NCAA Hockey 101: Here comes Michigan; Hobey Baker finalists

(Ed. Note: Ryan Lambert is our resident NCAA Hockey nut, and we decided it’s time to unleash his particular brand of whimsy on the college game every week. So NCAA HOCKEY 101 will run every Tuesday on Puck Daddy. Educate yo self.) 

Red Berenson picked a hell of a time to get the 800th win of his career.

It came at the tail-end of a semi-impressive weekend sweep of Minnesota — which I'm sure he'd say left a lot of room for improvement — and kind of served to catapult Michigan back into the national conversation of teams that are actually really good. They should have been there all along of course, but they started the year just 2-5 and mostly looked awful doing it.

But after they dropped a pair at Michigan Tech on Halloween and All Saints' Day, then had two weeks off to really kick the tires and look at what was ailing them.

The answers, near as I can tell, seem to have been goaltending (.881 through their first seven games) and the fact that they were giving up more than 32 shots per night. That's a lethal combination in most circumstances, even leaving aside the team's handful of injuries. And when the offense also isn't working (2.7 goals per game, and that's buoyed by an eight-goal performance at UMass Lowell), you're going to look like you, as a coach, have finally lost that fastball after what feels like a thousand years.

But Michigan, for all its faults the last few years, is still Michigan, and the quality of that roster cannot be denied.

That plus some regression toward the mean, seems to have launched the team into the stratosphere since that Nov. 1 loss. From Nov. 2 on, in fact, the Wolverines have been the second-best team in the country in terms of actually winning games (10-2-0, behind only Minnesota State's 11-1-1) and all the underlying stats suggest they're doing it both with ease and at a repeatable level: 71.1 percent of the goals and 60.7 percent of shots. Their team goaltending has also jumped to .923, which is probably right around where it should be given what Edmonton draftee Zach Nagelvoort and Steve Racine did last season.

And obviously, the offense has come around as well, led by Florida prospect Zach Hyman. They've been scoring 4.5 goals per game since mid-November, and pulled their shooting percentage up appreciably in the process (it's now 11.2 percent, which is a little high even for this team's talent level). But Hyman has 18 points in the last 12 games, and Tyler Motte (15 in 10), Andrew Copp (14), Boo Nieves (11), and Michael Downing (10) aren't that far behind. Then there's Dylan Larkin, whose performance at World Junior was really just a reflection of what he's been doing for a while now: he's on 13 points in his last nine games, including 2-1-3 in this most recent sweep of Minnesota.

And let's just talk about the two wins against the Gophers, neither of which were all that comfortable. The Wolverines won 4-3 in overtime on Friday, then needed some prime special-teams play to win a wild 7-5 contest the next afternoon. And look, Minnesota obviously hasn't been that great this season — they've merely been “kind of great but then they lose some weird ones sometimes???” — but they're still one of the best and most talented teams in the country, and beating them twice, regardless of venue, is almost always going to be an extremely difficult task. The Gophers, in fact, are only 3-6-1 since mid-November, right around the same time Michigan started winning a lot, and are starting to feel the impact in terms of their standing in the Pairwise even after the hot 8-1 start.

The good news for both teams is that what's happened to this point largely does not matter. With the exception of Minnesota's upcoming participation in a pair of non-conference games for an in-season tournament, both teams have nothing but games against their Big Ten foes coming up, including a Valentine's Day weekend rematch of this series, this time at Mariucci. That gives Michigan a two months to solidify its position at the top of the conference, and Minnesota the chance to make up the ground they've lost to this point.

At the end of October, this never seemed as though it was a particularly likely scenario, with the Gophers and the rest of the Big Ten trying to run down the Wolverines, but here we are. Michigan is still on the outside of the NCAA tournament picture looking in, but given what they've got in front of them, and their form in the last few months, I don't really expect that to be the case much longer.

And so now having reached this milestone Berenson seems well-positioned to keep adding to his total. He's still fourth on the all-time coaching wins list behind the totally uncatchable Jerry York and Ron Mason, and maybe within striking distance of Jack Parker if he can wring another four or five years or so out of his career, but as long as Michigan keeps getting the players it does, even slow starts and bad bounces might not be enough to keep the Wolverines down from being one of the 10 or so best teams in the country for a good long while to come.

They're certainly proving that's the case this year.

Thinking about Hobey

Fan voting for the Hobey Baker award opened this past week — and you really shouldn't bother with it, because whoever wins the months-long, thousands-of-votes process ends up garnering just 1 percent of the total balloting — and while it's silly to start the conversation this early, we're doing it anyway.

So here are the six guys who really ought to be the only ones in the conversation at this point; they're the only ones that have really and truly separated themselves from the pack in terms of quality among their peers to this point:

Jack Eichel, BU: He's the only actual candidate I think is worth considering, given that he's on 31 points in 18 games to lead the nation in both overall scoring and points per game. This comes even after a bit of a recent slump in which he was held scoreless in three of his last six games. And he still went 2-8-10 in them overall. When Eichel doesn't have a point, or doesn't play, BU is 0-2-3, and scores just 1.8 goals per game, which tells you everything about how vital he is to the team in addition to being indisputably the best player in the nation.

Mike Vecchione, Union: Another kid who's technically draft eligible and happens to be second in the nation in scoring (30 points in 21 games). Now, to be fair, fully half of those points are on the power play, while teammate Daniel Ciampini is just a point behind him and has just nine points on the power play, as well as more goals. But still, when you're third in the nation in points per game as a young sophomore, that says a lot. Vecchione's scoring is also a lot more sustainable given that he's not shooting almost 20 percent.

Jimmy Vesey, Harvard: Another kid with a lot of points per game — 1.5, second in the nation — and the fact that we're really not talking about him more seriously comes because Harvard has played just 14 games to everyone else's 20-something. If you're looking for a reason the Crimson are doing so well this year, Vesey's probably the biggest (along with Steve Michalek's .940 save percentage to this point in playing every non-empty-net minute this year). Hobey loves two-way forwards with strong goal totals (Vesey's goals per game leads the nation), and probably can't do a lot worse than this kid.

Mike Reilly, Minnesota: Say what you want about the Gophers' problems, but Reilly isn't one of them. He plays huge minutes in all situations, puts up big points (20, best among the nation's blue liners) and is probably the biggest cause of the Gopher power play running at around 30 percent this season.

Jon Gillies, Providence: The fate of the Friars largely lives and dies with Gillies, and has for years. He's got a .933 save percentage in 20 appearances, playing far more minutes than Michalek (who might have made it here if not for his numbers being so far outside the realm of expected performance). Not that I think a goalie will win this award for reasons I'll get into in a second, but if any one of them does, Gillies is probably the most deserving.

Zane McIntyre, North Dakota: The team is giving up a pretty good number of shots (McIntyre has faced the seventh-most in the nation to this point) but he's stopping 93 percent of them, and NoDak is one of the best teams in the country. He's a huge reason why.

(With that having been said, you need to be like a .950 goalie to even get serious consideration, which is stupid. But everything about Hobey voting is stupid. That's why some nice 29-year-old senior with 0.85 points per game who takes two classes a week and is on a mediocre team out west will probably be in the Hobey Hat Trick again this year.)

NCHC is wide open

This past weekend, four of the five best teams in the NCHC played each other, with Minnesota Duluth and North Dakota playing in Grand Forks, and Miami and St. Cloud in St. Cloud. Miami found itself swept, and the other series was a split. Meanwhile, the poor-but-they-keep-winning-anyway Omaha Mavericks swept Denver.

That creates a lot of tightness in this top-heavy conference: Omaha has 26 points, Duluth 24, North Dakota 22, and Miami 21. St. Cloud is a ways back at just 13, but might soon start making up ground if this weekend is any indication.

Most of these teams are good ones, of course, and it wouldn't be any great surprise to see them finish atop this conference (especially given its insipid use of the shootout) but the tightness goes beyond the standings. The top-four are in the same range in terms of goals-for (from 56.5 to 57.4 percent) and more.

Omaha will fall off, but might have enough points banked that it doesn't make a difference. North Dakota is better but still not great. So the question becomes whether Miami and Duluth can make enough of a charge in the back half to separate themselves out.

A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?

1. Minnesota State (swept Lake Superior

2. Boston University (took three points at Wisconsin

3. Harvard (lost to Yale)

4. North Dakota (split with Duluth)

5. UMass Lowell (lost at UConn)

6. Minnesota Duluth (split with North Dakota)

7. Miami (swept by St. Cloud)

8. Minnesota (swept at Michigan)

9. Michigan (swept Minnesota)

10. Vermont (won at Dartmouth)

(Most of the top 15 didn't have a good weekend. It happens, I guess.)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.