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NCAA Hockey 101: Is Union College finally back?
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Union’s rise from ECAC doormat to national title winner was dizzying.
Once Nate Leaman got a full class worth of his own players around 2007, they went from being occasionally .500 to regularly clearing .600 in short order. By the time Leaman left for Providence — another short-order national title winner — and Rick Bennett was behind the Union bench, a pretty clear trend had been established.
Bennett’s winning percentages went .720, .613, then .810. After making the NCAA tournament zero times in almost two decades, they went four years straight, including two Frozen Fours and one national title in 2013-14. Then came a step back.
You win a national title, and you often lose a lot as well. Those teams tend to be a bit senior-laden, and the younger players tend to be pretty high-end as well. Like Shayne Gostisbehere, who probably played 30 minutes a night for the Dutchmen but of course went right to the Flyers after being the best player in the NCAA tournament. There were lots of losses on the roster, and that led to more losses on the schedule.
After losing just six times in their title run, Union tripled that number the next year, then finished below .500 with just 13 wins last season. And worse, the thing that made Bennett’s club so good — world-beating possession numbers — escaped it. After regularly finishing in the 54-57 percent range from Leaman’s final seasons to Bennett’s first three, the past two seasons they came in at just 50.5 percent and 51.3 percent, and that was with a lot more trailing than the club had done previously.
So no one really thought much of Union’s chances this year, if we’re being honest. They were seventh in the ECAC coaches’ poll, and picked to finish eighth by the league’s media. Both felt just about right. Around .500, maybe a little below it. Bennett, it seemed, had caught lightning in a bottle with Leaman’s superlative recruiting class, and once those kids left, it became a lot harder to make things happen on the recruiting trail.
Which brings us to now: Union has eight wins and a tie from its first 11 games. Few saw this coming, and those who did seemed to have been deluding themselves.
And not only are the Dutchmen winning once again, they’re winning the “right” way. That is to say, their possession numbers are back about 55 percent again and don’t seem particularly likely to slow down.
Their only two losses, it should be noted, were on the road: one at Michigan the second night of the season, and one at Holy Cross(?) on a Tuesday. Other than that, you have to say that their schedule has been a bit soft, too. AIC, Sacred Heart, RIT, Niagara, RPI, Yale and Brown. Not exactly the iron of college hockey. But you can only play the teams on the schedule, and the last two seasons Union wouldn’t have won eight of them in too many simulations.
That Yale game, played this past Friday, was their toughest test. They started out down a pair of goals but clawed back to make it a 3-2 deficit through 40 minutes. Normally you’d say just about any lead held by Yale in the third period would be fairly safe, but Union got the tying goal early in the third, the winner late, and the insurance goal in the final minute. Their first truly impressive win of the year (sorry, but Michigan is sub-mediocre), and here too they did it “right,” winning the possession battle against a historically good possession team is right where you want to be.
Now, as with any team at this point in the season, there are question marks. Alex Sakellaropoulos continues to be less than good to this point, following a solid .921 last season and .894 the year before that. His career junior and college numbers suggest he’s probably a .910s-level goaltender so he might improve marginally in the next several weeks and beyond, but he probably won’t be a game breaker for them like, say, Colin Stevens or Troy Grosenick were in years past.
Moreover the team has been a bit on the lucky side to this point, shooting 10.9 percent through 11 games. And specifically, Mike Vecchione — who has been excellent for years now and is shaping up to be in the Hobey conversation at the end of the year — is shooting 31.8 percent. His 14 goals in 11 games unsurprisingly leads the nation and his scoring rate will of course come down. But the question is, how much? He was a little above a point a game for his entire career coming into this season, and he and Spencer Foo (5-13-18) seem to have forged a bit of a connection.
If the goaltending improves to a level I expect it to, and the shooting takes a bit of a step back, that’s something a 55 percent possession team can absorb.
While it is extremely early to say anything definitive about the Pairwise — this is the first week it’s even calculable because everyone has finally suffered a loss or tie — it’s worth noting that even being 8-2-1 doesn’t favor Union too much. That’s the quality level of the wins they’ve taken so far.
It’ll probably be a little while before we know if Union is officially back to anything resembling its previous levels of domination, because their schedule for the next few months isn’t really great. After this coming weekend’s games against St. Lawrence and Clarkson (two iffy teams), they’re off until the start of December. The game at Quinnipiac on Dec. 3 will be interesting, as will the return engagement at Yale a week later. In fact, from Dec. 3 through Jan. 14, they’re scheduled to play 7 of 10 games against teams that are currently ranked nationally.
That’s the trial for the Dutchmen: If you can get through that with a respectable record, your chance to hang in at the end of the season and earn an at-large bid for the NCAA tournament (or better?) is probably credible.
This is a coaching staff that knows what gets it done over long periods of time. How that escaped them for two years is a bit mysterious, but now they might be able to put all that in the rearview mirror anyway.
All they have to do is keep winning, and the way they’ve played to this point both on the scoresheet and on the ice, portends good things.
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?)
Minnesota Duluth (swept at St. Cloud)
Denver (idle)
Boston University (took three points in a home-and-home with Northeastern)
UMass Lowell (swept Vermont)
Boston College (swept at Maine)
Notre Dame (split with UConn)
Minnesota (took three points from North Dakota)
Quinnipiac (won at Clarkson, lost at St. Lawrence)
North Dakota (lost and tied at Minnesota)
Union (beat Yale and Brown)
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
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