NCAA Hockey 101: Problems for Minnesota; Michigan Tech takes No. 1; Casey DeSmith dismissed?

(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.)

It really seemed like Minnesota might have been the No. 1 team in the country from start to finish this season.

The Gophers, national runners up last season with very few meaningful losses over the summer, are far and away the best on-paper team in the country, and any series they played from October to March always seemed as though it would have a pretty good chance of ending in a sweep for the U. Obviously teams don't win every game for a full season, but with this club you at least felt like the likelihood that it would come out of any given game with two points, regardless of venue or opponent, was exceedingly high.

Invincibility is something for which one cannot reasonably ask, however, and this weekend highlighted why. The Gophers were handed losses Nos. 2 and 3 — after that somewhat surprising loss to a strong St. Cloud team on Halloween — of the year this weekend, losing 3-0 and 2-1 to Minnesota Duluth in a home-and-home series that led to the Gophers being knocked from the top spot in the polls, as well as the hearts of many voters who might have still favored them even as they worked out another split against an in-state rival. This, in fact, is the third meeting between the two teams this season, and the Gophers won the first one 4-3.

And yeah, even the best teams will take games off here and there, and maybe lost a surprise result, but that's not really what happened in this series. Instead, Duluth rained hell on the Gophers from start to finish this weekend, and the 5-1 aggregate scoreline actually does a lot to flatter the former No. 1. Shots in the weekend series ended up being 72-42, and it's really not often at all that a team as talented as this gets so dramatically bossed around (though when taking 5-on-5 play into consideration, possession was a bit more even, but not much, at 43-34 for the Bulldogs).

So one has to wonder: If the Gophers gave up 28 shots (and three goals) in close to 24 minutes of power play time, is that an outlier or a problem with the penalty kill?

Consider that the Gophers have to this point allowed just 64 shots on their various penalty kills, which have spanned 90:05 over their 10 games, effectively 9 minutes per game of man-down hockey. That's only 42.6 shots against per 60 minutes of PK time, and thus Duluth's shots-for rate (28 in 23:56) and ability to actually draw penalties is extremely outside what we'd think of as normal Gopher hockey.

In fact, it's even well outside Duluth's ability to create offense on the power play, as its season number now sits at 54.2 shots per 60, and is thus supremely pumped up by the 70.2 or so they posted in these past two games.

So basically what this means is that the Gophers took far more penalties than they usually do, and the Bulldogs pummeled poor Adam Wilcox with shots as a result (and he still had a .931 save percentage on the weekend). Meanwhile, his counterpart, Duluth's wonderfully named Kasimir Kaskisuo, went .976 in allowing just one goal, that at even strength.

So what we have here, really, is a series in which the Gophers put themselves in an uncharacteristic special-teams slog and ended up looking rather poor as a consequence. Their drop to No. 4 in the polls, however, seems a bit unreasonable because this was two losses to a Duluth team that's now 8-4, despite having played nothing but quality teams; its losses were to Minnesota, Minnesota State, Denver, and Miami.

Obviously Don Lucia and Co. would like to have one or both of these games back, and obviously that's not how it works, but there's not really any great shame in being swept by Duluth. They're a team that's going to be there at the end of the year, vying for if not comfortably owning an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament at the very least.

They're also probably going to be a little ways back of the Gophers. Just like everyone else.

Making sense of BU's start

A team that held steady in the polls this week, at a curious No. 3, was Boston University.

I say curious here because while the Terriers are off to an impressive start at 6-1-1, the way in which they've done it is a little strange. They've outscored their opponents nearly 2-to-1 (a whopping 29 for, and only 14 against in eight games), but their shots-for percentage is “only” 54.3 percent.

I've talked before about their possession numbers being dismal last year, and that was backed up by the fact that they won just three games after Thanksgiving back then. But with every game they play in — and this week they had only a one-off, at Maine — they seem to extend themselves farther into credibility even as the underlying numbers continue to move in a direction that logically shouldn't hold up. Even beyond their various percentages necessarily having to reach some sort of remote equilibrium, this is basically a one-line team.

That line, of course, is led by Jack Eichel — who continues to lead the lead the nation in points per game (1.88) as an 18-year-old freshman. How influential is this phenom? How about this stat: He's been on the ice for 20 of BU's 29 goals, and only four of the opposition's 14. When Eichel plays with you, you are more or less guaranteed to rack up points; his regular linemates are Ahti Oksanen (4-2-6 with 28 shots in what is effectively six games) and Sharks pick Danny O'Regan (6-7-13 with 28 shots in eight). And when Oksanen went down for nearly two full games, Evan Rodrigues moved up to the top line instead, and posted 2-2-4 in five periods, with six shots on goal. For the rest of the season, Rodrigues is 1-6-7 in six.

And to be fair, a lot of these stats are inflated by an 8-1 bombing of UMass to open the season, and Eichel “only” figured into four goals in that one.

Another point of concern for the Terriers is that their power play has been terrible. It's just 3 of 22 this year, despite the fact that Eichel tries his damnedest to make things happen: He's been on the ice for all three of those man-advantage goals.

Now, perhaps it's not fair to cast aspersions on BU for being a one-line team. That, after all, is an extremely influential line, and you can't hold “having probably the best player in the country” against them, really. In college especially, teams can ride elite points-producers or goaltenders a very long way indeed, and it wouldn't be any great shock to see Eichel drag this team kicking and screaming to a Hockey East title and beyond.

But someone else does need to do something before this club can be taken extremely seriously as any sort of a national contender. Only two guys who haven't gotten time with Eichel have more than one goal on the year, and teams with actual depth of talent (of which BU has played precisely three in eight games) will be able to exploit that.

Michigan Tech the new No. 1, but for how long?

With Minnesota being knocked out of the No. 1 spot, that finally opened up a chance for Michigan Tech to crawl to the top of the heap for the week. They remain unbeaten and untied at 10-0 — and by virtue of both Harvard and Robert Morris both finally losing, they are the last undefeated team in the country — but as discussed last week haven't played much in the way of real quality.

That changes this weekend, when one of the few WCHA teams with good fundamentals underlying its strong winning percentage comes to town. Minnesota State (7-3-0) is the best team in the WCHA for my money, and by a pretty fair distance. Their possession numbers are off-the-charts great at 63.7 SF% but their goaltending has been abysmal (.848) after Cole Huggins went .926 last year. You obviously need goalies to play well, but State has been so good that even abjectly terrible keepers haven't sunk their season. Put it this way: Isles draftee Stephon Williams is only .901 for the season and his GAA is 1.95; that's how few shots the Mavericks concede.

The question, then, is whether Tech can continue to get .957 goaltending from Jamie Phillips, whose career save percentage before this season was a poor .897 in about 1,005 minutes. I don't know how much stock you want to go putting into the 599:18 so far this season, but anything more than “maybe only just a little?” seems a little foolish.

Because of all this, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see things normalize this weekend, even with the Huskies at home. Of course, every conceivable own-zone bounce might continue to go the right way for Tech and the wrong way for the Mavs, as they have all year, because hockey's weird. But at some point, luck both good and bad necessarily has to run out.

DeSmith dismissed?

It shouldn't come as any great surprise, I guess, that reports are now starting to filter out — starting with this from SBNation — that Casey DeSmith is now permanently removed from the UNH roster, following his arrest for domestic assault and battery and indefinite suspension earlier this year.

Which is good, because it sends a strong message that even an above-average goaltender like DeSmith doesn't have the privilege of being able to do any damn thing he wants. Allegedly beat up a woman, get kicked off the team. Pretty simple. (Update: SB Nation got a statement from UNH, saying "Casey DeSmith is not currently enrolled at the University of New Hampshire. It is inappropriate for the university to comment further on a specific student's situation as protected under state and federal privacy laws.")

Meanwhile, UNH became the first team to lose to Northeastern all season this past weekend, so everything's going great up in Durham. Adam Clark is now on a strong save percentage of .894, and the Wildcats have just four wins from their first 10 games. It's gonna be a long season.

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. North Dakota (split with Miami)

2. Boston University (beat Maine)

3. Minnesota (swept by Minnesota Duluth)

4. Michigan Tech (Swept Bemidji)

5. UMass Lowell (split with Penn State)

6. Colgate (beat St. Lawrence, tied Clarkson)

7. Miami (split with North Dakota)

8. Minnesota State (idle)

9. Minnesota Duluth (swept Minnesota)

10. Denver (beat Colorado College)

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