NCAA Hockey 101: What’s left for returning powers?

Have a look at last year’s teams to make the Frozen Four: Boston University, Providence College, North Dakota, and Nebraska-Omaha. They kind of typify the situation in college hockey at large this season.

Usually, when a year begins, we have a pretty good idea of who’s going to be really good. It’s not uncommon to get near-unanimous preseason No. 1 rankings. But in the first preseason poll, that was not only not-the-case, but there wasn’t even a good idea of what the top-10 would look like. In all, a whopping 10 teams received at least one vote as the No. 1 team in the nation, and of that number, five got two or more.

This is, to some extent, a democratization of power on the national level; long-time lower-tier programs (reigning national champion Providence, Minnesota State, UMass Lowell, Harvard, etc.) have closed the gap between themselves and traditional powers (Boston College, North Dakota, Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth, Miami, etc.) and it’s a trend that’s likely to continue.

That makes for fun hockey and a dramatic season, but as far as the whole “handicapping the season” thing goes, all it does is muddy the waters in a delightful way.

Let’s take, for example, the preseason No. 1: Boston College, which received 19 first-place votes and was also selected to finish atop Hockey East. With no disrespect to the Eagles — who got demolished in a Saturday exhibition against the CIS superpower University of New Brunswick — this feels more like people just kind of throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “I don’t know, BC looks pretty good.”

Indeed they do, with only Michael Matheson and Noah Hanifin (both first-round-pick defensemen) as truly notable losses from last year’s NCAA tournament team, there’s a lot to like about the Eagles. In theory. Alex Tuch and Zach Sanford up front? Yeah buddy, Ryan Fitzgerald and Adam Gilmour too. Ian McCoshen is going to be one of the best defensemen in the nation this season, and Thatcher Demko has a pretty good claim to “best goalie.” But the rest of the team? Well, freshmen Jeremy Bracco and Colin White should be pretty damn good, but if you’re looking for freshmen to make your offense go (that was a big problem for BC last year, too), you’re probably not in the best shape.

Speaking of counting on freshmen to make your offense go, there’s also No. 3 Boston University, which lost a kid you might have heard of called Cason Hohmann. Just kidding, it was Evan Rodrigues. Just kidding, it was Matt O’Connor. Just kidding, it was Jack Eichel.

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Anyway, Jack Eichel accounted for some absurd percentage of BU’s offense last year, and not-having him, Rodrigues, or Hohmann back for this season makes Danny O’Regan the only sure thing in attack on the entire team. Which is problematic. Also, they lost anything resembling reliable goaltending (junior Sean Maguire is the clear No. 1, and he didn’t play hockey at all last year), so despite having arguably the best blue line in the nation, it’s really impossible to judge just how they’re going to do.

Meanwhile, Minnesota-Duluth (which did not make the Frozen Four last season, having lost to BU in the Elite Eight) is the No. 2 team in the country, and they too have a good team with obvious holes. Mediocre goaltending (apologies to those dazzled by Kasimir Kaskisuo’s middle-of-the-road .917 as a freshman), nobody with more than 30 points, that sort of thing. Tony Cameranesi is their best returning forward — and they have a lot of returning players at every part of the ice — but he didn’t get to 30 points last season until the NCAA tournament began. So yeah, a lot of questions, just fewer than everyone else.

Duluth’s conference foe North Dakota was picked to finish No. 4, for reasons that really defy description. It got a totally new coach, for one thing, as Dave Hakstol went off to the Philadelphia Flyers. Also jumping to the pros was all-world goaltender Zane McIntyre, who will probably be impossible to replace (unless one of the three guys with a combined 43:19 of college experience can also .929 hockey, which definitely seems very very very possible for sure). And hey what do you know, it’s another team that didn’t have a single point-a-game player last season.

I mean you can go on and on like this. No. 5 Denver is solid but not considered even the second-best team in its conference. No. 6 Minnesota State is a piranha in a pond of minnows. No. 7 Providence needed .930 goaltending from a guy who went pro to barely make the tournament last year (but hey, they won it). Et cetera.

This isn’t to say any of these teams aren’t good or won’t become great, but right now there’s very little to separate the combined impact of one’s strengths and weaknesses from that of the next. Would it surprise anyone to see Miami win a national title this year? No, but they’re currently considered the 11th-best team in the country.

A lot of this will boil down, as it always does, to who has the best goaltending. Having a good goalie goes a very long way in hockey in general, but in the NCAA in particular. There are a number of good goalies returning, including Demko, St. Lawrence’s Kyle Hayton, Yale’s Alex Lyon, and Michigan State’s Jake Hildebrand. More are bound to have uncommonly good seasons because some bad goalie does it every year (see also: Ryan Massa), but you see the point.

In the NHL, you have a pretty good idea of who the four or five best teams in the league are, and it would truly be a shock if, say, Columbus won a Stanley Cup or even came close. But if I were picking the Frozen Four teams that will meet in Tampa come April, I’d have a hell of a time with it. As would just about anyone else.

Maybe that’s what will make this long, cold winter of college hockey so fun: The not-knowing.

What do you mean the NCAA did something stupid?

Further complicating Denver’s problems this year is the loss of captain Grant Arnold to NCAA-mandated suspension, for the team’s first two games of the year.

The reason he was suspended? He played a USHL game on his 21st birthday, which technically made him ineligible for junior hockey. But it was the final game on his team’s run to the Clark Cup title. And it was in 2012.

Arnold, like most captains, is a senior, and the NCAA wanted to suspend him for literally an entire season for this technically-illegal-but-come-on-it-was-his-21st-birthday infraction. A whole year for one game, which was played more than three years ago.

Fortunately, Arnold appealed and got it cut down to the current two games (probably about 5 percent of the original punishment). But boy doesn’t that just tell you everything about how good and cool the NCAA is at all times when it comes to stuff like this?

Fortunately those two games are against Air Force, and if Denver needs Arnold to beat Air Force twice, the Pioneers have bigger problems than their captain being suspended for a game that happened before Obama got re-elected.

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. Boston College (I guess)

2. Miami (okay)

3. Minnesota-Duluth (if I have to)

4. Yale (sure)

5. Denver (I suppose)

6. Harvard (Jimmy Vesey can keep shooting 20-plus percent, right?)

7. UNH (I don’t know why I believe in them but I do)

8. Notre Dame (I’m just guessing at this point)

9. North Dakota (because why not?)

10. UMass Lowell (whatever)

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.