College Hockey:

This Week in the NCHA/MCHA: Nov. 12, 2009

The first regular season installment of the USCHO.com Division III men’s poll was released on Monday, and at first glance it looks pretty much as expected. Five NCHA teams grace the top 15 and Adrian is hanging out roughly where it has for the better part of the past two years.

The big mover was St. Norbert, who at 4-0-1 vaults all the way to the top spot in the land, up ten positions from the inaugural poll. The Green Knights landed seven first place votes, one more than second place Oswego.

Adrian and its two first place votes slid up one spot to number five, while River Falls, St. Scholastica and Stout landed at eighth, ninth and tenth, respectively. Superior rounds out the NCHA teams by holding onto 14th, down 10 spots from its preseason ranking of fourth

Though seeming like a conventional poll — as far as the NCHA and MCHA are concerned — further examination reveals otherwise.

A look at the others receiving votes shows Milwaukee School of Engineering landing 10 votes and Lawrence five. That makes this poll the first in the history of USCHO in which three MCHA teams received votes.

Not something that is bound to send shockwaves through the world of Division III, but empires arent built overnight. And in terms of the poll (which reflects the collective perception of numerous D-III coaches) it looks like we can add a third brick to the foundation of the MCHAs castle.

First Impressions

After discussing the magnitude of the gap between Adrian and the rest of the league a week ago, the Bulldogs went out and scored a road sweep at Marian. Considering the Sabres were expected to be one of the Bulldogs biggest challengers, the 13-2 combined weekend score certainly seems to indicate, for now at least, that the Bulldogs are once again the team to beat — and once again its by a considerable margin.

They arent alone at the top of the league, however, as MSOE, Lawrence and Lake Forest are all undefeated in league play.

Lake Forest? Yep, thats right.

As first year MCHA members, the Foresters ultimate place in the conference still remains an unanswered question, but for head coach Tony Fritz, last weekends 7-6, 3-0 road sweep over Finlandia is about as good of a start as he could have hoped for — and for more than just the obvious reasons.

The most prevailing thought is that its the first week since 05 that weve swept anybody, he said. We swept [University of Wisconsin-]Eau Claire and [UW-Stevens] Point that fall and then swept Stevens Point that spring in the conference playoffs and thats the last time weve swept anybody.

This was the first sweep ever for our seniors. Doing it on the road was very important as thats a tough road trip. Its important to your players that they are successful and thats the key.

Beyond that, the significance of a four point road weekend is not lost on Fritz as Lake Forest is expected to be in the mix with Lawrence, MSOE, Marian and Finlandia for the 2-6 spots in the league.

Thats huge and its puts us in the drivers seat for the first time in a long time. Here we are with four points in the second week and were pretty excited about that.

The Foresters scored a wild 7-6 win on Friday in a game that featured a combined 110 penalty minutes.

They held a slim 4-3 lead after the second period but blew the game open in the third as freshman defenseman Trent Brown tallied twice and rookie forward Phil Bushbacher added another in the opening five minutes of the final frame.

The Lions scored twice in the next four minutes and added another with only 14 seconds to play, but it wasnt enough and Lake Forests first foray into the MCHA ended with the W.

I just sort of felt we were going to be okay. We were killing penalties alright and everything, but there are still always those unknowns, Fritz said.

Saturday featured an entirely different style of game, but Lake Forest prevailed again, nothing a 3-0 victory. Freshman netminder Brendan Sullivan turned back 19 Lions shots to pick up his first career shutout.

The Foresters roster has 15 freshman so while growing pains will no doubt be a fact of life for some amount of time, the shutout was especially pleasing to Fritz considering they allowed eight goals in their opener at St. Norbert and six in Fridays win.

(On Friday) we were too helter-skelter, Fritz said. We were playing too much of a run-and-gun game and in our own end we werent playing very solid. We were relying on our goalie to keep us in it in the wrong way.

The second game is where the transformation really took place. We took care of business defensively and thats key for us and thats the way we have to play. Anybody who wants to be successful has to first shut things down in their own end.

Lake Forest will remain an intriguing team to follow this season as its not every year a team switches leagues. Despite being one of the more established programs in the West, they might as well be a first year program as it relates to the MCHA. Between that and the challenges that a young team presents, ups-and-downs are a certainty, but for now the Foresters are off to about as good of a start as they could have hoped for.

Its the first step and thats very important. It puts us in the right direction and just gives us some confidence, Fritz said.

Were just trying to be conservative and realistic because weve still got some really good teams to play. We still have Adrian for four games, Lawrence is better, MSOE is a good team, Marian is a good team and so on. We also play St. Olaf non-conference so it will be tough. There are a lot of good teams out there no matter where you play.

A Sick Obsession

Considering the NCHA is so tight its almost impossible to figure out where everyone stacks up as of now, lets try something a bit different this week.
As touched on in this weeks introduction, NCHA teams are all over the place in the national rankings. With four teams cracking the top 10 and another just outside of it, allow me to put the cart four months ahead of the horse and start talking about (gasp!), the NCAA tournament.

Over the past four seasons I have stressed numerous times that come selection time, one game can make or break a season. Within the selection system currently implemented, the key component of my contention is that it often doesnt matter if that one key game was played last week or is in late February.

The NCHA landed three teams in the NCAA tournament field last season, the first time in 10 years that was the case.

So what are the prospects for this season? Well, pretty good in the sense the NCHA has as many quality teams as it does, but there have been numerous changes this offseason that, one way or another, will possibly have a profound effect.

They all stem from the fact the NCHA has switched to an 18 game conference schedule in which each team will play every other three times. Talk has circulated that this might raise the opponents winning percentage (OWP) component of the selection criteria for NCHA teams. OWP has carried significant weight in recent years and it has been purported that, like what seems to be the case in a league like the ECAC West, more conference games might raise OWP league-wide.

Having nothing better to do, I tried to quantify this to see if this theory might be accurate. As always, trying to predict the future involves some assumptions, but this is how it works.

Using last seasons results, I attempted to adjust last seasons results to determine what last year would have looked like had it been played under this seasons