Nicole: Hey Grant and Lindsay! It’s NCAA Tournament time! There was a lot more movement in the Pairwise last weekend than I expected and we really didn’t know the tournament field or where they’d fall into the rankings until things wound down on Saturday. Clarkson made things interesting with their semifinal defeat of Yale and Penn State gave me heart palpitations when they needed overtime to win the CHA Tournament. But ultimately this is the tournament field we expected to see.
Arlan used to remind me that for all the fun and chaos of individual outcomes, it was still usually the same teams in the tournament. We have two teams earning their first-ever bid this year, which is pretty great. And while I know that folks who aren’t fans of the other nine teams might be sick of them come this time of year, I think there’s something to be said about putting in a body of work all year long that makes your inclusion in the postseason a forgone conclusion.
Considering we basically knew who would and wouldn’t be in, the conference provided some really great games and intrigue.
Lindsay: Hi Nicole! It’s great to be back talking college hockey with you and Grant. Clarkson certainly did make things interesting. Knocking off ECAC regular season champion Yale in the league tournament is the most recent reminder of how this team has outperformed my expectations this year. They had an uncharacteristic defensive setback though in the final losing to Colgate 8-2, on just 28 shots against and will need to regroup quickly for their NCAA play in game versus University of Minnesota-Duluth on Thursday.
Colgate’s rout of Clarkson in the final was incredible. In the semi final and final of the ECAC tournament they outscored their opponents (ranked 8th and 9th in the national polls at the time) a combined 13 to 3. Goals are supposed to be hard to come by in the playoffs but apparently no one told the Raiders, who were led by Danielle Serdachny with three goals in the tournament Championship weekend. The ECAC being one of the best two leagues in the country, with parity among its top teams, makes this result all the more impressive. The #3 Colgate Raiders are certainly playing free and should roll into the NCAA Tournament with lots of confidence.
Nicole: Colgate really just full-on dismantled Clarkson. That first 10 minutes was an absolute clinic where they made a very good Golden Knights defense look like they’d never tried to impede someone with the puck. It was as impressive as it was surprising. I definitely expected Colgate to win, but – particularly after Friday’s win over Yale – thought Clarkson would make it difficult for them. It certainly felt like a statement by the Raiders.
Lindsay: In the CHA, congratulations to the Penn State Nittany Lions who defeated Mercyhurst 2-1 in overtime to win their first ever CHA Tournament Championship. It was the fourth consecutive year that the CHA Final went to OT and the fourth different winner of the tournament in as many years. This was the first Championship game in CHA tournament history for Penn State, who elevated their program to DI in 2012.
Mercyhurst had a good start, but Penn State started buzzing near the end of the first, got a great start in the second and pulled away in the shot column. Senior Julie Gough led the team with an assist and the OT goal. Gough is one of numerous Nittany Lions to have a career high year in points. The Nittany Lions have to be pleased that even as opponents focus on their stars or veteran transfers, players like Julie Gough, Izzy Heminger and others have continued to elevate their games in stride with the program, becoming a threat as well.
Tenth seeded Penn State will play #8 Quinnipiac on Thursday in an NCAA regional semifinal game. These two teams haven’t played since the 2016-2017 season, and the rankings favor Quinnipiac but this strikes me as the play-in game most likely for an upset. A key for Penn State will be getting goaltender Josie Bothun comfortable early, as she hasn’t been tested a ton in recent weeks. There will be some nerves as the program makes its NCAA debut, but I’m excited to see how they respond and who makes that OSU barn their own this Thursday.
What do you both think of these two series?
Grant: I was awfully high on Quinnipiac a few months ago, but wow, they have had a remarkable fall from grace since the end of January. They’ve gone 6-6-0 in that time, falling from battling for home ice all the way to not knowing their NCAA tournament fate until the very last day of conference title games.
Penn State, on the other hand, has won eleven straight. Their level of competition is far lower than what the Bobcats have been facing, it’s true, but from a morale standpoint, I’m guessing the Nittany Lions are feeling far more confident than QU is these days.
And it’s not like Penn State is a noncompetitive CHA champion. They’ve been a top ten team since the season started and have been very consistent.
With how much trouble Quinnipiac has had against the St. Lawrences of the world the last couple weeks, if I were a betting man I would definitely feel better about Penn State coming out of this game.
Nicole: Predicting the outcome of the Penn State/Quinnipiac game feels like such a toss up because we have no way to know which version of each team shows up.
I had a feeling that beating Mercyhurst in the CHA title game was going to be a more difficult prospect than I think most people thought it would be, but I also expected Penn State to muster more than one goal through regulation. This is all new territory for the Nittany Lions and they’re relatively young overall and I think they got in their own heads about it. That makes me nervous about their mindset heading into this game.
I know teams believe they can beat anyone and PSU has the Wisconsin win to bolster that belief, but I wonder if this being an actually winnable game might be the worst outcome for them in terms of the pressure they put on themselves. They need to come out strong and establish their style of play and ideally score first and I worry they’ll be wound up and flat instead.
Quinnipiac feels like they’re on tilt. There’s just no understanding how things can go from so good to so bad over the course of 6-8 weeks. At this point I assume it’s like having the yips or something like that, where the more they try to fix things or shake it off, the worse it gets. We know what they were capable of, but we just don’t know if they’ll be able to showcase that tomorrow.
Lindsay: You may be right about Penn State and pressure to win. Meanwhile, Quinnipiac may seize that “no one believes in us” energy and take it personally that observers are predicting an upset.
Grant: As for Minnesota-Duluth against Clarkson, if you look only at their positions in the rankings this is a pretty similar matchup to PSU/QU. But it’s less a gap from 7th to 8th in KRACH and more of a chasm. UMD is way, way, way more battle tested than the Golden Knights are, and has an almost identical record despite playing a level of competition that’s a stratosphere beyond what Clarkson has had to deal with. I would be really surprised to see Clarkson make it out of this game and into the quarterfinal round.
Nicole: The Bulldogs get a little lost in the national conversation behind Ohio State, Minnesota and Wisconsin – especially because their style is a lot less flashy than those three – but that doesn’t make it less effective. UMD has given its three big rivals plenty of difficult hockey this season and that’s not going to change now.
They are frustrating on defense and make it hard to get close to the net and then they have Emma Soderberg there to shut you down. They wear teams down and are very good at striking quickly on the other end. It’s not so much about fast transition in terms of speed through the neutral zone, but they aren’t killing time in the offensive end. They get there, they set up and they strike. They also seem to have a knack for players a little further down the line sheet or who are normally setting up their stars lighting the lamp in these situations. Half of Clara Van Wieren’s 9 goals came against Ohio State and Minnesota. One of Nina Jobst-Smith’s five goals was the overtime game-winner over Wisconsin.
Don’t forget, too, that UMD made the title game last season as the #8 seed. No one knows better than them how to fight their way out of this opening round and earn a spot in the championship game.
Lindsay: In addition to the Nittany Lions making an NCAA debut, the NEWHA, represented by regular season and tournament champion LIU will make their first appearance, and will face Wisconsin. Any thoughts on that series?
Nicole: I’m super excited for NEWHA and for LIU. This is another big step for women’s college hockey and goodness, this roster of LIU players sure have been outstanding at making the best of every opportunity that’s come their way. I love their spirit and that they’re the ones that got this first bid after they won the conference tournament in their first-ever season a few years back.
There’s another really cool aspect of this game: LIU coach Kelly Nash is a Wisconsin alum who won National Championships in 2009 and 2011 while playing for current Badger goal Mark Johnson. To the best of my research ability, I believe Nash is the first head coach to coach against her former head coach in the NCAA Tournament. It’s really amazing to see former players coaching such an important step in growing the sport and getting women on staff. Nash is just 34 and coached at Princeton and Vermont before getting the head coaching job at LIU.
Grant: I don’t have a lot to add on this matchup itself – Wisconsin will win and it’ll be a crazy-cool experience for the LIU women to play in this game. But I do want to use this space to give a shout to this being the NEWHA’s first year with an NCAA tournament bid. This is a genuinely exciting moment for the growth of the sport, and it’s opened up dozens of playing opportunities for girls who want to go to play college hockey and have a shot at making it to the NCAA tournament. These teams will only get more competitive over the years now that they are part of a recognized, automatic-qualifying conference and can attract better talent. Watch out for Stonehill over the next couple seasons as they were already conference title contenders despite fielding a roster composed almost entirely of freshmen.
The 11 team tournament field is weird, but it does mean that these lower-ranked automatic qualifier teams will not get run out of the building. Getting paired up with the 6 seed instead of the 1 seed means LIU should be able to put up a good showing even in a likely loss. That’s not a small thing, and that gap will close further over the years.
Lindsay: You hit the nail on the head. An 11 team tournament field is weird, but a celebratory mood is still appropriate. Grant, can you shed some light on Hockey East? After Northeastern University won their fifth consecutive regular season championship, another tourney championship felt inevitable.
Grant: The Huskies are really impossible to judge. I don’t mean that they’ve been a roller coaster where you don’t know who you’re going to get in a given game – I mean we literally don’t have any meaningful contests with which to judge them against any other contenders.
I don’t mean to steal the tidbit Nicole and I discussed last week, but they haven’t played anyone at all in the top 10 of the rankings. The only tournament team they played was LIU. How do you judge a team like that? They’ve won 21 straight games and have been perfect since mid-November, and despite that flawless run they still couldn’t climb into a home ice NCAA tournament spot. That’s pretty incredible and it’s a testament to how completely unchallenging their schedule was.
But you look at their roster, and it’s clear their talent – at least at the top – is elite-team worthy. Müller-Aurard-Murphy is as good a line as anyone’s, and they have easily been able to control games for months now.
The problem for Northeastern at this point isn’t talent, because I think we all know they’ve got plenty of it. The problem – which as a Boston College fan tortured by the mid ’10s I am miserably aware of – is that running roughshod through noncompetitive competition does absolutely nothing to prepare you for the next level of hockey you need to play in order to be a national championship contender.
It’s so disappointing to see Hockey East fall to this level. I have close friends who are as tortured Northeastern fans as I am a tortured Boston College fan, and I know how violently painful getting to these NCAA tournaments and fizzling out every year can get on your emotional well-being. But the league hasn’t done their top team any favors these last few years in preparing them for postseason success, and this season in particular it’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it.
Which brings us back to Northeastern not having a single game against a contender with which we can judge their competitiveness. I don’t have any reason to believe that they’re better than Yale – there’s just no evidence there to support that conclusion. But there isn’t much evidence to say that they *aren’t* a great team, either.
Put it this way: Yale is definitely the team with the better case to advance, and definitely the team that I expect to win this quarterfinal match-up. But if the Huskies can pull out that win, we’ll finally have a data point to show that Northeastern’s raw talent might be enough for them to at least give them a fighting chance in this tournament, despite their lack of big-game, hard-fighting preparation.
Lindsay: I used to doubt Northeastern based on having less quality competition during the year but with them making the Frozen Four the past two years in spite of it, I’ve changed my tune. Win or lose, this will be a good game. The six consecutive Hockey East Tournament Championships hint at their greatness and as good as the ECAC has gotten, I think it helps Northeastern that they are facing an ECAC team in the first round. To your comment about raw talent, Northeastern stands out as the only program with three of this year’s top ten Patty Kazmaier award finalists (Alina Müller, Maureen Murphy and Gwyneth Philips). On the Yale side, before the Patty Kazmaier finalist listings came out, I tried to brainstorm who I thought might be on it. Yale’s goaltender Pia Dukaric made the top ten, but a case could also be made for ECAC Player of the Year Elle Hartje, who is sixth in the nation in points per game with 1.59, helping lead Yale to an historic year for their program. Senior defender Emma Seitz takes a ton of shots and will be key to any Bulldog success as well.
Nicole: Northeastern’s probably pretty happy that the only way they’d have to face Minnesota Duluth again is if they both make the title game. They had to come from behind and needed overtime to beat them in the 2021 semifinal and lost to them in overtime in last year’s semis.
I take your point about the Hockey East titles and Frozen Fours, Lindsay, but my concern for the Huskies would be that they haven’t been able to reach the top and on the surface, don’t seem to have changed anything in their approach to get a different result this time around.
Lindsay: It’s a valid concern for sure, and soon we’ll have an answer. We’ve talked a lot about the regional semifinal games and the #4 vs #5 game in the regional finals. What about the top three seeded teams? How confident are you that each of Ohio State, Minnesota and Colgate make the Frozen Four? Which matchup is most compelling to you?
Ignoring fandoms, the possibility of UMD getting past Clarkson and then upsetting Minnesota to advance to the Frozen Four that they host would be a great hockey story, even if it’s a common matchup. Just as much, there has been more chatter than ever that the ECAC is as strong as the WCHA, despite the lack of National Championships. It’s the time of year where teams can prove it and I’m curious to see who from the ECAC conference will go the farthest, and how far.
Grant: I’ve been beaten into submission the last few years and have to acknowledge the dominance of the WCHA, and as such I’m expecting Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to make it through out of the other regionals.
Nicole: Dramatic much?
Grant: Me?? Never!
Ohio State is by far the most likely to advance to the Frozen Four without too much stress. As I’ve already mentioned, Quinnipiac is stumbling into the postseason and I don’t even think they’re likely to win their matchup. Ohio State is far better than either of those teams.
After Wisconsin beats LIU (sorry, Sharks, we love you though <3), the Wisconsin/Colgate game is going to be, for me, the most compelling matchup of the regional rounds. Both of these teams have had their ups and downs, but are playing pretty well at the moment with big wins over top teams in the last few weeks. And while Colgate hasn’t quite played the strength of schedule of Wisconsin, their overall opposition has still been pretty darn good.
Having said all that… yeah, gun to my head, my money is on the WCHA just in general. I think Wisconsin pulls it out.
The Duluth/Clarkson/Minnesota region is certainly the deepest, but how can you not tip your cap to the WCHA champion in that grouping?
I’ll defer to Nicole on getting into the weeds on some of these teams as she’s seen them more, but from my point of view, my general take is “WCHA scary.”
Lindsay: “WCHA scary” is a sound take. I think the WCHA is the best conference, based on National Championships alone. But a women’s hockey math guy once said, “One thing I like about KRACH is that it makes it very clear that anyone can beat anyone on a given day. I’m (obviously) a big numbers guy, and as such I sometimes have to remind myself that these games are played by people, and not even professionals, either, who have maximized every bit of their talent and have less variation in how well they play.” I hope I interpreted your comment correctly, but it just feels like the ECAC is close enough that if a couple bounces go their way, teams will advance. I’m taking Colgate to beat Wisconsin. It just seems so extreme, the idea of three teams from one conference advancing.
Nicole: That possible Wisconsin/Colgate quarterfinal is also a rematch of a 2018 semifinal where the Raiders kind of stunned the Badgers and won in double overtime. The Raiders’ approach is so different from Wisconsin’s, which is part of what makes it so intriguing. But they are both teams that use their speed in transition – it could be a ridiculously fast-paced, run and gun type of game that would be potentially high-scoring. I’m with Grant that I’m just excited to watch it, honestly.
Minnesota played the most complete game I’ve maybe ever seen from them in the WCHA title win over Ohio State on Saturday. For me it was all the more compelling because I’d just watched the Buckeyes doing what they do best as they dictated the flow of the game against Minnesota Duluth in the semifinals. OSU could not do one thing in the final that they’d been able to do at will in the semifinal.
But all season they’ve seemed to match their energy and to the team they’re playing. I know UMD and Minnesota fans aren’t thrilled with the idea of another rematch between the two, but it might be the best thing for the Gophers to basically only play in games against rivals from here on out. I’m not sure we see the same kind of compete from them if they play Clarkson in the quarterfinal. Waffling on that, I’ll say I’m not sure any one group views their college experience as incomplete as the Gophers do. This team does not want to graduate this senior class without them getting a title and if anyone can will their team to a title, it’s Taylor Heise and Grace Zumwinkle. I’m not sure I’d bet against them doing absolutely everything to win this year.
The best counterpoint I can give for the Buckeyes is that there’s no way Nadine Muzerall lets what happened on Saturday happen again in the NCAA Tournament. That’s not to say that OSU definitely won’t lose. But she will have strategized and planned and will have her team prepared in a whole new way to fight back so they aren’t pushed completely off their game. It would be absolutely silly to assume otherwise.
I’m going to turn it around a bit on you all. In my opinion, this is one of the strongest “bottom half” of the brackets we’ve seen in awhile. Circumstances have to fall the right way, but if they play to the potential we’ve seen from them in fits and starts all year, it’s no big stretch to imagine Wisconsin, UMD or Quinnipiac winning it all – the #6, #7 and #8 seeds.
Who’s your pick for most likely bottom half team to make a run at the title?
Lindsay: For me it’s UMD, by virtue of Emma Soderberg in net and having the crowd on their side, if they can make it to the Frozen Four. They have three wins over Wisconsin, and a win over Ohio State. In recent history, they’ve performed better in the National Tournament than the WCHA Final Faceoff. They have a gauntlet ahead of them, most obviously the need to defeat Minnesota at Ridder, but they are my underdog pick.
Nicole: We’ve talked a bit about the Patty Kazmaier Top Ten throughout, but I’d love to hear both of your thoughts. I voted on the committee this year (submitted my ballot Monday morning), so I’m going to mostly abstain, but the Top Three Finalists will be announced today. Who are your picks for Top Three and who do you think should win? I also vote in the Goalie of the Year and turned in my ballot, so I’d be curious how you would rank the top three goalies – UMD’s Emma Soderberg, Yale’s Pia Dukarich and Northeastern’s Gwyn Philips.
Lindsay: Sophie Jaques should win the 2023 Patty Kazmaier award. I would round out my top three with Danielle Serdachny and Taylor Heise.
I see Jaques as number one because of her role in keeping defending National Champion Ohio State at the top of the polls all year long. Wisconsin and Minnesota returned so much talent from centralization that I don’t think Ohio State was expected to hold at number one as much as they did. Jaques’ 46 points aren’t as high as last year’s 59, but once again she came through offensively in clutch moments. Jaques scored a natural hat trick against Bemidji in the playoffs, and the week prior she had the primary assist on Madison Bizal’s game winning goal against Wisconsin, to secure a regular season championship for OSU. Jaques also had an OT winner versus Wisconsin back in January. Her strong skating and long reach allow her to be offensively aggressive, yet still get back in time to defend.
Colgate’s Danielle Serdachny and Minnesota’s Taylor Heise rank first and second in total points in the nation with 70 and 65 respectively. Just like they dominated all year long, each helped lead her team to win a tournament championship, and each put up big points in tournament play (9 for Serdachny and 8 for Heise). To watch either of these players without the benefit of a stat sheet one sees the will to win, the offensive damage they can do in the waning minutes of a tight game against any opponent, and how they relish being on the ice in pressure situations. It’s not a stretch to call either of these women the top player in NCAA Division I women’s ice hockey.
For goalie of the year I’m picking Gwyneth Philips. Of the three players she had the best statistics in every category, and her 0.96 save percentage helped Northeastern to three trophies this season. Hockey East has some great scorers in players like Sara Hjalmarsson, Natalie Mlynkova, Theresa Schafzahl, Abby Newhook and Hannah Bilka to name just a few, speaking to Philips impressive stats.
Pia Dukaric stepped into the starting role and helped Yale to a brief stint at number one in the polls, and Soderberg has led UMD back to the National Tournament while breaking the program record for shutouts. It’s incredible work by all three but Philips has earned goalie of the year from my perspective.
Nicole: I always worry that I’ll inadvertently give insight into the discussions the committee had, so it seems best to just not say much at all publicly until after the award, but I love hearing other people’s view of things.
Thanks so much for the conversation and analysis this season Lindsay and Grant! I really appreciate you guys sharing some of your passion for the game, teams and players. Good luck to the NCAA Tournament teams and to the players up for the Individual Awards!
