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NCAA Hockey 101: Duluth's slide tightens NCHC

Minnesota-Duluth photo from school Twitter account.
Minnesota-Duluth photo from school Twitter account.

It’s getting tougher to say who, exactly, is the best team in the NCHC.

Over the past few weeks there have been some, shall we say, troubling results for the nation’s second-best conference, with very good teams suffering very bad losses and allowing the door to open up a little bit for other teams to get into the conversation.

It wasn’t so long ago that Minnesota-Duluth looked like it was going to run a box-to-wire campaign at or near the top of the conference, but two weeks ago it only got a single point (as far as the Pairwise is concerned) in a home series against Colorado College, and then only split with St. Cloud this past weekend thanks to an overtime win. This is classic “giving points away” for a team that is, frankly, a lot better than this. The Bulldogs are only 3-3-2 since the start of December after opening the year 10-2-3.

The good news for them, if you want to put it that way, is that the competition at the top of the NCHC is likewise stumbling a bit here. Denver is 3-3-1 in its last seven games, and two of those wins were gimmes against Arizona State. Meanwhile, North Dakota is finally getting things back on track a little bit after a woeful stretch of bad results from late October through mid-November, but still has unfortunate losses to Western Michigan and Miami in its last six games.

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One hesitates to call any of these situations “predicaments” because despite their occasional foibles these three teams remain atop one of the two deepest conferences in the nation but how they all got to their respective points in the standings is interesting (these numbers assume a 2-1-0 points system for wins, ties, and losses, rather than the NCHC’s convoluted system with 5-on-5 overtimes, 3-on-3 overtimes, and shootouts):

NCAA Hockey 101
NCAA Hockey 101

As you can see Denver’s “slide” is really a prolonged stretch of .500 hockey, which is suboptimal but not the end of the world. Meanwhile North Dakota has recovered from that ugly stretch in which it went from Oct. 28 to Nov. 12 without a win. The real issue here, then, is that Minnesota-Duluth has slowly fallen from a very good team (but one that never really reached the true highs Denver did on multiple occasions) into a kind of mediocre one.

The Pioneers hit a weird skid after months of rolling in the area of at least three wins from every four games they played. The Bulldogs never got to that point and therefore their margin for error was significantly diminished.

Going 1-2-1 over the past two weekends of home games against Colorado College and St. Cloud — after having only narrowly tied-and-beaten Bemidji State in a home-and-home — shows there might be some reason for worry, right?

The Bulldogs are, therefore, the most interesting team in this group of elite NCHC teams. You can explain away some of Denver’s struggles by saying their best players were away at World Juniors for their 0-1-1 trip out to Providence, and simply by saying that they lost at Western Michigan because sometimes weird things happen (this is underscored by their 7-2 win the next night, a return to the dominant form they should have showed all along). Likewise, North Dakota hit an awful skid because Cam Johnson couldn’t make a stop for the first six weeks of the season. But hey, big shock here: he’s .928 in his last 12 games after being .895 in his first 11.

The question for Scott Sandelin and his coaching staff is what’s gone wrong in the past several games for the team to slowly decline over the course of seven or eight games? It’s tough to say for sure, but their shots-for percentage in all situations started slipping around the time they played Western Michigan, Omaha, and Denver all in a row. Those are three decent-to-great teams, so sometimes you’re going to hit a rough patch. But that slide continued even against Bemidji State, a team the Bulldogs should have beaten more comfortably than they did, even if three points out of four is a great showing in the record book against just about anyone.

Simply put, UMD flat-out dominated CC and St. Cloud the past two weekends, outshooting them 144-98, but losing on the scoreboard 9-8 on aggregate. And it probably won’t surprise you to learn that their last few games have seen them hit the skids in terms of their shooting percentage.

What you have to keep in mind is that college hockey is incredibly percentage-driven. Teams — no matter how good — sometimes just hit dead-cold streaks for shooting or even saving the puck, often out of nowhere. There isn’t always some correlation between areas of the ice where they’re getting or allowing shots. It just happens, but then teams snap back to normal very quickly as well. It happens time and again, and you can look to Johnson’s atrocious start to the year as a classic example; the Fighting Hawks couldn’t kill a penalty to save their lives early in the year, and while Johnson was a big reason why, it shouldn’t be a surprise that all of a sudden things turned around for a team that good.

That’s what’s almost certainly going to happen with Duluth as well. They shot 11 percent over the first 17 games they played. They’re very good but few teams have that kind of sustainable talent level. They’re also very obviously not the 5.8 percent shooting team they’ve been for the last five games.

Adding in the fact that the Bulldogs’ goaltending performance is at one of its lowest points of the season right now, which can happen if you give up just 98 shots over four games, and you see how a team can struggle over four, five, six games.

The problem with the top of the NCHC is that if you’re dropping conference games because of those struggles — something only Denver has been fortunate to not deal with all that much — you’re going to probably cost yourself in the conference standings. Denver is lucky here because it only has two regulation losses in the conference this season. North Dakota, with the same number of games played, already has five. UMD is at four but also has two extra games played and only a three-point lead in the standings. Oh, and this coming weekend it has a pair at North Dakota to worry about. For its part, Denver is done with both these teams, having gone 2-1-1 against them.

That’s going to play a huge role as they jockey for position and get more chances to feast on some of the lower-level teams in their conference down the stretch. These are three of the six or seven best teams in the nation this year, but the ability to slightly more difficult match-ups in the conference playoffs will be vital to ensuring a good seed in the NCAA tournament.

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.Penn State (swept Michigan State)
2. UMass Lowell (won at UMass)
3. Boston University (swept a home-and-home with BC)
4. Denver (split at Western Michigan)
5. Boston College (got swept in a home-and-home with BU)
6. North Dakota (split with Miami)
7. Minnesota-Duluth (split with St. Cloud)
8. Minnesota (swept Michigan)
9. Union (beat Dartmouth and Harvard)
10. Harvard (lost at RPI and Union)

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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