Yahoo Sports 
NCAA Hockey 101: North Dakota, BU and curse of No. 1 ranking this season
(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.)
Look, people are always going to make a big deal out of being No. 1 in the country, and for the most part it is not a big deal at all.
It's an arbitrary ranking presided over by people who are ostensibly knowledgeable about the sport of college hockey but whose frame of reference is often limited to say the least. Most voters see two teams in any given week: The one they cover, and the one that plays the one they cover. Coaches and scouts also vote but they likewise don't have a real firm grasp on the national picture for the most part. And besides, it's tough to say that Western Team X is better than Eastern Team Y once you get past, say, the top five or six teams in the country.
That said, being the No. 1 team in the country this season seems to bring with it a bit of a curse. Minnesota spent the first month-plus of the season sitting comfortably and relatively unchallenged; through Nov. 10, they were 7-1, and it looked as though the preseason consensus that they'd be the best team in the country was looking pretty prescient. Then they got swept by Minnesota Duluth, and have gone 5-8-3 since.
The next week, hey, Michigan Tech rolled into the top spot, thanks to its 10-0 record. They were immediately swept by Minnesota State, and are 10-7-1 since being ranked tops in the nation.
Then it was Boston University's turn. At 8-1-1 and with the best player in the country leading the charge, they looked like an actual, legitimate contender, as opposed to Tech, which was a nice diversion of a little fluke run to start the year but not actually all that good. The night after they were given the No. 1 slot, they lost to Harvard at home. Then they pummeled Colgate, and were shut out by Dartmouth. A week later, they were 9-3-1 and weren't No. 1 any more.
At that point it was North Dakota's turn because they were 10-3-1 and they'd just taken three points from Omaha. Two weeks later, something as trivial as a split at Denver combined with a BU win at RPI led them to once again be bounced from the top spot in favor of the Terriers. Then there wasn't a poll for the holiday break, and during that time North Dakota once again became the best team in the country in the hearts and minds of voters nationwide.
That lasted a week because NoDak split with Duluth, and Minnesota State took over instead. At 16-4-1, it was tough to argue they didn't belong there, and with the prospect of playing mostly poor WCHA teams the rest of the way, theirs might not be quite so easy a crown to grab. Except two weeks later the Mavericks lost to Bemidji then beat Minnesota, which was enough to get them bounced in favor of North Dakota again.
Then North Dakota went and split with Omaha behind a pair of overtime games this weekend and Minnesota State took over as No. 1 again this week. Who knows how long that’s going to last?
The longest anyone's gone as the No. 1 team in the nation this year is eight games, and already five teams have laid claim to it, with North Dakota being the most frequent visitor to the pinnacle but Minnesota enjoying by far the longest stay there. Three teams ducked their heads in, didn't like the look of the place, and went right back out the within a week.
It's hard to know what to make of this. I can't remember the top of the polls being this volatile in recent memory, even if the same handful of teams are repeatedly getting that kind of consideration. Usually I think the voters don't do a great job, but this year, they've at least gotten this much right: No one is clearly the No. 1 team in the country and you could say to me right now today that the national champions in April will be one of anywhere between five and seven teams, and I would have to believe you.
BU? Yeah I can see it. North Dakota? Sure, of course. Minnesota State? A bit of a stretch but certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Boston College? They're charging hard all of a sudden. Minnesota? If anyone can put together a run, it's them. Miami? A sleeper pick, but a credible one. Michigan? Hell, that could happen too. You could name a few more dark horses in this group too, and while they'd get increasingly implausible, they also wouldn't be totally ruled out.
The point, I guess, is that voters are fickle, and hockey fickler. And shoot, maybe another week or two from now they just say screw it and give the No. 1 spot to, like, Robert Morris. Stranger things haven't happened, but they've come awful damn close this year.
Don't be fooled by the “Actually Interesting Beanpot” storyline
“Wow,” everyone in Boston screamed for the last two weeks or so, “the Beanpot is coming up and it's going to be the most interesting field in years.”
Believe me when I tell you it is not and was never going to be. Except they postponed it and moved it to Tuesday. That was interesting. In its way. I guess.
The problem with the Beanpot is that it is stupid and pointless until BC and BU play, at which point it becomes engaging and interesting. Often this is because they're typically meeting in yet another final and seeing two teams that seem to have a legitimate dislike of each other play for a trophy they cherish more than their conference championship is fun. Everyone will try to tell you that the games involving these two teams playing either Harvard or Northeastern are likewise good but they are not because the conclusion is more or less inevitable: The historically better teams nearly always win, and when they don't you usually saw it coming.
The reason this year is being touted as “interesting” — notice this doesn't mean the same thing as “competitive” — is that BU plays Harvard in the first round and the former hasn't beaten the latter in a few years. As mentioned above, the Crimson beat BU in overtime earlier this season, and started the year extremely well thanks to their goaltender, Steve Michalek, starting out the season at like .945 for the first several weeks. But Harvard has faltered in recent weeks, dipping from 11-1-2 in their first 14 to 2-4 in the last six. Injuries have mounted, Michalek stopped playing like Connor Hellebuyck, and things have slid back into the familiar rhythm of Harvard just not being very good. BU is much better and, if things go as they should, will emerge victorious later this evening behind what I'm going to assume is a big night from Jack Eichel, Evan Rodrigues, and Danny O'Regan.
Meanwhile, Boston College started out the year very slowly indeed, going an un-Eagle-like 7-7-0 through the end of November. But then they realized, like, “Oh yeah, we have a ton of first- and second-round draft picks on this team and our coach is the greatest in college hockey history,” and they enter tonight's game against a mediocre Northeastern team — which to be fair is an improvement over the usual bad Northeastern team that often darkens the TD Garden — on a streak of near invincibility (nine wins and a tie from their last 11, with only 22 conceded and 37 scored). Northeastern took but a single point from the Eagles in their series a month ago. I don't know why anyone thinks things will go differently in a game that like, really matters to Jerry York.
Hmm, a BC/BU Beanpot final? This Beanpot is so interesting that it would be as much as 1 percent surprising.
St. Lawrence leading a strange season in the ECAC
Take a quick look at the ECAC standings for this season and you'll see some very strange stuff. Sure, Quinnipiac is at the top because Quinnipiac is an elite program in the country, but beyond that it's tough to imagine anyone saw this coming.
The preseason polls from the league's coaches and media indicated that this was Colgate and Union's league to lose, with Cornell and Yale mixed in as also-rans with the Q. Colgate and Union are instead ranked sixth and 10th out of 12 in the conference, respectively. Yale is right where most people thought at No. 4.
The aforementioned hot start for Harvard — picked to finish around ninth or 10th — got them to the top for a while but they've since slumped back down to third. But second in the conference right now, and not really showing any signs of slowing down, is St. Lawrence for some reason. Both media and coaches had them second-last in the league at 11th, and the reasons are understandable. Greg and Matt Carey are gone, and when your returning top scorer is a defenseman who played with those two point machines, there's certainly cause for concern.
And frankly, none of their skaters have been lighting the world on fire; they've scored just 76 goals in 26 games — not a particularly high number — though literally everyone on the team who isn't a goalie has netted at least one. What's different for them this year is pretty simple: Freshman goaltender Kyle Hayton has gone .938 for the Saints this season, playing all but one game, and allowing just 50 goals in 25 games. Somehow, the team has lost nine of those.
The question of whether this can last is a decent one, I guess, but the answer seems to be “no.” His .938 exceeds what he did in the USHL by a good 25 points, and so at some point St. Lawrence is probably going to start dropping even more games. But here's the thing: The Saints' starter last season — senior Matt Weninger — went .878 and still got into 34 games. So the fact that Hayton is 60 points better than him really is the difference between being sub-.500 with an offensive juggernaut and being well over .500 on a mediocre scoring team.
The lesson here is that goaltending is more important than people in college hockey give it credit for.
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?)
BU (beat UMass)
North Dakota (split with Omaha)
Minnesota State (swept Ferris State)
Miami (tied at Denver)
Minnesota Duluth (split at Denver)
UMass Lowell (split with Merrimack)
Boston College (beat Providence)
Denver (split with Duluth)
Omaha (split with North Dakota)
Michigan (lost to Michigan State)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is hereand his Twitter is here.
