The day is here. The NCAA hockey tournament will officially get underway on Thursday afternoon in Springfield, Mass. when the puck drops on Denver-UMass. Great day if you’re a hockey fan. Even better day if you’ve hit your basketball quota for the year, waiting for the NHL playoffs to start or believe nothing in baseball matters before Memorial Day.
Here’s what we have going for us in this tournament:
BC as dominant a team we’ve seen in some time. Last season’s top seed, Minnesota, was powered by a juggernaut forward line of Logan Cooley, Matthew Knies and Jimmy Snuggerud. This year’s BC team has just that – a forward line of 2023 first-round picks Ryan Leonard, Gabe Perreault and Will Smith all while having another line centered around 2022 fifth overall pick, Cutter Gauthier, who has 35 goals in 37 games. There’s virtually no holes on this roster. And while Providence, where the Eagles will look to punch their first ticket to the Frozen Four in eight years, hasn’t been nice to them historically (they’ve lost three national title games in Providence while not advancing out of any of the three regionals they’ve played there, going one-and-done twice), none of those BC teams were nearly as dominant as this one. The Eagles are favored to win their first title since 2012 for good reason.
And the possibility of a BC-BU final. It feels like the whole season has been a crash course to BC and BU playing each other in St. Paul with the natty on the line. The Comm Ave rivals have been the nation’s top two teams virtually all year, laid waste to a very strong Hockey East and are led by some of the country’s best players. It’s far from a lock, especially when you consider these are two of the five youngest teams in the country, but it feels like destiny.
Star power. The amount of players that will be making big impacts in the NHL real soon in this tournament is incredible. Just start with BC, which has four players alone who were first-round picks, and BU which is headlined by the projected top overall pick in the 2024 draft in Macklin Celebrini, another first-rounder in defenseman Tom Willander and another blue liner in Lane Hutson that would be first-rounder were they to do a reselect the 2022 draft. Michigan has its usual complement of top prospects in Rutger McGroarty, Seamus Casey, Frank Nazar III and Gavin Brindley while Minnesota’s Snuggerud, a 2022 Blues first-rounder, has 21 goals in 37 games. Michigan State is headlined by defenseman Artyom Levshunov, who could be a top-three pick in the draft while Denver blue liner Zeev Buium could go in the top 10. Then there’s Jackson Blake at North Dakota, a 2021 fourth-rounder who has had his stock fly up in his sophomore season.
Maryland Heights regional for all the bragging rights in the Midwest. Perhaps the best case for on-campus regionals is to imagine what this region would be like were it held at Munn Ice Arena, Michigan State’s home barn, for a regional that features the Spartans along with Western Michigan, North Dakota and Michigan. You couldn’t top that atmosphere. Regardless, this region has been labeled the ‘region of doom’ and rightfully so. The team that finds its way to St. Paul from this group won’t do it the easy way.
Quinnipiac goes for repeat. And if they do, the Bobcats would do something that hasn’t been done in more than half-century – a Northeast school successfully defending a national championship. The last Northeast school to pull the trick was BU, when the Terriers won their second straight title back in 1972. The Bobcats will take to regionals in Providence, where they won back in 2013 to advance to their first-ever Frozen Four, where they lost to Yale in the title game. They’ll likely have to go through top-seeded BC, which they took to overtime on the first night of the season, falling 2-1 in overtime.
Will age be a factor? The four youngest teams in the tournament are one-seeds, with the top overall seed BC checking in as the country’s youngest team at 20 years, nine months. Michigan advanced to the Frozen Four as the nation’s youngest team last season but lost in the semifinals – the last time the youngest team in the country reached the national title game was in 2015, when BU did so and lost to Providence. BC was the last program to win the natty as the youngest team in the country, however, when they won in 2010. Quinnipiac had age on its side last season when it won the national title tied for 31st-oldest team in the country, beating the second-youngest team, Minnesota, in the final. But the year before that Denver won as the country’s second-youngest team. So who knows.
The most intriguing regional from an age standpoint comes in Sioux Falls, where BU – tied for the fourth-youngest team in the country – plays the nation’s oldest team in RIT. Another young group, Minnesota, plays the third-oldest team in the tournament, Omaha, in the other game.
Can Omaha keep its run going? Speaking of Omaha. The Mavericks are rolling into the tournament on a 12-3-2 run that saw them make the Frozen Faceoff final, where they lost to Denver (no shame in that). The Mavericks are led by brothers Tanner and Griffin Ludtke, who lead the team with 28 and 27 points, respectively. Tanner, a third-round pick by the Coyotes, has been a near-point per game player since the turn of the year, with 20 points in his last 23 games.
Maine is back. It once would’ve been inconceivable to think Maine would go 12 years without making the tournament. The Black Bears were a model program in the 1990s and early 2000s, making the tournament 17 out of 26 years from 1987 to 2012, making 11 Frozen Fours and winning a pair of national championships. The Black Bears, which face Cornell in the opening round on Thursday, are a veteran group led by a pair of freshmen brothers (not twins) in Bradly and Josh Nadeau, who have 46 and 45 points, respectively. The two linemates have a Sedin-like connection on the ice – with a near identical scoring line (19-27-46 for Bradly, 18-27-45 for Josh). Bradly is a 2023 first-round pick, taken 30th overall by the Hurricanes, to give Maine its first first-round pick in over two decades.
Puck Watching 