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NCAA Hockey 101: Is Harvard starting to slide?
It seems like every year, Harvard becomes an en-vogue team for a few weeks in December and January.
And it’s tough to say why that is. Obviously a lot of that has to do with the fact that they tend to win a lot of games in those months for one reason or another — first theory is the bottom of the ECAC is very bad — and that they play a shorter schedule which allows any winning streak against those lower-level ECAC teams to look better by comparison.
But then, usually around now, the Crimson seem to drop off a little bit. This year is no different. They spent the tail end of the holiday break as the No. 4 team in the country by the reckoning of the poll voters, and in their first games back won against a solid Quinnipiac team (No. 15 at the time) and a dreadful Princeton, both at home. That bumped them up to No. 2. Then they got swept by RPI and Union in a weekend trip to New York’s capital district, lost a Tuesday game at Dartmouth (another not-good team), and this past weekend finally got another win, against Brown, before tying Yale.
For those scoring at home, that’s one win in the last five games, all against ECAC opponents, after they started the season 11-3-2.
So if this happens somewhat regularly, it’s important to ask why. Why do the Crimson start the year hot on a regular basis then hit the skids once they play a few months? Last season their February was the big disaster, as they went just 4-5-1, with all but one of those wins coming against the dregs of their conference. The year before that they collapsed over six weeks, going 5-9-1 from mid-January through the end of February.
As to the idea that the ECAC schedule builds a lot of soft games into Harvard’s schedule every year, that seems inarguable. Their league games this season before this recent skid against Colgate, Cornell (decent), Princeton, Quinnipiac (borderline NCAA team), St. Lawrence (mediocre team with elite goaltending), Clarkson, RPI, Quinnipiac again, and Princeton again. That’s a lot of very winnable games, in fact, games they should win walking away based on the talent level.
And to that end: Harvard has a lot of very talented players. Not that being drafted is necessarily something that denotes quality, but the Crimson have eight drafted players on the roster, including their top five scorers and their starting goaltender, Flyers pick Merrick Madsen, who’s a little above the national average right now but until this futile stretch had been a laudatory .922 in 14 games.
Guys like Alex Kerfoot, Tyler Moy, Sean Malone and Ryan Donato are point-a-game players up front, and World Junior gold medal winner Adam Fox is the same from the blue line. And given that this is a team that had Jimmy Vesey and Kyle Criscuolo the past few years as well, you can say that talent is a results-driver, pretty unequivocally.
The problem for Harvard is, and has been, the huge differentiation between the quality of their top-six forwards and top-three defensemen and the guys on the lower half of the lineup. It’s hard to quantify this kind of thing in college hockey but the drop-off in relative possession and scoring from the higher-end guys on Harvard to their lower-end counterparts is significant.
When you rely heavily on high-end talent to guide you through your season, sometimes that’s going to fail you for stretches. Only the truly mega-elite players in the game at this level don’t have scoring slumps. Jack Eichel didn’t suffer scoring slumps, but Jimmy Vesey did.
Wouldn’t you know it folks, in the last five games, Harvard’s best players have these stats: Kerfoot is 1-1-2, Moy is 2-1-3, Malone and Fox are both 0-3-3, Donato is 1-1-2, Luke Esposito is 1-0-1, and Madsen has gone .886. Kind of strange that it all happened at once, I guess, but again, this happens to Harvard every year.
Obviously your PDO is going to go through ups and downs every year, but Harvard tends to run “hot” thanks to their high talent level, but then their percentages completely abandon them for quite a while. And as you can see, it’s usually around this part of the season.
None of this is to say Harvard is bad, by any means. But there has never been a point at which they were the second- or fourth-best team in the country despite their national rankings. They’re a high-level possession team — they’ve been outshot in any single game just once this season — and their best players are going to be able to make a huge difference most nights.
Specifically what’s gone wrong in recent weeks has been their special teams efficiency. Through the first 14 games, before this five-game skid began, their power play was running at almost 33 percent, which is unsustainably high of course. Meanwhile, the PK was a solid but not inspiring 82ish percent. Those numbers ranked first and 34th in the country during through Jan. 7.
In the two weeks since, the power play has operated at just 15 percent (38th in the nation) and the PK at 71.4 percent (49th). That’ll make a huge difference in your overall results, even if it is a small sample.
Because the Crimson have plenty of talent on the roster, and based on previous trends, one shouldn’t expect these doldrums to last too long. With that having been said, though, the fact that they need to get by on big PDOs against a relatively soft schedule — they’re currently 29th in strength of schedule — to get into the NCAA tournament every year is a big reason they tend to bow out of that tournament quickly.
Based on all available evidence, we can reasonably assume that this year’s Harvard team isn’t that much different than last year’s or the one before that. And everyone knows that song and dance by now.
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?)
Minnesota-Duluth (swept at North Dakota)
Boston University (swept Maine in a home-and-home)
Penn State (got one point at Ohio State)
Denver (split at St. Cloud)
UMass Lowell (got swept in a home-and-home with Providence)
North Dakota (got swept by UMD)
Union (beat RPI)
Minnesota (split with Wisconsin)
Providence (swept Lowell in a home-and-home)
Boston College (beat UMass)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and occasionally covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
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