BOSTON — Hockey East has an imaging problem.
All of the success the league has had in the postseason in recent years has been overshadowed in some respect by the conference’s lack of wins in non-conference play. The 11 Hockey East schools were just 54-49-8 in their non-league games last season, and just five teams had a winning record in non-conference action. It’s a black eye on a league that bills itself as the best in the nation.
However, Northeastern coach Jim Madigan said it’s impossible to judge a league’s success by singling out a small margin of its season.
“Just like any coach, you don’t measure your season at the 60 percent mark, you measure it at the end of the season,” Madigan said. “At the end of the season, we had two teams in the Frozen Four, a team in the national championship game. We had the Hobey Baker Award winner (UMass’ Cale Makar), the rookie of the year in (Boston University’s) Joel Farabee and the goaltender of the year in (Northeastern’s) Cayden Primeau. All in all, it wasn’t a bad year for Hockey East.”
But the coaches also understand there is a need to improve the performance in their 10 games outside the grinding 24-game Hockey East schedule. Boston College and Boston University, two of the more historically successful programs in the league, were just 3-16-1 in non-conference games last season — a mark that has contributed to the notion that Hockey East is down.
Boston College coach Jerry York said he doesn’t schedule in an attempt to stockpile wins, but to challenge his team. The Eagles just haven’t been up to the test in recent years against those marquee opponents.
“The idea is you don’t schedule teams you think you can beat, I want to play the very best teams I can get on my schedule,” York said. “That’s how you find out how good you are. … If you’re good enough, you win the game.”
One potential reason for the conference’s lack of success outside the league is how early those games are played. The NCAA determines when teams can begin full practices with coaches based on when the championship is played. In hockey’s case, the long season means the sport has a shorter preseason than most others, so there isn’t much time for practice before teams play their first games.
Providence coach Nate Leaman pointed to the first two weeks of the season and th week after the holidays as major trap zones for teams because of the amount of unknowns. In fact, 31 of Hockey East’s 49 non-conference losses came during those three weeks of the season.
“You can just roll the dice on games sometimes, and it’s usually the first two weekends and the weekend after Christmas,” Leaman said. “Those are areas where we probably have to get better at, probably have a little better scheduling philosophy as a league. That’s what kind of hurt us, the ending hasn’t hurt our league.”
Leaman said what he values more is how deep Hockey East is on a yearly basis and how many teams are actually challenging for postseason berths. The conference has placed at least three teams into the 16-team field in each of the last 11 years, peaking at five schools in 2016.
But in order for those schools to be in contention for the NCAA tournament, the conference needs to help its members by winning games improving their standing within Pairwise — the objective statistical system that determines at-large berths to the postseason. Madigan said it’s on the coaches to make sure that even if there isn’t two points in Hockey East on the line that each game is vital to helping secure a spot for the conference in the NCAA tournament.
“That’s for us as coaches and players to make sure we’re playing at the same level for all those games,” Madigan said. “At the end of the day, those 10 non-conference games we have, we need to be good as a league and individual teams because it affects our ability to get more teams into the tournament.”
COACHES POLL — Every coach will say that the preseason polls conducted by the coaches don’t matter. And while they don’t win anybody a game, there can be messages sent through where teams land in the rankings.
Boston College was pegged to win Hockey East this season with eight first-place votes, but UMass picked up two first-place votes and finished a comfortable second place. It is the highest preseason ranking for the Minutemen in program history, and a marker of how far the program has come in just a short year.
Coach Greg Carvel said the challenge is to now prove that his team deserves the respect it has received.
“That’s been our common purpose as a team is to gain respect,” Carvel said. “In this year’s polls, you see that, but now we have to live up to it, that’s our purpose now. These are the expectations and I’m excited about that. It’s great that we’re high in the polls, it gives us even more motivation, but for me and the team, it’s about proving we can maintain that kind of success.”
BACK ON NESN — Hockey East and NESN announced a multi-year extension to the long-running partnership between the league and television network to broadcast games this season.
Nearly 100 men’s and women’s contests will air on NESN and NESN+ throughout the season, including a league-high 16 UMass contests. The Minutemen’s first three games will all be broadcast on NESN and half of their Hockey East contests will appear on the network in some capacity.
Josh Walfish can be reached at jwalfish@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshWalfishDHG. Get UMass coverage delivered in your Facebook news feed at www.facebook.com/GazetteUMassCoverage.