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The first season of the new National Collegiate Hockey Conference is in the books, and the NCHC’s first playoff gets under way this weekend, leading up to next week’s first-ever league championship event at Target Center.
UMD will be in the middle of it all, having earned a tough home-ice slot at AMSOIL Arena as fourth seed, taking on No. 5 seeded Western Michigan Friday night to start it all off.
But hockey isn’t the only sport reaching a climax this weekend.
The state high school basketball tournament takes the stage this week, and it’s a good time to pay tribute to a wellspring of skilled basketball teams in our midst. While the tournament is already well underway, look at Fond du Lac, the Native American school up near Cloquet, which made the select state tournament field in Class A, and Esko, a dynamic little powerhouse outfit that could make a lot of noise in Class AA, and Cloquet, which is larger than its two neighbors, and made the tournament in Class AAA.
You could drive from one of those schools to the next and the next in the span of 5 minutes, since they’re all located within a magic triangle of about 5 miles. How unusual for all three to be good enough to reach the state tournament in their respective classes.
With the high school basketball guys reaching their big pinnacle, we also can focus in on AMSOIL Arena. Western Michigan, remember, came to A
MSOIL in midseason and split with the Bulldogs, signaling a rivalry between the two that would go down to the last game of the regular season as they battled for position.
When UMD got the fourth seed, and the final home-ice slot, it was an interesting good-news/bad-news scenario, because UMD, which swept at Nebraska-Omaha and at Western Michigan and at Miami of Ohio, wound up with a better record on the road than at home. The standing joke, then, was why should the Bulldogs work so hard to get home ice when they might be better off going on the road!
All bets are off at playoff time, though, because the hard, cold facts of college hockey is that there is more turmoil and less certainty than ever before when it comes to forecasting the 16 teams that will comprise the NCAA tournament. A year ago, the WCHA remained the best in the country, and four, maybe five, WCHA teams would be pretty certain to get in. The CCHA might add two or three, Hockey East three or four, and the ECAC and independents filling out the field.
But dissolution of the WCHA, which reformed with what was left of the CCHA, spawned two new conferences with the Big Ten and the NCHC. We can speculate that the NCHC lived up to its billing, with every game, every series, seeming to be played at playoff intensity. You could make the case that North Dakota, St. Cloud State, Denver, UMD, and Nebraska Omaha might deserve to be among the 16 tournament entries.
Well, it’s not going to happen. There has been a lot of publicity and promotion by other conferences, and the Big Ten is clamoring for prominence. With Ohio State just building up to elite status, Michigan State struggling, and Penn State suffering from being a new program, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan all have impressively bolstered records by having the chance to play three weaker teams. Consider that Miami of Ohio finished last in the NCHC - after the coaches predicted they’s win the new league - but the tightly clustered grouping of North Dakota, St. Cloud, Denver, UMD, Western Michigan, and Nebraska-Omaha, proves there were no easy match-ups all season. Colorado College and Miami were worthy foes, but none of that matters to the NCAA computer.
Look at this week’s U.S. College Hockey Online national poll, which lists Minnesota first, Wisconsin fifth, and Michigan 13th among Big Ten teams. From the NCHC, St. Cloud State is No. 4, North Dakota No. 10, and UMD No. 20. Never mind that Western Michigan, Denver and Nebraska-Omaha are all among “others receiving votes,” if you just lined up the top three in the two leagues, I’d pick St. Cloud, North Dakota and UMD to win a composite series against Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
But if the NCAA rating comes close to the USCHO listing, and we cut it off at 16, the tournament field would show Minnesota, Boston College, Union, St. Cloud, Wisconsin, Ferris State, Quinnipiac, Mass-Lowell, Providence, North Dakota, Notre Dame, Cornell, Michigan, Northeastern, Vermont and Yale. No UMD, and only the top two NCHC teams. That would mean Hockey East and the ECAC would have four teams each, while the Big Ten would have three, the NCHC two, and the WCHA one.
Of course, the top 16 won’t all make it. First of all, the league or playoff winner of other leagues automatically qualifies, bumping out a couple of those top 16. Also, any upsets in any of the league playoffs would cause those league playoff champs to gain an automatic berth, possibly bumping out several more of the top 16. No longer can a strong team hanging on the fringe get voted in; all the new leagues with their automatic berths will prevent any such thing.
So for the UMD Bulldogs, the best course of action is to beat Western Michigan this weekend, then advance to Target Center, where they undoubtedly would play , and have to beat, St. Cloud State or North Dakota, and then perhaps beat the other in the playoff final. That would guarantee an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament, without needing to depend on the vague cross-referencing of other league playoffs.
So focus in on the UMD playoffs this weekend, but don’t forget to cheer on our northern basketball lads in the state tournament.