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NCAA Hockey 101: Denver rampaging to the NCHC title
When you’re in the conference with the two best teams in the country, the problem is that you have to be almost perfect every night of the season. Slight mistakes can sink you quickly.
So it was that Minnesota Duluth, having merely lost in 3-on-3 overtime (and thus given two points away) on Saturday night more or less sealed its fate as the NCHC’s runner-up behind top-ranked Denver. Coming into the weekend, Duluth knew it had a bit of a hill to climb, being two points back of Denver with four games to go in the regular season. It also potentially had the tougher out.
Miami is only No. 29 in the country, and the games were at home, so that looked alright. But then they had to go to Kalamazoo and take on a Western Michigan team that just keeps earning points. And in the NCHC’s standings system that awards three points for a regulation or 5-on-5 OT win, two points for a 3-on-3 or OT win, and one point in a 3-on-3 or OT loss, earning points also robs other teams of points.
So the Bulldogs really got themselves in the soup two weekends ago, when they only won in a shootout against lowly Colorado College. Then they reached out of the pot and turned up their own burner when they lost in 3-on-3 OT on Saturday night.
Over those same two weekends, Denver Swept both Miami (on the road) and St. Cloud (at home). The gap between these teams has therefore broadened significantly, from one point to four. And unless something goes catastrophically wrong for the Pioneers this weekend at Nebraska-Omaha, that’ll just about do it for the regular-season NCHC title.
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And it’s important as hell to get that title, too, because the No. 1 seed in this tournament matters more than it does in perhaps any other conference in the country.
At this point the top-three in the conference is pretty much decided: Denver, then Duluth, then Western. Then there’s a huge gap between Western and the next three teams, North Dakota, Omaha, and St. Cloud, all of which are separated by just one point. If you’re the top seed, your chances of advancing fairly deep into the conference playoffs increases significantly. Assuming chalk mostly advances, you don’t have to play, say, Western in the semis. Everyone comes to you.
With that having been said, obviously Denver has to do the job this weekend and take five or six points out of Omaha, which won’t necessarily be easy, but it’ll be a lot easier than Duluth’s task of doing the same out of Kalamazoo. That much is certain. The Bulldogs split with the Broncos at home, a long, long time ago in November, back when Duluth was widely considered a juggernaut and had just two losses on the schedule so far. Since then they’ve racked up only three more Ls, but also five more ties that mostly counted in the league standings as something more than that.
Meanwhile, Denver has only six regulation or 5-on-5 overtime losses all year, and none since January 20. They’re winners of nine straight, and haven’t lost regulation in about a month and a half. That includes two wins hosting this weekend’s opponent, Omaha. They won those games 10-3 on aggregate.
Much like in the ECAC and Hockey East this past weekend, there are plenty of scenarios in which weird things can happen. Both those leagues ended in ties at the top, with Union and Harvard splitting the ECAC regular-season title, and a three-way split between Lowell, BU, and BC atop Hockey East.
Even two points from Denver ensures they at least tie. They’re currently up four, and even if Duluth were to win all six points at Western, two points guarantees the Pioneers cannot be leapfrogged. So already, Duluth is rooting hard for a big weekend from Omaha as well as itself.
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The most likely scenario, then, is that Denver rampages to the title. In their nine-game winning streak they’ve outscored opponents 41-15. Only one of those was into an empty net.
Meanwhile, the better question is what’s happened to Duluth in the past few weeks. And the answer is, not really anything. The only difference is Denver has played at an exceptionally high level now (they approached a five-game SF% of 66 for a little while) and everything is both going in for them offensively and staying out in their own end.
Denver just had slightly the better luck when it comes to getting into NCHC overtime games this year. When you get to OT, it’s a coin-flip. You can win, you can lose, and there’s no real repeatable skill to it. But Duluth had the better OT record, winning one league game in 5-on-5 overtime, won three more in shootouts, and lost once in 3-on-3. That’s 10 points of a possible 15 if they’d been able to close in 5-on-5.
Denver won and lost in 5-on-5 OTs, and went .500 in four shootouts. That’s nine points out of 18, which is obviously worse than 10 of 15, but it’s also more games in which they flipped a coin in the first place.
Not-losing games is one thing — and the Bulldogs haven’t lost since Jan. 13 — but giving away these points down the stretch hurt them in the long run. The real problem, though, is Denver just turned borderline invincible, which will happen sometimes when you have a very good coach and a talented roster.
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?)
Denver (swept St. Cloud)
Minnesota-Duluth (took three points from Miami)
UMass Lowell (swept BC in a home-and-home)
Harvard (beat Clarkson and St. Lawrence)
BU (split with Notre Dame at home)
Providence (swept UMass in a home-and-home)
Union (won at Colgate, tied at Cornell)
Western Michigan (took three points at Colorado College)
Minnesota (split with Wisconsin)
Notre Dame (split at BU)
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.
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