NCAA Hockey 101: When good teams go bad; Jack Eichel rules as usual

(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.)

This weekend saw the crashing halt to the impressive runs for the top teams in the nation.

All 20 of last week's top-ranked teams played over the weekend, and only four didn't actually lose. Those teams were now-No. 2 North Dakota (beat Air Force in a one-off), No. 6 UMass Lowell (swept UNH), No. 9 Michigan Tech (swept Michigan), and No. 15 Notre Dame (three points from Vermont).

Everyone else dropped at least one decision, and it was just a very weird weekend nationwide.

Minnesota and St. Cloud each their home games, okay, you can see that. Two very good teams. Same with BU and Providence splitting their road games. Fair enough. And Miami and Minnesota-Duluth splitting in Duluth. And BC splitting with Denver. All fine.

But, like, Union being swept by RPI? Colgate splitting with Mercyhurst? Vermont only getting one point against Notre Dame? Minnesota State splitting with Bowling Green? Alaska not winning a game in Bemidji? Michigan losing 10-3 on aggregate to Tech? Just weird. No other way to say it. These are results that, on paper, shouldn't happen.

Now, to be fair, the early part of the college hockey season is always a little strange. Teams lose goofy games in October and early November that defy explanation. Last year, Lowell was the No. 1 team in the country and lost its home opener to Sacred Heart, which could have been safely considered the worst team in the country at the time. The good teams get the ship straightened out, the bad teams find themselves running out of luck over the next week or three.

Usually, by December, we know more or less enough about these teams to know where they're going to be headed.

So the question, then, is which of these teams are legit and which are going to crumble, and I have some guesses prepared. The national power houses like Minnesota and NoDak and BC are all going to be fine. Teams in softer conferences like Colgate, Union and Minnesota State will probably also settle into a nice groove of crushing the mediocre to poor teams on their league schedules. But for the rest, it's a bit of a mishmash.

We don't know, for example, if Notre Dame, BU, Providence and Lowell are any good yet (and we'll discuss the last of these teams in a minute). Same with Miami and Denver. They're in tough leagues and while they're doing well enough right now, things could slow down a bit as the season wears on. Probably you'd have to think they are good overall, though — maybe not this good, of course — and you likely won't turn out to be wrong or anything by the end of the season. But how good obviously remains to be seen; some of the stats suggest there could be serious problems emerging for some of them.

College hockey is ruled by an almost-insane amount of luck, probably more so than the NHL, and so a lot of these early season results that aren't expected can be explained in this way. Colgate should not split with Mercyhurst, for instance.

Here come the Ivies!

One of the absolute stupidest things in college hockey is that the Ivy League schools — Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale — don't start the same weekend as everyone else. This is because the Ivy League has a bunch of stupid rules that put their teams at a competitive disadvantage but it's like, honor, or something? I don't know. Most of the time, Ivies can't even start practicing until most teams have played at least an exhibition game.

But this weekend was the one in which they all started playing actual NCAA games (Dartmouth and Brown played an exhibition against each other on Oct. 26, which doesn't seem like it should be allowed to happen) and what a start it was. Yale and Princeton took part in the Liberty Invitational in Newark, Harvard and Dartmouth, Brown played Army, and Cornell visited Omaha for two.

How'd they do? They went .500, which tends to happen when you play each other. But they also went .500 against non-Ivy opponents (2-2-1), which is likely due to the fact that they played some bad teams: UConn and Army were the two teams they beat, and Merrimack pummeled Princeton, 6-1. Maybe if these teams got to start, say, I don't know, three weeks earlier in October, they'd be better overall. Guess we'll never know, because the rules about starting the season at a goofy time are never going to change, unfortunately. It's one of those long-held Ivy League traditions that doesn't make a lot of sense, like thinking anything about Yale is worthwhile.

The good news is that, now that the Ivies have started up, we're just weeks away from being able to obsessively and mathematically rank every team in the country from Nos. 1 to 59. And that's what college hockey is all about.

A hard rain in Lowell?

You'll note that the River Hawks, who moved to No. 6 in the polls this week, are sitting at 5-1-1 and looking like a goalscoring juggernaut. Everyone in college hockey is now leaning back in mock amazement at what they've done to this point, including this weekend's 10-2 aggregate dismantling of UNH in a home-and-home, and said, “Well, it looks like they haven't missed a beat!”

Which is an odd way to look at things. Lowell lost two goalies (including the best one in the country over the last two seasons), about half its wings, and its No. 1 center, and its Nos. 1 and 3 defensemen. People were concerned that they'd be able to keep the puck out of the net first and foremost, and also that they'd be able to score quite so effectively as they did last year.

It's worth noting that in terms of goals per game, Lowell was only 29th in the country (2.83, which isn't a lot), just about smack dab in the middle, so losing all those forwards was a serious point of concern. And yet here they were with them scoring 4.29 per though seven, first in the country by a decent margin. “Wow,” everyone says, “how are they doing it?”

Well, they have been extraordinarily lucky, that's how. 4.29 goals per game? That's on just 23.4 shots per game. That number is 56th in the league. No one seems to want to question whether this is going to be in any way sustainable, but guess what, dudes: It ain't. They scored eight goals against UNH on Saturday on just 21 shots.

And the weird thing is, it's everyone scoring. Lowell has dressed 25 different players through seven games, and 16 of them have goals already. Of the 23 skaters, 21 have at least one point. It's insane. But all people care about is the goals. Because there are so many of them, maybe it's just easy to get distracted.

Meanwhile, their goals against per game ranked first last year at 1.88 per, and with the loss of both Connor Hellebuyck to Winnipeg's farm system (early departure) and Doug Carr to Calgary's (graduation), most expected a step back. They were right. Lowell is now allowing 2.71 per (though if you take out the extremely anomalous 8-4 loss to Michigan, it's more in line with historical norms at 1.83).

But what's more troubling is the possession numbers. For all its acclaim as a strong team, Lowell's SF% last year was only a little above even; they allowed about 30.1 shots per game, which was 28th in the nation. But they took 31.9, so no big deal. This year, though, the shots for have vanished, falling to that 23.4 while the shots against have stayed more or less the same (30.4). The fact that they're only getting .911 goaltending instead of the .938 from last year is worrisome, but at least seems a little more sustainable given the talent level of the two new guys.

The point is this: Lowell's performance to this point has been impressive but has all the hallmarks of also being pretty flimsy. When held up to scrutiny, this run of Lowell's looks like it could portend bad things down the road unless it straightens things out with respect to possession (and playing Northeastern and Penn State the next two weekends should help), a collapse might be coming. Teams don't keep up a 43.5 SF% and a 61.2 GF% at the same time for very long.

Guess who's probably the best player in the country right now

It's Jack Eichel. Of course it's Jack Eichel.

Among players that have gotten into more than one or two games this season, Eichel (who just turned 18 last week) leads the nation in points per game (1.8), on four goals and five assists in five appearances. He's also registered at least a point and four shots on goal in every game so far this year.

That's very impressive, and what's even more impressive is that he should probably have more goals than he actually does.

He's second in the nation in shots on goal per game as well, at 6.2. He trails only Quinnipiac's Sam Anas, who's at 7.33. He's shooting about 13 percent, consequently, but a kid with his talent should maybe do a little better than that; Johnny Gaudreau shot about 18.4 percent over his three years in college, and in terms of pure scoring talent, that looks to be the closest comparable.

Meanwhile, his linemates — San Jose prospect Danny O'Regan and undrafted converted defenseman Ahti Oksanen — have six goals and 41 shots in those five games as well.

Is Eichel singlehandedly making BU good? No, the whole team has been improved by its freshman depth, beyond this one phenom, and went from a doormat last year to a possession-driving, scoring juggernaut. Their goaltending is going to regress a bit from its current .961, and thus more losses are in the offing, but they should be able to keep pushing the goals for thanks in large part to Eichel.

No one has been able to contain him yet. Maybe no one will.

Tech keeps winning

Last week in this space I talked about how Michigan Tech was one of the few remaining undefeated  teams in the country. Privately, I didn't think they'd keep it up given that they were playing Michigan for two, even if it was at home.

But then they swept the Wolverines by a combined score of 10-3, moved to 6-0 on the season, and I just don't know any more. They're driving possession (56.5 SF%), they're not shooting a super-crazy-high number (10.8 percent). Their goaltending from Winnipeg pick Jamie Phillips is better than it has any right to be (.952) but given that they're moving back into the WCHA schedule soon, is it so far-fetched that this is the team that's going to win the league? At the very least, the Huskies are probably going to give Minnesota State, which is getting pathetic goaltending this season, a run for its money.

(On the other hand, you'd have to think Devils prospect Blake Pietila, who has four goals in six games this year will, at some point, stop shooting almost 29 percent. Probably.)

An 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 (beat Air Force)

2.     Minnesota (split with St. Cloud)

3.     St. Cloud (split with Minnesota)

4.     UMass Lowell (swept UNH)

5.     Boston University (split with Providence)

6.     Boston College (split with Denver)

7.     Michigan Tech (swept Michigan)

8.     Denver (split with BC)

9.     Colgate (split with Mercyhurst)

10.   Union (swept by RPI)

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