goals in the second and third, but this time Quinnipiac prevailed over Clarkson in OT.

Boston College beat and then managed a tie with Merrimack and, with the earlier Beanpot win in hand, rose up two slots to #2 — are these guys peaking at the right time or what? Providence swept Connecticut and held at #5, Michigan beat and tied Wisconsin and held at #6, and Notre Dame edged up to #7 on its sweep of Maine.  Yale beat Colgate and Cornell and rose up two spots to #8, Nebraska-Omaha swept Western Michigan and held at #12, and Harvard lost to RPI and beat Union, and with their Beanpot Consolation round loss to Northeastern earlier in the week, dropped four rungs to #13.  Penn State beat and tied Michigan State, and entered the top fifteen at #15, while an idle St. Cloud State edged up to #3 on North Dakota’s disaster in Denver, and an idle Michigan Tech held at #14.

Last weekend, Michigan had huge help from its junior forward Tyler Motte, of St. Clair, MI., who scored a goal and added an assist in his team’s 4-1 win Friday night, and scored a goal in his team’s 4-4 tie Saturday night, both against Wisconsin.  Motte is first on his team in goals scored, with 27, and is tied for third in assists, with 15.  As a sophomore he scored nine goals and added 22 assists, and as a freshman he scored nine goals and added nine assists.  He spent a year on the National Under-18 Development team in 2012-13, and he scored 25 goals and added 16 assists in 53 games played.  He was picked in the fourth round with the 121st pick overall in the 2013 NHL Entry Draft by the Chicago Blackhawks.  His brother, CJ, is a senior goalie for Ferris State.  Their hometown of St. Clair, Michigan, is on the eastern side of the “thumb” on the lower “mitt” of Michigan, and is home to 5,500 residents who live among the town’s three square miles along the St. Clair River.  Michigan is 18-4-5, is ranked #6, and plays one game this Friday night, hosting . . . . Ferris State.  Being in the Big Ten (Six), Michigan will play three weekends of regular season games after this Friday night’s game, ending at home against #15 Penn State.  Michigan has more NCAA titles than anyone — nine — but seven of them are ancient history dating back sixty years plus, and two they won twenty and eighteen years ago in ’96 and ’98.  And of late Michigan has been plagued by going into the tournament highly ranked, but then losing to teams ranked much lower than them.  It will be interesting to see this year if that is repeated for the team and its fans, or if they can overcome it.

So we’re on the home stretch of the regular season as it winds down.  Many (fans of) teams in all six conferences are somewhat consumed by their hopes for home-ice play in their conference tournaments, and how the outcome of these last weekends of play will impact that. There are only about six thousand possible permutations and combinations of outcomes and impacts here, and that’s something we just won’t get into.  Suffice it to say that among the six conferences, only Hockey East has a leader (Notre Dame) leading by a single point with a pack of teams right behind it in conference standings, and the other five conferences have leaders well ahead (in points) of the pack:  Atlantic Hockey’s Robert Morris is three points ahead of the pack; The Big Ten’s Minnesota leads Michigan by a single point, but the two are seven and six points, respectively, ahead of the third place team; The ECAC’s Quinnipiac is five point ahead of the pack; The NCHC’s St. Cloud State and North Dakota are tied together, both six points ahead of the pack; and The WCHA’s Mankato State is four points ahead of the pack.  And that’s all the dissecting we’ll do here.

Then there’s the difference between the poll and the system used by the NCAA, pair-wise rankings, to determine the teams who make the NCAA Tournament.  About this deep into the season the two start to match up fairly well, so we can do a quick discussion on this.  There is a method believed to practically duplicate the NCAA methodology on one of the major college hockey sites, and in fact it has been accurate at predicting the sixteen team field for many years now.  Looking at the rankings there, here is what we find. The top seven teams in the poll are the exact same seven teams in the top of the pair-wise rankings, with very little difference in the order of the seven teams.  You can pretty well bet that all seven of these teams are going to be in the NCAA Tournament.  The next six teams, ranked 8-13 in the poll, are the exact same “next six” teams in the pair-wise rankings, with more difference in individual position than the differences in the first group of seven.  These six teams all seem to have a good shot at making the NCAA Tournament, but not the same level of certainty as the first seven.  The next fourteen teams, ranked 14-27, all have a chance of making the NCAA Tournament, very much so depending on what happens in the next five weekends.  And that’s all the dissecting we’ll do here.

This weekend presents two potentially blistering top-fifteen matchups, and while in one case the disparity in rankings doesn’t suggest it, well, just look what happened to North Dakota when they went to not-very-highly-ranked Denver.  So let’s get to it.  #3 St. Cloud State, a team certainly on a roll this year, will travel to (yes, travel to, just as North Dakota did to Denver), #12 Nebraska-Omaha.  This should be a terrific matchup.  Next, #5 Providence will host a lately very hot #7 Notre Dame.  Another great matchup.

This provides the top fifteen teams, rankings, records, and last weekend’s results:

[table id=126 /]

That’s all for now.  Stay tuned, and go Terriers!

— Tom