NCAA Hockey 101: Hockey East comes down to the final weekend

Last week in this space, the ECAC’s tight race to the regular-season title got full attention.

And after the weekend’s results, the race is a little less tight. Only three teams can finish first in the conference now, with St. Lawrence having earned just one point on the weekend while Cornell took three points and both Union and Harvard earned sweeps. The Dutchmen lead the conference by a single point, and the race will almost certainly come down to the last night of the season, when Union heads to Cornell and Harvard hosts St. Lawrence.

And yet, somehow, it’s even tighter in Hockey East. Four teams can still finish first. And all of them are playing each other. Because everyone is so close, the tie-breaker scenarios are bonkers.

Right now, BC sits at the top of the league, two points clear of BU with 29 points. Then the Terriers are only up one on Notre Dame (whom they play twice this weekend in Boston), and Notre Dame is only up one on UMass Lowell, which has a home-and-home with Boston College.

Four teams separated by four points, with the fifth- and sixth-place teams looking to play spoiler. For instance, fifth-place Providence College is only two back of Lowell and has two games with UMass this weekend. That’s basically four points guaranteed. Vermont is in sixth, a point back of PC, with two games hosting Merrimack (not a great road team).

And here’s the best part: Only a few of these teams are playing that well right now, and the top four teams in the conference get byes, meaning everyone has a vested interest in winning as much as possible. All six of these teams are still technically eligible for that bye week.

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As discussed a few weeks ago, BC has been awful against top-25 teams this year (since that column published, the Eagles are 0-2-2, with one of those losses coming to a bottom-35 team). Lowell is currently No. 8 in the Pairwise. It is entirely feasible that the Eagles get swept this weekend, which would catapult Lowell to a tie with BC at 29. But then again, Lowell has a weird propensity to look bad against teams they should beat (they got just one point out of UConn, split with Northeastern and Omaha, etc.), so it’s possible BC gets at least two points this weekend as well.

But if there is a Lowell sweep, what if BU splits with Notre Dame, which is also entirely feasible? BU just took three points out of lowly UNH this weekend, having looked more than a little off for about half of a 4-4 tie at home on Friday night before winning 8-4 on the road. Notre Dame, meanwhile, split with a white-hot Providence team that, even with the loss, is 10-1 in its last 11 games. You never know which BU or Notre Dame team is going to show up on a given night. Both have goalies who can steal games; BU’s Jake Oettinger is still .926 even after a poor weekend, and Notre Dame’s Cal Petersen is… also .926.

If there’s a split in that series, then things get interesting. That would put the Terriers tied with Lowell and BC at 29 points, but Lowell would have more league wins and take first. BC, having been swept by both Lowell and BU would drop to third. At that point, Vermont and Providence — even with at least three points each being the most likely results this weekend — are locked out of byes.

All of this is extremely complicated to try to figure out, but it seems to me that the crazy three-way tie atop the league is a very probable outcome. BC doesn’t have a win since Feb. 3 and looked awful this weekend, Lowell is on a five-game winning streak (mostly against mediocre teams, but they also beat BU), the Terriers can’t seem to figure themselves out even at this late point in the season, and Notre Dame seems to specialize in splitting with higher-end Hockey East teams — the only one they didn’t split with was Vermont, and still gave away a point at home.

These are four very similar teams. How similar?

Obviously these numbers are skewed a little bit by various factors, and can’t be totally taken at face value. Again, BC looks putrid against actual good teams but destroys bad ones to an ugly extent. BU, likewise, gets outshot by actual good teams, though they generate high-danger chances at such a phenomenal rate (well above 60 percent at 5-on-5 in the 15 games I’ve seen live and tracked this year) that it might not matter; then again, as has been discussed before, they also take too many penalties.

Lowell has a low team save percentage, but starter Tyler Wall is .913 on the year, which is respectable if not wholly inspiring. That high team PDO might be a little worrisome because shooting percentage can vanish in an instant at this level.

As for Notre Dame, well damn, that’s just a solid team from the net out, but Anders Bjork is the engine that makes them go and everyone else is just kind of along for the ride. If the top line gets shut down (which doesn’t happen often) big problems can emerge; the Irish are 17-5-1 when Bjork has a point, 1-4-3 when he doesn’t. And with the Terriers having last change in this final series, you can bet he’ll be up against Charlie McAvoy all weekend.

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At this point, given how weird of a season it’s been in Hockey East, no results here should be surprising, especially because Providence’s almost-guaranteed four-point weekend against UMass effectively bumps them to 27 with two extra games played.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that can’t happen with these standings is for both Lowell and Notre Dame to miss out on a bye simultaneously. But individually, Lowell could finish as low as sixth and Notre Dame could drop to fifth.

It also goes without saying that these games have huge NCAA implications, too. In the past few weeks BC has slipped from the single digits to on the outside looking in at No. 18. Likewise, Vermont is No. 17 and Notre Dame is No. 16. All would probably benefit from the extra wins that missing out on a first-round bye would provide, though of course BC can’t fall that low, and Vermont and Notre Dame can’t miss out at the same time.

Since the NCAA tournament expanded to 16 teams, no Hockey East team with 22 wins has missed the cut. Only Lowell and BU can hit that cut-off this weekend. But BC, Notre Dame and Providence can all reach the 20-win plateau and position themselves well for a postseason run. Vermont can finish with a max of 19 wins this weekend, meaning, again, that the first round of the conference tournament would be vital to them getting into the NCAA version a few weeks later.

It’s wild how much is possible with just two games left in the Hockey East schedule.

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 (took three points at Colorado College)
2. Denver (swept at Miami)
3. Boston University (took three points in a home-and-home with UNH)
4. UMass Lowell (won at UMass)
5. Harvard (won at Yale and Brown)
6. Providence (split at Notre Dame)
7. Union (swept Quinnipiac and Princeton)
8. Minnesota (swept at Penn State)
9. Western Michigan (swept North Dakota)
10. Notre Dame (split with Providence)

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.