Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) Hail to the victors!
It didn’t take long for Michigan to rewrite the narrative surrounding its January.
A week ago, people were trolling and criticizing the Wolverines for cancelling their Great Lakes Invitational game against No. 4 Western Michigan. The move arguably cost the team votes in the DCU/USCHO.com weekly national poll, and the water chummed for sharks expecting this weekend to squarely fall into the hands of the suddenly-resurgent UMass Minutemen.
Michigan, though, powered through that criticism and swept the No. 10-ranked, defending national champions with a pair of four-goal outbursts. On Saturday, a 4-1 win in front of a capacity crowd included three goals in the third period, and the gridlocked showdown, which was an instant classic through the first two frames, broke for the maize and blue after Kent Johnson and Brendan Brisson scored over a 10-minute segment. Brisson had previously scored MIchigan’s first goal, and he added an assist on the game while Johnson registered two helpers alongside Matty Beniers.
A different storyline unfolded on Sunday when Brisson, Beniers and Dylan Duke shot Michigan out to a 3-0 lead through two periods, and though UMass did its best to rally late, a Johnny Beecher goal offset strikes from Bobby Trivigno and Ryan Ufko to push a weekend sweep across the line for the home side in Ann Arbor.
After last week’s dramatic saga, the weekend was exactly what Michigan needed to right its ship heading back into conference play, where it takes on Penn State before heading to Minnesota in two weeks.
2) A very B1G win for Minnesota
Speaking of Minnesota, the Gophers left the weekend in possession of first place in the Big Ten after earning results at Michigan State that were arguably more critical than the results 60 miles to the southeast. They won the first game, 4-1, on Friday before turning around on Saturday to post 60 shots in a five-goal rally with a 6-3 win.
The 10-goal outburst were the most scored across any two-game stretch since Minnesota scored nine goals across the Penn State and North Dakota weekends in November and were the most goals scored in an entire weekend since potting 12 against Mercyhurst at the start of the season. The two wins made for the first conference sweep since a pair of Halloween weekend wins over Notre Dame while tallying the third sweep – with that Mercyhurst weekend – of the season.
Minnesota’s done a fantastic job of earning splits and points over the season but sweeping a conference weekend surged it past Michigan and into first place in the Big Ten despite outranking the Fighting Irish by four spots and being outranked three spots in the most recent poll.
3) LaFontaine leaves
Now for the bad news.
Minnesota might have swept Michigan State and pulled into first place, but any sweetness quickly lost its good flavor when goalie Jack LaFontaine left Minneapolis to start his professional career with the Carolina Hurricanes.
Losing a goaltender at any juncture of the season is tough, but the circumstances swirling around LaFontaine’s departure are increasingly complex to unpack. Carolina badly needed help after scratching Antti Raanta from its lineup over the weekend, and despite Frederik Andersen’s win over Calgary, the Hurricanes had to promote taxi squad goalie – and former Yale product – Alex Lyon for the overtime loss to Florida.
With injuries to AHL goalies dotting the minor league development system, Carolina made its move to sign LaFontaine, a third-round pick in the 2016 NHL Draft.
It’s hard to turn down the right offer to play in the NHL, but LaFontaine’s departure leaves a hole in a Minnesota lineup where he was the only goaltender with any kind of experience. The Gophers are now in first, but they’ll have to navigate the rest of the season with either Justen Close or Brennan Boynton in some capacity. Close seems like the candidate at the front of the line with 30 minutes under his belt, but they largely came in one game after Michigan chased LaFontaine during a 6-2 decision in December.
Jared Moe, the backup from last season, transferred to Wisconsin in the offseason and has four wins in 18 appearances for the Badgers.
4) Team USA comes calling
News of LaFontaine’s departure spread like wildfire on Sunday night and overshadowed the other roster news threatening some college hockey teams – albeit temporarily – as the Olympics picture started to draw nearer to the present.
Earlier in the week, Minnesota State head coach Mike Hastings and St. Cloud State head coach Brett Larson announced they would accept assistant coaching positions for Team USA under former Boston University and New York Rangers head coach David Quinn.
Additionally, Penn State video coach Alex Dawes joined the Americans to work on staff for the Beijing games.
That news wasn’t entirely surprising, but it still managed to surprise college hockey as the second half of the season ramped into gear. Both coaches’ programs ranked inside the top five this week, and with the commitment for the games to likely last through at least through the end of February, both programs will now enter stretch runs without their head coaches behind the bench.
Neither name should be entirely shocking, though, since both have ties to the international stage with USA Hockey. Both coached on different teams at the World Juniors, with Hastings leading the Americans to the silver medal in 2019 and Larson assisting Scott Sandelin one year later, and Larson led the 2012 United States Junior Select Team to the World Junior A Challenge championship.
Still, the announcement served as a reminder of the potential incoming storm from Olympic rosters that are set to raid NCAA programs for talent. Both the rosters of the United States and Canada are widely expected to include a number of college hockey players – including a large number from the aforementioned Minnesota and Michigan teams – and the inclusion of the American college coaches will do nothing to tamp down that conversation.
The Olympics are set to run in Beijing from February 3-20.
5) North Dakota left seeing (Big) Red
For over four years, opponents entering Ralph Engelstad Arena knew they wouldn’t leave with a full freight of points. The last team to sweep North Dakota was Western Michigan, which left Grand Forks with two wins in November 2018, and since then, the Fighting Hawks rose to the top of the ranks as arguably the best team in the nation at protecting home ice.
Enter Cornell and a team fresh off its consecutive losses at Arizona State. The Big Red did the unthinkable to NoDak and swept two wins out from under their rug, winning 4-3 on Friday night before doing it again one night later with a 3-1 victory. It was the first road sweep at the Ralph in over 1,140 days, and it laid waste to the idea that Cornell was a three-loss team propped up by games against struggling opponents.
The Big Red’s wins were doubly impressive considering they had to rally on Friday night after trailing by a pair of goals in the third period. They went down, 3-1, after Jake Schmaltz scored six minutes into the period, but goals by Jack O’Leary and Max Andreev tied the game, and Kyler Kovich’s goal less than 90 seconds later moved Cornell in front for the first time on the weekend.
One night later, North Dakota again took a lead in the first period when Riese Gaber scored in the first two minutes, but Kovich tied things under five minutes later before Ondrej Psenicka gave the Big Red a 2-1 lead after one. The game remained deadlocked in that score until eight minutes remained in the third, and Brendan Locke offered an insurance goal to send Cornell back to Ithaca with the historic victory.
Cornell entered the weekend only ranked 14th in the nation but earning two wins over the No. 5 team in the nation should put a pin in that perception. It remains ranked 14th in the PairWise largely because of the statistical weakness in ECAC, but the three losses are tied with UMass-Lowell for second-fewest behind Quinnipiac.
6) The ice bus revs its engine
Connecticut has done an amazing job of flying under the radar in Hockey East, but the Huskies took a giant step towards PairWise respectability by beating No. 18 Boston Collect, 5-4, on Saturday. The win pushed the unranked team into 19th in the all-important statistical ranking while spotting into fifth among Hockey East teams.
Anyone who watched UConn over the past few years knows the Huskies are a plucky, feisty team capable of beating anybody, but they now enter the second half of the season as a dark horse to catch some fire. They still only sit in sixth in Hockey East, but they have games remaining against both Providence and BC and have two-game series left against both UMass and Northeastern. Assuming they can hold serve in some of those other matchups, including the Connecticut Ice tournament in late January, they have an opportunity to push some of those upper-echelon programs in a league that may only get three teams into the tournament this year.
7) One play does not make a series…
Niagara’s Ryan Naumovski earned a little bit of notoriety on Saturday when he ranked second on ESPN’s Top Ten plays of the day on Sportscenter. Trailing 1-0 to Sacred Heart, he split his legs on a breakaway and deked to his forehand by cradling behind his right skate. He lifted the puck and beat goalie Luke Lush, tying his Purple Eagles with the Pioneers in the second period of a home regular season series.
Coming in at number two on #SCTop10 is our very own Ryan Naumovski, with this sick breakaway goal from last night's game versus Sacred Heart!#Uncommon pic.twitter.com/Wlp9gpwIRy
— Niagara University Men's Hockey (@NiagaraMHKY) January 9, 2022
Now for the bad news: Niagara didn’t win the game.
Sacred Heart’s John Jaworski scored before the end of the period to give the Pioneers a 2-1 lead, and they carried that through a scoreless third period to earn the three points in the Atlantic Hockey table.
Coupled with an overtime loss the night before, Sacred Heart boarded the bus back to Connecticut with four out of a possible six points – not a bad haul considering the long drive out to Niagara Falls was only their second such trip to the league’s western pod since last year when it infamously played Air Force in a game at Niagara (oh, weird COVID year, how we already forgot you).
Those points helped vault Sacred Heart into a potential first round bye as the second half started, and the Pioneers are now headed to a crucial two-game marker at Bentley, which is in second place after AIC swept its way past Holy Cross and into the league’s top spot. There’s a whole mess of a logjam up high in Atlantic Hockey – no great shocker given the league’s notorious parity – that was held in place when Army and Canisius split their series at West Point.
8) …just like the early week games don’t make a weekend.
Those games overshadowed the yin-yang type of week in Atlantic Hockey that started when Mercyhurst and Holy Cross scored a couple of late season, nonconference wins for the league. Both played on Tuesday and won one-goal games against Vermont and Miami, with the Crusaders beating the Catamounts, 4-3, at the Hart Center while the Lakers avenged an earlier-season loss to the Redhawks with a 5-4 win in overtime.
Those wins might not seem like much, but they are adding a little bit of flavor to the second half’s PairWise rankings. Vermont hosts Northeastern this week, and while the Catamounts are tied for 57th, a win would decimate the number for the 12th-ranked Huskies. Hockey East in general is facing that small crisis given the number of teams hovering around the bubble – specifically Providence and Connecticut – and the loss by BC drove the Eagles, who already hold non-wins against Bentley, Vermont and Merrimack, outside the top-20 spots.
For what it’s worth, UMass-Lowell may have inadvertently found itself in a beneficial position after it wound up in COVID protocols this week. The River Hawks – ninth in the PairWise – had two games on the schedule against Bentley, but the protocols forced the postponement of those matchups. Bentley eventually played Merrimack and lost, 4-1.
9) First time visiting?
Only in college hockey can a Division I school based out of upstate New York and the Patriot League play a game against a traditionally-Division II school located on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but that happened this weekend when Colgate made its first-ever trip to Northern Michigan.
The Wildcats beat the Raiders on both nights, though neither game likely will count for much in the PairWise Rankings or the NCAA tournament race, but it’s really an interesting facet to watch a team make that trek up to Marquette for two games.
Interestingly enough, Don Vaughn had to miss the games due to COVID protocols, ending a streak of 1,037 consecutive games behind the Colgate bench. The games were the first without Vaughan since his arrival in Hamilton in 1992. Had the Raiders won, he would have earned credit for those games, which would have pushed him within 20 wins of Air Force’s Frank Serratore on the list of all-time active and all-time overall wins.
10) The latest in COVID
The COVID-19 pandemic continued ripping through the college hockey schedule this week by forcing the postponement, cancellation or rescheduling of several different matchups. The most notable was the series between No. 4 St. Cloud and No. 8 Minnesota Duluth, which was postponed due to protocols within the Bulldogs’ program, and No. 1 Quinnipiac, which was unable to play after both Brown and Yale initiated protocols within their respective programs.
The continued postponements are largely part of daily life this month, but the NCAA responded this week by clarifying its COVID protocols for fully vaccinated individuals for winter sports. Any athlete with a positive diagnosis must quarantine or isolate for five days but can end their isolation after five days if their symptoms are resolving or if they are asymptomatic. Their participation then includes five additional days of masking around others unless they are able to produce evidence of a negative test.
Close contacts to those who test positive do not have to quarantine if they are fully vaccinated but should wear a mask when they are not training or competing.
The NCAA also clarified its definition of “fully vaccinated” to include a timeframe within two months of the one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or within five months of the second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna. Personnel outside those time frames are then considered fully vaccinated if they receive a booster shot, though a documented COVID-19 infection over the previous 90 days can also contribute to the definition of “fully vaccinated.”
And on a somber note…
Hockey is a community, and the entire hockey community experienced an unthinkable tragedy this weekend when 16-year-old Teddy Balkind passed away following a terrible accident in a high school game in Connecticut. Across the country, the news shook players, coaches, fans and anyone who loves the game to their collective core, and tributes poured in as programs and organizations put their sticks out for Teddy in a tribute to someone they never knew or met.
We can get caught up in wins and losses in this sport, but the true soul of hockey exists in high schools and community-level rinks across the world. It’s seen on a daily basis whenever kids lace themselves up for a practice, and the foundation is poured constantly by players whose names we don’t know or faces we don’t recognize.
The tragedy that unfolded in Connecticut is one of those stories that rocks you to your core. The dedications and tributes are a reminder that we’re all part of that one community, and, like we did when we learned about what happened to the Humboldt Broncos, we seek refuge in the game and the people who built it at its ground level.
I can’t imagine the sadness or pain for Teddy Balkind’s family or anyone who knew him as part of the St. Luke’s School in New Canaan. They are in my thoughts and if you so choose or believe, please keep them all in your prayers and well wishes.
