NCAA Hockey 101: Hockey East already a 2-team league?

It not even being the end of November yet, it is perhaps too early to start pronouncing conferences to essentially be two-horse races, but it's certainly shaping up that way in Hockey East.

Already, the two teams tied for fourth (Merrimack and Providence, both of whom can safely be categorized as surprises for opposite reasons) are already five points back of tied-for-first-place Boston University and Vermont, 13 to 8. That's a lot of ground to make up in a relatively small number of games, but it's actually the league's third-place team which looks like it's going to be one of the two best at the end of the year.

People who've seen plenty of these games will tell you that this is probably a season-long contest between BU and UMass Lowell, and that their confidence that Vermont can keep up its pace atop the league is minimal. The reason for the latter is that the Catamounts have taken 13 points, yes, but they've needed 10 games to do it, compared with BU's eight, and Lowell's 12 in seven games. There's also the fact that Vermont has played a relatively easy schedule in-conference, beating Northeastern UConn, and Maine (twice at home). They also split with Providence, and pummeled UMass Amherst on the road. But they went out to Notre Dame and took just one point of four, and also lost to UConn on the road. (They also play UMass again tonight, in Burlington.)

So the Catamounts are 4-0 at home in Hockey East because they've played soft competition, and will probably improve to 3-0. They're 3-3-1 on the road, and their remaining dates away from Gutterson Fieldhouse are at BC, and at Lowell in February, when both should be in playoff form. It's very easy indeed to see this team fading.

Not that BU and Lowell are without their problems, of course, but the River Hawks are undefeated in seven conference games (5-0-2), and BU has taken at least a point in seven of eight (6-1-1). Both have played tougher opponents than Vermont, and combined they have just two league losses overall to Vermont's three, and the Catamounts have also played a full half their league schedule before U.S. Thanksgiving.

The reasons both BU and Lowell seem poised to sit atop the standings for the remainder of the season as Vermont likely fades are very different, though.

As discussed last week, BU has one transformative player who has made the entire team better: Jack Eichel has 19 points in his first 10 games, and has never been held off the scoresheet in his brief college career. The percentage of BU goals for which he's on the ice remains ludicrously high (25 of the team's 37, or 67.6 percent), and the Terriers have outscored opponents 25-7 when he's on the ice. That means that without him on the ice, the team's GF% drops to 52.2 percent (12 for, 11 against). Allowing just 11 goals in 10 games is very good, obviously, but scoring only 12 is very much not. Having Eichel obviously helps make this decent but not great team — someone would get his first-line minutes and produce a little more if he weren't on the team, but the dropoff would be drastic — into one that looks like it's going to take a run at the regular-season title.

Lowell has the opposite problem, if you want to call it that. At this point in the season, 13 games in, no one has more than 11 points. But two guys have that 11, two more have 10, one has nine, and so on. No one on Lowell can match the production of BU's top four guys (Eichel, linemates Danny O'Regan and Ahti Oksanen, and fill-in Evan Rodrigues, who got four of his 11 points in five periods with Eichel), 10 River Hawks have at least 0.6 points per game, which would put them all comfortably in fifth on BU. In fact, 19 Lowell players have at least one point. This, by the way, is a team with 15 freshmen and sophomores.

This past weekend, BU needed overtime to complete its season sweep of Maine, 3-2, then crushed UConn down in Hartford, 5-2. Eichel had another four points, including these two ludicrous ones from Friday's game:

Meanwhile, Lowell took three points from Notre Dame in South Bend and apparently dominated both games, even if they only won 5-3 on aggregate. Shots were 69-50, and have further assuaged early-season concerns that Lowell didn't have the puck enough.

If Eichel can keep BU's offense afloat at this pace (and I've seen no reason why not, because he's that good), and Lowell can continue to get scoring throughout the lineup (and I've seen no reason why not, because that's all it's done in the past three seasons), then they're going to continue to put distance between themselves and the rest of the pack.

Down goes Tech, up go the Mavs

All good things must come to an end, and the improbable 10-game winning streak posted by Michigan Tech to start this season is now among them. As a consequence, there are no undefeated teams left in the nation. (Interesting note: Wisconsin, at 0-6, is still the only one without a win.)

This week they hosted their first real competition of the season, taking on WCHA rival Minnesota State, losing 2-1 and 3-2. This came largely because the goaltending normalized a little bit, dropping from the previous .950 posted by Jamie Phillips in the first 10 games of the year to “just” .912 this past weekend, which to be fair is still better than the national average of .910.

And so it's worth noting now that Minnesota State is, for my money, the runaway best team in the WCHA this season, and has been since the puck dropped a month and a half ago. No one in the conference scores more goals, no one takes more shots, no one allows fewer. If the goaltending — currently just .871(!!!) but trending up behind Stephon Williams, who's .915 and has one loss in 10 appearances — can straighten itself out (high probability that it can), there's basically no way this team doesn't walk away with the conference title laughing.

As for Tech, well, they're still 10-2, and still doing a lot of the little things right that could serve to keep them in business all year. Even if their goaltending continues to normalize, which it will, they're allowing a small enough number of shots (28.25 per night) that I wouldn't be extremely worried about a collapse. At least, not one so monumental that they'll miss the NCAA tournament. They basically need to go .500 the rest of the way to all but guarantee entry, which is why a hot streak of that length, at any time of the season, is so valuable.

How long can Omaha keep it up?

Have a look at the NCHC standings these days and you're sure to see a very surprising thing: The Omaha Mavericks are keeping pace with the rest of the conference despite the fact that they've played fewer games than everyone else. Now, to be fair, they swept a dismal Western Michigan team on the road, which just about anyone can do. But they also split with Duluth, which you'll recall just swept Minnesota a week earlier. That's a pretty good start to the season for a team that finished a game below .500 last season, and is currently 7-2-1 overall.

But the question is simple: Is this something they can keep up, or are they going to fade like so many other hot starters always do?

Unfortunately for Nebraskans, it seems that this team is going to fall into the latter category, because they have all the hallmarks of a team that's going to collapse:

a) Unbelievably hot goaltending.

Ryan Massa has stopped all but 12 of the 247 shots he's faced in his first eight appearances of the season, posting a 6-1-1 record. He's also a career .897 goalie before this year, and very few (if any) guys experience a 50-plus point improvement in their career number over less than 500 minutes and keep it up.

b) Huge shooting percentage.

Right now the Mavs are shooting 13.45 percent for the year, for 32 goals on just 238 shots. Last year they scored 117 on 1,256 (9.32 percent) and the year before that it was 127 on 1,231 (10.32 percent). Which is to say that this seems well outside the range of the typical Omaha team's shooting ability. In fact, it's well outside just about everyone's numbers: Only four teams in all of college hockey shot better than 11 percent all of last season, and it was just three the year before that. All this goalscoring, therefore, is likely to dry up.

c) Terrible possession numbers.

Which brings us to this final point of concern: A SF% of 43.35, lowest in the NCHC by more than four full percentage points (a poor Colorado College team is at a shade above 48 percent for second-last). In conference play, the Mavs are even worse, at 40.9 percent. At least there, though, they have CC (38.2 percent) beat by a little bit.

So no, I wouldn't advise UNO fans to start booking NCAA trips just yet.

People probably don't want to hear this about Arizona State but it should be said anyway

I want to believe that the Arizona State experiment is going to go extremely well. I really do.

But as with NHL hockey, I'm going to need to see evidence that the region (and in this case the school) really wants to support this program. Not that the Sun Devils aren't going to have some financial support; you don't raise $32 million for a new Division 1 program then let it languish. But can this team, which is for some reason retaining its club coach, actually attract kids?

Right now they're talking like they can target potential NHL prospects, and maybe that's true a few years from now if they have success, but right now? Doubtful at best. The ASU promise is one of nice weather and a potentially relaxed atmosphere, but beyond that what does it offer as a hockey development destination at present — at least for kids who want to play at the next level — that, say, Northeastern doesn't?

They don't have a rink and probably won't build one of their own any time soon. They don't have a conference yet, and if they do, it might change in a few years if more Pac 12 schools join up.

Nothing about this is new or revelatory but I just can't take the statements of, “We're going to build a rink on campus soon, maybe probably we think so,” and “We're going to attract good recruits, maybe probably we think so,” as promises.

This means a lot for college hockey, in terms of making the sport bigger and more visible in places where it wasn't before. But it might mean ASU students barely noticing a team get killed by teams that would otherwise be NCAA also-rans at best for the next half decade or more. If it wants to sit through the latter for a while, then this might work.

But it's a process, and nothing is guaranteed right now or in the future.

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.     Boston University (beat Maine at home and UConn on the road

2.     Minnesota (lost to the US Under 18s in an exhibition

3.     North Dakota (split with St. Cloud on the road)

4.     UMass Lowell (took three points from Notre Dame on the road)

5.     Minnesota State (swept at Michigan Tech)

6.     Miami (swept at Western Michigan)

7.     Denver (beat both Air Force and Wisconsin at home)

8.     Colgate (beat Brown, lost to Yale at home)

9.     Michigan Tech (swept at home by Minnesota State)

10.  Minnesota Duluth (split with Omaha on the road)

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