NCAA Hockey 101: Omaha’s monumental collapse

It’s not usually a big deal when a team that rarely makes the NCAA tournament happens to slide in one year and then fails to do so again in the next. In a nation with a number of national powers who can reliably count on making the tournament, there really aren’t that many at-large bids open to most of the other 50 or so teams.

Between the auto-bids for the WCHA and Atlantic Hockey, the nine or so teams from power conferences who make the tournament like clockwork, and emerging powers, you have maybe two or three chances to really squeeze yourself into the national tournament. So again, a one-and-done generally shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.

But when the most notable crash-out from a year ago previously went to the Frozen Four, and looked like a lock to make the tournament again as recently as early February, that’s quite concerning indeed.

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The University of Nebraska Omaha Mavericks entered the month of February with the 14th-best winning percentage in the country (.635, tied with Michigan Tech), and by dint of a sizable strength of schedule, a pretty solid hold of the No. 9 slot in the NCAA tournament. There was, at that point, a lot of season left to be played, and a tough schedule ahead, but in the NCHC you apparently don’t have to win too many games to assure yourself a spot in the tournament.

Two wins over Western Michigan in mid-February pushed the Mavs to 18-9-1 and further solidified that hold on the No. 9 spot in the Pairwise rankings, and with at least eight more games guaranteed to be coming to them, all they had to do was win three to give themselves a pretty good chance to lock things up.

In the remaining eight games, four of which were at home, they managed zero wins. Not one. They finished the year 18-17-1, and as a result of their first-round bounce at the hands of mighty Denver, assured that they were just another one-and-done team, albeit one that collapsed to an alarming extent.

But in retrospect, everyone should have seen it coming. Yes, they entered February with a 16-9-1 record, but that was after starting the year 14-3-1. In the month of January, they went 2-6, with only a win at North Dakota (in overtime) as fuel for the “this team is actually good” fire. They were also swept by Miami and Denver at home, and split with Colorado College on the road. So looking down the barrel of a cold late-February slate of St. Cloud twice, North Dakota twice, and Denver twice, you had to say there probably weren’t a lot of wins to be had. And obviously there were none.

The extent to which there were none, though, was alarming. The Mavericks not only went 4-14-0 once the calendar flipped to 2016 — the ninth-worst winning percentage in the nation — but conceded 67 goals in those 18 games (3.7 a night) and only scored 40 (2.2 per). In short, they were getting blown out most nights, as a team that had made dizzying offense and stifling defense something of a calling card over the previous year and a half.

But if you were actually paying attention, you could have seen this slow train coming a mile down the track. People who actually keep close tabs on the underlying numbers in college hockey have been loudly stage-whispering this entire time that Omaha just isn’t a good team. Much as their supporters at Baxter Arena may not have wanted to hear it, the hard truth was that this team got outpossessed quite often. And that has been true for basically all but the first three-quarters of 2013-14.

Over the past three seasons, the team has a marginally positive possession number (50.9 percent) and shot share (50.3 percent) but a negative goal differential (minus-9). There’s a pretty good reason for this on the whole: They started 2013-14 on that huge possession and shot run, largely because they were playing a soft schedule and — to their credit — kicking its teeth down its throat. In the end, they finished as one of the best possession teams in the country, north of 55 percent, but you can see that much of this comes as a result of that first stretch. Nonetheless, they finished a game below .500.

And indeed, when the going got tough so too did the process by which they played the games. The fact that they spent the large portion of 2014-15 in the 45 percent range should have set off any number of alarm bells, and they finished in the bottom quintile of the country (45th) in corsi-for percentage, mostly because they allowed the 11th-most attempts. But recall, this is a team that made the Frozen Four. We’ll get to why in a minute, but again, if you’re 45 out of 59 in anything, and you finish in the last four in the country, things went very, very right for you.

That stretch continued this season, with the club winning all those games from October to December, before cratering hard when the new year began. The possession numbers started trending in the right way again toward the end of the season, as you can see, but you can probably chalk a lot of that up to score effects, and the rest to the real issue this team dealt with both in 2013-14 and 2015-16.

That is: Goaltending talent.

Ryan Massa was their man last season, with a .939 save percentage in 29 appearances, but the previous three seasons saw him rocking a lowly .901 career number across 46 games. The .899 he carried in all situations in 2013-14 was a big reason that team never got over the hump, especially because his two backups were even worse. Then he goes supernova for most of a season, and that combined with a team shooting percentage that occasionally approached 9.5 percent was enough to win a not-good team a lot of games.

Massa, of course, graduated last season, clearing the way for freshman Evan Weninger to take over. And for the first 12 appearances he made, he looked like he might improve Massa’s near-Hobey season. Before New Year’s Day, he was rocking a .947 save percentage, and was a whopping 10-1 as a result. But then he played poorly in a game on Jan. 8 against Denver, allowing two goals on three shots before missing five more games with an injury. Kirk Thompson (.875) was a disaster in his stead. Neither Weninger nor the team ever recovered.

If you were to overlay the team’s winning percentage during this three-year period over its 5-on-5 save percentage, the correlation would be significant. They nearly mirror each other. That’s because, when a goalie goes on the best 29-game run of his entire career, it’s going to make you look a lot better than you actually are. We see it all the time at both this and the NHL level. At the end of a season, you can’t begrudge such a player performances well outside his norm, but you can check your watch expectantly, waiting for that fall back to reality, especially if he’s not being supported by a good process, which none of Omaha’s goalies really have been.

There’s no great mystery here. If you can’t outshoot your opponents and get good goaltending, you’re just not going to win hockey games. If the Mavericks get Weninger back to 100 percent this summer and he can reliably deliver high save percentages once again (his junior numbers suggest he can) then maybe the fact that this is a bad possession team will once again cease to matter.

But probably not.

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. Quinnipiac (won two of three against Cornell)

2. North Dakota (swept Colorado College)

3. Providence (swept Merrimack)

4. Boston College (won two of three against Vermont)

5. St. Cloud (swept Western Michigan)

6. UMass Lowell (swept BU)

7. Denver (swept Omaha)

8. Michigan (swept Penn State)

9. BU (got swept by UMass Lowell)

10. Harvard (swept RPI)