NCAA Hockey 101: Who will win the ECAC?

Earlier this season we talked about Union’s turnaround after a couple of down years and how they’d made some changes that allowed them to roar out of the gate in non-conference play.

A month and a half later, the Dutchmen have continued that trend in the ECAC as well, climbing to an 8-1-1 league record. But even with just one loss from 10 games, their lead isn’t what you could call comfortable. Just one point back is St. Lawrence, and four behind them (with one extra game played) is perennial conference powerhouse Quinnipiac.

It’s starting to look like that’s the top three in the conference, though Harvard and Cornell, with their late Ivy-League starts, could make up some of that ground if they win a good amount of their games in hand. But let’s just go with the premise that QU, SLU, and Union have all gotten out to this fast start and will stay a bit ahead of the pack once break comes to an end. It’s not hard to see Harvard hanging in the top-three at the end of the year, but we just don’t have a significant data set (11 games overall, compared with 19 for everyone in front of them) to make definitive statements about their quality. The Crimson appear to be very good, but they’re also shooting 13.2 percent in all situations and getting sub-average goaltending, so that’s going to skew things.

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What’s interesting is Union and St. Lawrence are not surprisingly riding some good shooting luck as well (ranking tied for third and sixth in the country, respectively). Both appear to be good teams, but they are certainly not one-loss-in-10-league-games good. So they come to earth a little bit in the second half, in all likelihood, and that’s fine because they’ve banked so many wins. The Saints have only nine fewer points than they did all of last season, and Union is one point behind last year’s abysmal season total. Good places to be on both fronts.

The question is what you think of Quinnipiac and their ability to turn things around. As a team they’re quite snake-bit at just 8.4 percent, but the real problem is their goalies haven’t been able to make a save to this point. Chris Truehl seems to have taken the reins as the starter and he’s right around the national average, but Andrew Shortridge’s .889 in seven games earlier this year certainly cost the Bobcats a game at Vermont that they otherwise should have won.

Now, .910 is about the national average, which means that Quinnipiac — a team that basically always takes more shots than its opponents — might be in good enough shape going forward to keep their current pace (Truehl’s stats are hurt by Princeton’s sweep in a home and home in which he gave up six goals on 39 shots). But if you can’t reliably get good performances out of your goalie in college hockey, that’s a major problem. He struggled at Maine (a bad team), at UMass (a worse team, but at least they won), against Dartmouth (meh), at Colgate (not great), Union (good!), and those two Princeton performances (ugly). The first two of those were non-conference but the other four not, so even as they went 2-2 in those contests, there was cause for concern. Every once in a while, it seems, he’s just going to lay an egg, which is not where you want to be.

So Quinnipiac has to do at least one of two things, and likely both of them: Put the puck in the net more often, and get more reliable goaltending. Not sure where they find the latter, but they “should” have the personnel for the former.

But the problem when it comes to making up ground is that Union and St. Lawrence both seem to have guys who can reliably keep their teams’ all-situations percentages artificially high. The Dutchmen have Hobey favorite (more on that next week) Mike Vecchione filling the net at an absurd clip right now, in keeping with trends of past years.

Right now Vecchione has 18 goals and 37 points in 19 games, and linemate Spencer Foo isn’t far behind at 13-21-34. Will they keep shooting a combined 19.9 percent? Almost certainly not. But two years ago (before they were paired up) they were at a combined 13.7 percent, which is well above the national average. And moreover, they shoot the puck more than they did back then, increasing their total per-game average from about 5.6 to the current 8.2. That makes a big difference too. And it’s not like this is a one-line team. Four other players have at least 0.6 points per game.

Meanwhile, the Saints sure won’t shoot like a team of Hobey nominees all year, but their goalie might keep his percentages up. Kyle Hayton had a rough start to the year but has been so good of late that he’s back to being .935 even after a terrible October (.904 in seven games). That’s right in line with his career save percentage over 87 games, so he’s one of those guys where you just have to say, “He’s a .930-plus goalie every year” and assume he’s going to give your shooters nightmares for the rest of the season.

What the league title will almost certainly come down to, then, is strength of schedule. To be frank, Union hasn’t really played much in the conference so far this season, with one game each against St. Lawrence and Quinnipiac really being the only ones that stand out as being particularly difficult. They went 1-0-1 in them, which you obviously take, but they still have two dates with Harvard, one each with St. Lawrence and Quinnipiac, and a pair against what appears to be a solid Cornell team. Put simply, it’s easy to rack up a bunch of wins when your league opponents are RPI, Yale, and Brown, among others.

QU has at least shuffled along in a schedule with plenty of games against good league opponents. They’ve played Harvard, Cornell, Union, and St. Lawrence once each. Going 2-1-1 in that run is somewhat impressive, with the two non-wins being against Union (a 5-2 loss) and SLU (a goalless draw).

Finally, St. Lawrence has actually played one of the more difficult schedules, with a split against Penn State (the Nittany Lions’ only loss), losses at Lowell and Providence, tie against Minnesota and Union, a win and a draw against QU, and a loss to Harvard. Nothing to sneeze at, especially when you consider four of those games were when Hayton was struggling.

This is all very volatile right now for a lot of reasons, but the team I think is most likely to keep up its winning ways is St. Lawrence simply because Hayton is such a huge difference-maker. Not that Vecchione isn’t, but if you have goaltending in college hockey — and the Saints undoubtedly do — you’re going to be harder to stop than a team with a lethal top line.

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-Duluth (took three points in a home-and-home with Bemidji)
2. Denver (idle)
3. Penn State University (idle)
4. Boston College (idle)
5. UMass Lowell (idle)
6. Boston University (beat Yale)
7. Harvard (idle)
8. Notre Dame (idle)
9. Minnesota (idle)
10. North Dakota (idle)

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.