NCAA Hockey 101: Hobey Baker candidates at the halfway point

With holiday tournaments starting this week, the second half of the college hockey season is nearly upon us. Time flies.

With this in mind, we can at least start to look at who seems probable to be in the Hobey Baker conversation at the end of the year. The guys who are there now tend to be the ones there at the end of the season, with the exception of maybe one or two guys dropping off their production paces and being replaced by those who pick it up in the second half.

And as usual, you can break the Hobey group down into three categories: Forwards who score a lot or have a lot of points, defensemen with high point totals, and goaltenders who are head and shoulders above everyone else and play the vast majority of their teams’ minutes.

And also as usual, there’s a clear and very small group of guys who would be in legitimate competition for the award right now. This examination is really just an effort look at legitimate candidates, so while yeah there’s probably an Atlantic Hockey candidate who will end up in the Hobey top 10, there’s no way Robert Morris’s Brady Ferguson has a real chance at winning this thing; basically his landing in the finalists at the end of the year is his “it’s just nice to be nominated” award.

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So here’s the quick breakdown of who appear to be legit candidates, but I’d caution that these are not necessarily the guys who are the “best” in college hockey. Hobey voting is incredibly weird (look at last year’s award, or the fact that no goalie has won it since Ryan Miller broke college hockey a decade and a half ago) so this isn’t a slight to Your Favorite Player and everyone has been considered.

Forwards with lots of goals or points (6, or maybe 7)

The most obvious candidate to win the Hobey right now is Mike Vecchione, who’s scoring a ton of points for Union right now. Linemate Spencer Foo is right there with him. I talked about them both a little bit, because they’re basically willing their team to high-level performances on a nightly basis. They’re the engine that makes their legitimately good team go from solid to great, and Hobey loves producers from teams with a lot of wins.

Vecchione is currently second in the nation in goals per game (0.95) and is tied for seventh in assists per game (1.0) so that’s pretty clearly the No. 1 choice right now. Foo gets a larger percentage of his points from assists — playing with the national goals leader will get you there — and as we have learned many times over, Hobey prefers goals to assists every time.

The other guys, who are a little farther back from the two Dutchmen, are largely Hockey East players. UNH’s Tyler Kelleher is second in the country in points per game (1.82) behind Vecchione and has 12 goals in 17 games, so that’s checking a lot of boxes for Hobey, but I think he suffers because, a) he’s a little ways back of Vecchione and Foo, and b) UNH has played a soft schedule, and c) the team isn’t very good anyway. Three strikes against him right there.

Then there’s Anders Bjork out of Notre Dame, who’s just a solid producer who can take over games at will (see his recent effort against a strong Boston College team) but whose numbers might all be a little too close to average to really stand out.

Then there’s Zach Aston-Reese who’s fifth in both goals per game and total points, who’s been as dominant a player as I’ve seen live all season. He’s one of those guys whose WOWYs are amazing; Northeastern isn’t a very good club but when he’s on the ice they play like they’re one of the best teams in the country. It’s roughly a 60 percent vs. 45 percent on/off number across the board (attempts, shots on goal, high-quality chances, etc.) in the games I’ve seen. He’s been awesome but because the team’s below .500 it probably doesn’t matter.

Finally there’s North Dakota’s Shane Gersich whose point total isn’t great (“just” 24 in 18 games) but you gotta have at least one NCHC option in the field to attract western votes.

(I’ll also throw Penn State’s Denis Smirnov into this mix because he’s seventh in points nationally and the Big Ten might need a representative, but everyone hates Penn State because they shoot a bunch and haven’t played much of note. Doesn’t matter that they’ve destroyed almost everyone they’ve played. People hate the Nittany Lions behind their early success. I don’t think it’s fair but he probably won’t be there at the end of the year.)

Defensemen with lots of points (2)

While there are a lot of defensemen who are scoring a decent number of points this year — 25 are already north of 0.8 per game — there are two who really stand out as being particularly probable to end up there at the end of the season. Both are in the ECAC.

Gavin Bayreuther is St. Lawrence’s best skater by approximately six miles, and that’s been the case for a while now. He has six goals in 19 games — better than a lot of forwards — and 23 points overall. That’s the national leader by a decent amount, but it’s worth noting his production seems at least somewhat sustainable. He takes four shots a game, which is second in the country.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Adam Fox leads all blue liners nationally in points per game but because he’s an Ivy Leaguer he only has 11 games played. He doesn’t take a lot of shots (1.64 per game) so his production is assist-heavy and therefore probably doesn’t warrant a lot of Hobey consideration in the long-term, but he’s getting a lot of press.

Goalies with big save percentages (2)

As mentioned above, goalies need to really stand out from the crowd in terms of save percentage to get Hobey voters’ attentions, and they have to play pretty much all their teams’ minutes. By that token, only Army’s Parker Gahagen and Bemidji’s Michael Bitzer fit the bill, as they’re the only goalies at .940 and with at least 95 percent of their teams’ minutes.

With that said, there are plenty of guys in the mid-.930s, so they’re not so far above and beyond the group that they can legitimately be considered as true hopefuls at the end of the year. Maybe voters take pity on Gahagen in particular because of Army’s reputation for struggling and how he’s been this good for two straight seasons, but I doubt it.

So to quickly summarize, this would appear to be Vecchione’s to lose. It’s tough to see him blowing this kind of scoring lead down the stretch, even if that shooting percentage is quite high. You can level the same criticism against everyone in this group but Foo and Aston-Reese, but the fact that Foo and Vecchione are on the same line will likely help to prop both up the rest of the way.

Let’s put it this way: Vecchione is already at 37 points this season. Last year’s winner locked down the award with 46 in the same league. If Vecchione’s not at least in the Hobey Hat Trick something has gone very wrong.

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 (idle)
2. Denver (idle)
3. Penn State University (idle)
4. Boston College (idle)
5. UMass Lowell (idle)
6. Boston University (idle)
7. Harvard (idle)
8. Notre Dame (idle)
9. Minnesota (idle)
10. North Dakota (idle)

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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