NCAA Hockey 101: Maine’s time as hockey powerhouse over?

A few weeks ago I was tempted to write about how Maine's hockey program has gone off a cliff.

They started the season 0-0-3, with ties against Michigan State, North Dakota, and Union. Then they lost four straight to Union, Quinnipiac, UMass, and Princeton.

Some of those games were winnable (the lost to UMass in overtime and Princeton isn't very good), some were very much not (Quinnipiac is laying college hockey to waste so far). The three teams they tied are actually pretty good.

But since then, disaster. They went 0-4 against BC and Lowell — and okay, those are also games in which they shouldn't be able to reasonably stay competitive — but with just a single goal scored, and 13 allowed. And the whole “scoring one goal in four games” thing is obviously bad, but it's pretty indicative of an overall problem: The Black Bears have no offense to speak of.

Through 11 games, they've scored exactly that many goals. And allowed nearly three times as many. And that's with a respectable team save percentage of .914. Here's something more concerning: They've scored six of their 11 goals in the third period, but have never really made it close, because they've entered only one third period with a lead (which they blew and only ended up earning a draw), and three with the score tied (0-2-1). The other seven games they entered the third period trailing, and recovered just a single point from the wreckage.

There are plenty of good reasons why Maine is this bad these days (the facilities are atrocious and no one wants to play there, the recruiting budget has been slashed time and again, Orono is in the middle of nowhere, etc.) but for me this all boils down to the loss of goaltending coach and recruiter Grant Standbrook, who retired from doing that stuff full-time back in 2008.

When he was with the Black Bears, they went 493-216-66 (.678) over 18 seasons, winning two national titles in 16 NCAA tournament appearances, including 11 trips to the Frozen Four. Since 2008, the Black Bears are a combined 113-129-35 (.471) with one NCAA tournament appearance.

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The reason? Well, it'll shock you, but with Standbrook no longer recruiting and the budget for doing what he did so well for so long now slashed, they just can't attract good players.

And that's not going to change as long as they keep playing like this, either.

Minnesota State, Michigan Tech pacing WCHA once again

The two best teams in the WCHA last season were Michigan Tech and Minnesota State. They finished Nos. 1 and 7 in the Pairwise last season, both winning 29 games before the NCAA tournament began.

And they were very similar teams.

Minnesota State was the best possession team in the country last season (at 58 percent!), and Tech was “only” fifth (at 55.6 percent). They both got very strong goaltending performances. They both had star forwards who put up a ton of goals.

This year, things have very much not gone according to the plans laid out last season. The Mavericks started out the year 0-4 before they got into conference play, while the Huskies, with an easier out-of-conference schedule, have mostly bobbed along a little above .500.

At this point in the season last year, they were a combined 17-3. This year's they're 12-10. So the question one has to ask is: What's different?

Well, the possession numbers are still very, very good. Mankato is chugging along at 56.2 percent, with Tech not far behind at 55.8 percent. But here's the difference: There's no one on either team posting particularly massive numbers. Three guys have four goals each for Tech, and two more have three, in 10 games. And incidentally, Minnesota State is even worse off, with just one goal-goal scorer through 12 games, and three more with three.

Meanwhile, Stephon Williams' .925 in net has vanished from Mankato's books with Williams having jetted to the AHL. In his stead, Cole Huggins leads the team in his stead at .895. Meanwhile, Jamie Phillips — who started at .957 in 10 games last year and then settled down to a season-long and very respectable .933 — is delivering goaltending at only a slightly above-average .920 so far this year.

And yes, that kind of issue can often be the difference between going 6-6 and 7-3, or 6-4 and 10-0. Percentage-driven winning? The devil, you say?

But for all this totally fair concern about just how good these teams are going to be this year, one need only look at their remaining schedules to be reassured of the near-certainty in both reaching at least 22 wins on the season. The fact is that once you get into the teeth of the WCHA schedule, good possession teams tend to rip the weaker siblings in that conference limb from limb.

Last season, for example, Minnesota State lost only four regular-season games out of 28 against WCHA opponents, and Tech lost five. Out-of-conference they came together to go 16-9-0, which is a very good record, but it pales in comparison with the combined 42-9-5 (in head-to-head games, State went 5-0-1). In the WCHA last year, they put up goal differentials of plus-51 and plus-55, and again, this is in just 28 games.

So yes, they're quite likely to whale on WCHA clubs again this year. If the next-best team in the conference is Alaska-Anchorage or Ferris State, then the gap isn't so much something to mind as to rent a helicopter and fly over. It's difficult to see even a Bowling Green or Northern Michigan — which had implausibly and unsustainably hot starts last season — getting their acts together to the point that they're going to cause much trouble for either of the conference's giants.

But here's where it gets interesting: Mankato only ended up winning its first out-of-conference game this weekend, in overtime, and it needed an insane comeback against a bafflingly bad Minnesota to do it. That improves the Mavs to 1-5 in non-WCHA play. But given that we know their record is 6-6, we can also infer that they've crushed in-conference opponents, and they have pretty convincingly. The only loss, a 7-4 defeat at Ferris that included an empty-netter, was not surprisingly down to poor goaltending once again. But if you're getting .890 goaltending in six WCHA games and you've won five anyway, at this level, that just indicates that you're significantly better than everyone you play. The team's myriad problems simply seem not to matter when they play Alaska and Bemidji.

The issue for Tech, though, is that they haven't played a single out-of-conference game yet this season. They're 6-4, but that's 6-4 against nothing but WCHA clubs. Ferris four times, plus Northern, Alabama-Huntsville, and Bowling Green twice each. What happens when they start playing OOC games, like when they travel to a solid Michigan State team this coming weekend? They're only playing six non-league games to begin with, and if they're not exactly making hay against the dregs of the WCHA (let's face it), what the likes of Michigan State — three times! — and even UConn might do to them strikes the outside observer as worrisome.

The good news for both clubs is that the process is clearly sound (though, again, playing the bottom of the WCHA sure helps pad the attempts numbers) and that percentages probably won't stay as low as they currently are. As long as you keep getting league points, it kind of doesn't matter how you do out-of-conference. To an extent, at least.

Only one team from the WCHA gets an autobid into the NCAA tournament, and right now if you were betting on which one it will be, one of these two seems a very likely candidate. Last year, they both made it, and would have done so even if they'd lost in the league tournament. Such was the power of both their in- and out-of-conference records.

This time around, though, they're probably leaving it up to a little too much chance that they'll be making the return trip.

Quinnipiac is the best team in the country

Hey caring about the national polls is stupid, but if you're a person who voted in them and didn't pick Quinnipiac — 10-0-0, 4.5 goals for per game, 1.7 goals against per game, 59.3 percent CF% — as the No. 1 team in the country, please consider taking up another hobby instead.

I am deeply interested to find out how someone was able to find 38 people who don't think a team with these numbers is the best thing going today.

Again, who cares and everything, but what sport are these guys watching?

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. Quinnipiac (beat Harvard and Dartmouth at home)

2. Providence College (two ties with BU in a home-and-home)

3. North Dakota (swept Miami at home)

4. Boston College (beat Michigan State at home)

5. UMass Lowell (swept Maine in a home-and-home)

6. Denver (took three points at Minnesota-Duluth)

7. Nebraska Omaha (idle)

8. St. Cloud (swept Western Michigan)

9. Harvard (lost at Quinnipiac, won at Princeton)

10. Merrimack (beat Niagara)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here. 

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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