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NCAA Hockey 101: Brutal start to season, aesthetically
A bit of friendly advice to those planning to head to a college hockey game in the next month or two:
Clear out a little extra time on your daily planners.
Across the NCAA, officials are doing a bit of re-emphasis on penalties, in much the same way they did more than a decade ago, and similar to what the NHL experienced after the 2004-05 lockout. In theory, it’s a good thing to say “We’re going to crack down on obstruction, hooking, and other penalties that are slowing down the game.” In actual practice, it makes games abysmal to watch.
At first it was easy to dismiss exhibition results as an outlier. Sure, there were 31 — thirty-one! — minor penalties called in the game between Boston University and Prince Edward Island last weekend, but games between Canadian Interuniversity Sport clubs and NCAA teams typically get pretty testy. If that was the refs doing what they could to protect everyone from getting boarded into December by some 26-year-old with 32 career QMJHL points, so much the better.
But that trend continued, to a very slightly lesser extent, into the first full week of real NCAA games. The first weekend of games featured plenty of long, slow penatlyfests that are mentally exhausting to observers and physically exhausting to players. It’s tough to say who benefits from a rules crackdown that results in, say, Notre Dame drawing 19 power plays in a single game against Arizona State.
(Well, given that the Fighting Irish scored six power play goals in that one, maybe the answer is “Notre Dame.”)
So far this season, 48 teams of the 60 NCAA teams have played at least once. There have been 50 games across college hockey. There have been 784 penalties, both minor and major. That’s almost 15.7 penalties called per game. And how bad is it? Four different teams have already racked up at least 20 PKs in their first two games of the season. Others are averaging just three per game.
It’s nearly impossible to figure out what one official will call a penalty, and what another will let go.
“I went through it in 2003 when they did it before, and a penalty’s called, and literally both teams are looking to see who it is,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy after his team drew 14 power plays and conceded just five on Sunday afternoon.
Indeed, this new standard can lead to some wild swings. The first game in the UMass Lowell/Minnesota Duluth series saw 19 power plays handed out.
“I thought we were pretty well prepared last weekend when we went through the exhibition game,” said Lowell coach Norm Bazin after Friday’s 4-4 draw. “Today was a whole new level of penalties.”
The next night there were just nine. And it’s not as though the second night were any less contentious — it, too, ended in a tie — it’s just that fewer penalties were called.
Some referees are now abiding by the old standard that if you have your stick parallel to the ice and make contact with the puck carrier, that’s a hook. Fair enough. But some are also calling that on simple stick checks, which is a little more confusing.
“You can’t pick their sticks up any more, so you gotta play the body,” Dennehy said.
Sacred Heart coach CJ Marottolo got some first-hand experience on how wildly different games are called from one night to the next. In his team’s first contest of the year — a 4-0 loss at Army on Friday night — there were just eight power plays in the entire game. On Sunday against Merrimack, his team got five. His opponents got 14, including a number of lengthy two-mad advantages.
How did you feel your team did having to deal with 14 penalty kills in a single game?
“I’m gonna have no comment on the penalties.”
Have you ever seen a team get four separate 5-on-3 power plays of at least 1:15 each?
“Never.”
How hard is it to prepare for this new standard of penalty calls?
“I have no comment.”
The question some have asked in the wake of this first weekend of penalty-fests is, “Was a change even needed?” In most leagues — the ones with a lot of talent — the answer was “probably not.” Games were relatively free-flowing and penalties weren’t all that common. But in lower leagues, with fewer scholarships to give out and where the most talented players generally don’t go, observers say obstruction was a real problem that led to some tough-to-watch hockey. It was happening but refs weren’t calling it. There wasn’t a huge difference in PIMs distributed from one conference to the next, but the standard of play varied heavily.
The thing is, that’s probably going to be the case this year. Hockey East crews generally seem to be calling more penalties than, say, NCHC ones. And given how much out-of-conference hockey is played these days, that can pose problems for teams as well.
“We had [NCHC] officials last weekend, so it’s tough for players,” Minnesota Duluth coach Scott Sandelin said on Friday, after Hockey East officials gave his team almost as many power plays in one night (11) as it had the entire previous weekend (13). “But I think if we’re consistent with it, it’s gonna help the game. We’re always gonna argue about penalties, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s a tighter standard or not.”
It matters insofar, I think, as it makes the games unwatchable. Lengthy stretches without 5-on-5 play is a problem, and more to the point, the two Lowell/UMD games this weekend took at least two and a half hours to complete. The Merrimack/Sacred Heart game got done in a breezy 132 minutes which, anecdotally speaking, was still longer than the national standard for non-TV games last year.
“It’s something that we’re all gonna have to get used to, the referees are probably gonna have to get used to, the fans are probably gonna have to get used to,” Sandelin said.
The good news is that as the season goes along, as we saw in the NHL and the NCAA before, there just aren’t going to be as many penalties. Players will get used to the new standard, to some extent. But the more likely outcome is that referees who feel honor-bound to call everything now will probably be sick of doing so by December or January. You can’t play a whole season of giving out 19 power plays a game. If they don’t can you imagine what happens when they start adding TV timeouts later in the season?
All coaches really seem to want is for games to be called right down the middle, Bill Alfonso style. As long as that’s what’s happening to teams — and hey, refs have a natural predisposition to keep penalty numbers relatively close in most games, with make-up calls and so on — all that happens is fans (and handsome smart nice reporters) get to grumble about the unwelcome glacial pace. Coaches only need care about process and results. The rest is tangential to their objectives.
“I think the players kind of figure out [over time] that they can’t interfere with someone,” Dennehy said. “And I think, listen, it’s a hard game to referee. They’re trying to institute the rulebook again and that’s fine. It’s the same way for everybody.
“So it’s like Justin Rose complaining that the Ryder Cup course was too easy. Well, win. It’s the same for everybody.”
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?)
Boston University (won at Colgate)
North Dakota (swept Canisius)
Quinnipiac (took three points from Northeastern)
Minnesota Duluth (tied at UMass Lowell twice)
UMass Lowell (tied Minnesota Duluth twice)
Notre Dame (swept Arizona State at home)
Providence (split with Miami at home)
Denver (lost to Ohio State, lost to Boston College at the Ice Breaker)
St. Cloud State (idle)
Boston College (lost to Air Force, beat Denver at the Ice Breaker)
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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