NCAA Hockey 101: Harvard gets over the hump

[Ed. Note: Our big NCAA tournament preview will run later this week.]

Harvard has been a very good team for a few years now, but they’ve always had their skeptics.

And for good reason.

There’s a difference between being a very good team and a great one, and in college hockey short seasons and big streaks tend to bend opinions quickly. Harvard has generally been a team known for its streaks, and more specifically, the thuds that end them.

[Follow Puck Daddy on social media: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr]

Earlier this season I wrote about their tendency to drop off as the season wore along in each of the last three campaigns around January. And this year, too, they hit that skid a little earlier than usual. They won plenty early on thanks to a great power play, but the goaltending wasn’t really there from Merrick Madsen, who had previously shown he could be very good. If his struggles in the crease continued and the power play success went away, that posed a very big problem. And it would probably result in another collapse that had become the hallmark of Harvard’s talented-but-top-heavy teams in recent years.

Around the same time that column published, though, Harvard took off instead.

There was plenty of reason for skepticism at the time. Harvard had just dropped three in a row, including to some pretty underwhelming opponents, and had only played a handful of actually good teams in their previous few months of the season. Their record (at the time) against teams that ended up making the NCAA tournament was just 1-2-0. So if skeptics felt their 11-5-1 record was a little inflated by two games each against Arizona State, Princeton, RPI, and so on, that seemed reasonable. When they dropped those three in a row from Jan. 13-17, that sent off claxons.

Jan. 17, an ugly 8-4 loss at Dartmouth, is the last time they lost.

Not that their schedule got all that much harder, but the loss in Hanover seems to have caused a hard look in the mirror. Questions had been asked of Harvard teams in the past, and they failed to come up with any answers. Mostly, they just came up with excuses.

[Sign up for Yahoo Fantasy Baseball: Get in the game and join a league today]

This time, whatever questions they should have had probably revolved around goaltending. The comprehensiveness with which they beat their opponents was significant, but the fact was that Madsen wasn’t stopping pucks at his usual rate; he was a career .930 goalie through the end of last season.

On Jan. 20, he really returned to form and then some, and the team has one minor blemish on its record since: a 1-1 tie.

In part because of the overall weakness of the ECAC (the conference finished with three teams in the top 11, but no more than that even in the nation’s top 20), it was once again easy to hand-wave Harvard’s success. Sure, they were winning, and doing so handily, but look who they were playing. That’s the mark of a very good team, sure. Harvard has always been one of those. But if this team wanted to be considered great, it would need to do more than annihilate the dregs of the fourth-weakest conference in the country.

Then they handed it to future tournament team Cornell, 4-1, but that could be excused because Cornell has a very weak offense, and hey, it’s only one game. Then they beat the high-octane offense from Northeastern 4-3, which could be excused because Northeastern has abysmal goaltending. Then trashed Union 6-2. Then they not only beat BU 6-3 to win the Beanpot, they outshot the Terriers 46-17.

But even then, explaining these things away continued, albeit to a lesser extent. Now, a month and a half later, there can be no more rationalizations. They’ve won 15 of their last 16 games, and 14 straight. Donald Trump wasn’t president yet the last time they lost.

Still, one might hesitate to put them into the “elite” category because they only played the 21st-most-difficult schedule in the country. Lowell was the only other team in the top seven Pairwise rankings was in the double digits (13th). They only played three tournament teams all year, and the average PWR position of their opponents was about 30th. There was effectively no difference for the before/after date when their surge began.

What happens when Harvard plays actual elite teams four games in a row? It’s tough to say. They haven’t done it yet. The closes thing to it was when they played Cornell (11th), Princeton (33rd), Quinnipiac (21st), BC (16th), then BU (7th) in a five-game stretch in November.

But in all, Harvard played seven games against tournament teams this season. They went 5-2, with a 62.2 percent share of goals, and a 57.2 shot share. You’ll note those are both in line with what they did all season.

[Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey contest now]

So as much as you may want to means-test Harvard, the thing is, this time they finally seem to check every box. Beanpot. ECAC regular-season title. ECAC postseason title. All with relative ease. It’s tough to say where this train comes to a halt.

They’re a team to watch for the next few weeks, because while they may have tripped over the hurdles they faced in the past, now they’re running straight through them.

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. Minnesota-Duluth (won the NCHC title with wins over Western Michigan and North Dakota)
2. Denver (lost to North Dakota, beat Western Michigan)
3. UMass Lowell (won the Hockey East title with wins over Notre Dame and BC)
4. Harvard (won the ECAC title with wins over Quinnipiac and Cornell)
5. BU (lost to BC)
6. Union (lost to Cornell)
7. Western Michigan (lost to Duluth and Denver)
8. Providence (idle)
9. Minnesota (lost to Penn State)
10. Cornell (beat Union, lost to Harvard)

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

MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEY: