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UMass Lowell 2024-2025 Season: Expectations are.....Expectations

We all know the Lowell "tradition" of playing down to opponents, so it's interesting to note that we have 9 games left and all are against teams below us (except one game against UConn).

I have three clusers of teams in HE at this point:
  1. BC, BU and Maine. They'll all get home ice, have to be the teams to beat. I don't see any of these three slipping out of the top spots.
  2. Lowell, PC, UConn. Fighting for home ice. Lowell is 1-0-1 against PC, and 1-1 against UConn. We play both of them once each (both on the road), so the tie-breakers are huge. Lowell currently is in fifth, but only one point behind UConn with 2 games in hand.
  3. Everyone else. I don't take teams against any one of these for granted, and we have 2 against UMass, Northeastern, and UNH and a single against Vermont. If someone here gets hot, I can see them jumping into my second grouping.
If we can somehow win 6 of these 9, we should still have a shot at home ice in the quarterfinals.

If I'm correct in my groupings and PC and UConn are similar to us, UConn's remaining schedule includes two games against BU and Maine, and strangely they only have one Home/Home left (Lowell has three), but 6 of their last 8 (including a non-conference game) are at home. Lowell only has 4 of their last 9 at home. Providence has the toughest schedule of the three, with 5 games still left against Maine and BU. They do have 5 of their last 9 at home, but their last three are all on the road.
 
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UMLFan said:
We all know the Lowell "tradition" of playing down to opponents, so it's interesting to note that we have 9 games left and all are against teams below us (except one game against UConn).

I have three clusers of teams in HE at this point:
  1. BC, BU and Maine. They'll all get home ice, have to be the teams to beat. I don't see any of these three slipping out of the top spots.
  2. Lowell, PC, UConn. Fighting for home ice. Lowell is 1-0-1 against PC, and 1-1 against UConn. We play both of them once each (both on the road), so the tie-breakers are huge. Lowell currently is in fifth, but only one point behind UConn with 2 games in hand.
  3. Everyone else. I don't take teams against any one of these for granted, and we have 2 against UMass, Northeastern, and UNH and a single against Vermont. If someone here gets hot, I can see them jumping into my second grouping.
If we can somehow win 6 of these 9, we should still have a shot at home ice in the quarterfinals.

If I'm correct in my groupings and PC and UConn are similar to us, UConn's remaining schedule includes two games against BU and Maine, and strangely they only have one Home/Home left (Lowell has three), but 6 of their last 8 (including a non-conference game) are at home. Lowell only has 4 of their last 9 at home. Providence has the toughest schedule of the three, with 5 games still left against Maine and BU. They do have 5 of their last 9 at home, but their last three are all on the road.
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Lowell already has the tiebreaker against PC, having taken 5 out of 6 points with only 3 points left. Lowell just needs a win (regulation or OT) against UConn for the tiebreaker.

Last season, 38 points was enough for 4th place and home ice in the quarterfinal. Assume that is the case again, then Lowell needs 13 points from the remaining 9 games.
 
FiveLetterBird said:
I know we aren’t on the bubble but oh boy does it feel like we are. I hate this 10-13 range in the pairwise. So little margin for error in these next few weekends. No more easy games. I just need to see one convincing win this weekend to put my mind at ease.
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Two wins would go a long way to ending the season (edit: ending it in the ncaas). Two wins would effectively put us four losses up instead of 3.

Edit: man i getting way pessimistic in my outlook. Maybe it's the playing goaltender or other things but I've been viewing everything as hazard prevention... winning is to prevent the hazard of losing. I gotta find another outlook, I think this isn't healthy on my part
 
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ScottK said:
Lowell already has the tiebreaker against PC, having taken 5 out of 6 points with only 3 points left. Lowell just needs a win (regulation or OT) against UConn for the tiebreaker.

Last season, 38 points was enough for 4th place and home ice in the quarterfinal. Assume that is the case again, then Lowell needs 13 points from the remaining 9 games.
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Thanks Scott. The HE site doesn't really clarify that point since it only states that they use shootout wins for the extra point in the standings: "While nearly every Division I college conference now uses shootouts to break ties after overtime is played, the NCAA uses W-L-T for record keeping and does not recognize shootout "wins" as wins. A game is considered a "tie" for both team and coach historical records after overtime ends without a goal scored. Shootouts are used only to determine points in league standings. For this reason, records will continue to be displayed as W-L-T with OW-OL-SW following to display total point calculations. The OW-OL-SW records are accounted for in the W-L-T record."
 
Season isn't over for Lowell basketball, but for all the talk about this extremely experienced roster (15 players on the roster, 5 redshirt/actual freshmen and the rest all seniors or grads) ... and coming off the hope of 2 straight years of making the AE Final ... this team is in trouble. Now 4-5 in league play after today's loss, this team is lacking something. And with so much talent leaving after this season, Lowell's future isn't bright unless they absolutely nail the transfer portal. I desperately hope they can figure things out the remainder of this season.
 
UMLFan said:
Season isn't over for Lowell basketball, but for all the talk about this extremely experienced roster (15 players on the roster, 5 redshirt/actual freshmen and the rest all seniors or grads) ... and coming off the hope of 2 straight years of making the AE Final ... this team is in trouble. Now 4-5 in league play after today's loss, this team is lacking something. And with so much talent leaving after this season, Lowell's future isn't bright unless they absolutely nail the transfer portal. I desperately hope they can figure things out the remainder of this season.
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Losing oconnor to Mason didn't help but I think he was always moving on
 
UMLFan said:
Season isn't over for Lowell basketball, but for all the talk about this extremely experienced roster (15 players on the roster, 5 redshirt/actual freshmen and the rest all seniors or grads) ... and coming off the hope of 2 straight years of making the AE Final ... this team is in trouble. Now 4-5 in league play after today's loss, this team is lacking something. And with so much talent leaving after this season, Lowell's future isn't bright unless they absolutely nail the transfer portal. I desperately hope they can figure things out the remainder of this season.
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Let's hope Somerville sticks around.
 
Season isn't over for Lowell basketball, but for all the talk about this extremely experienced roster (15 players on the roster, 5 redshirt/actual freshmen and the rest all seniors or grads) ... and coming off the hope of 2 straight years of making the AE Final ... this team is in trouble. Now 4-5 in league play after today's loss, this team is lacking something. And with so much talent leaving after this season, Lowell's future isn't bright unless they absolutely nail the transfer p
boblav1 said:
Let's hope Somerville sticks around.
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NIL money will be involved I'm sure. And if he wants to be a leader in just his second year (albeit, I know they'll bring in older players through the portal).
 
4-2 Vermont during the 2nd intermission.

No matter what happens the rest of the way, the way this team has played at home the last two years is inexcusable. I borderline dread coming to the Tsongas because there’s a better chance that they lose here than win as of late.
 
What a disaster. Amazing people (however few were actually there) actually pay money to see this trash. This team is a bunch of individuals skating like chickens with their heads cut off. No execution. Poor blind passes. Goal tending real lousy over at least last few games. I might be time for Dr Chen or the new AD have a serious sit down with the coach. He’s probably been around too long.
 
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Can’t draw up a bigger character test for this team than today’s game against UConn. Bad home loss last night (5-7-2 at home this year ), quick turn around with a long drive to Hartford to play against a good UConn team in front of a large crowd. All the while, crucial conference points are on the line and of course pairwise implications. I’ll know everything I need to know about this team after today.
 
Curious to see who plays net tonight. Halasz definitely didn't have his best stuff last night but he shutout UConn earlier in the year and Welsch was in net when they lost 4-1. Norm seemed to brush off the bad goal in his press conference so wouldn't be surprised if Beni gets the nod again even with the quick turnaround. Need to see more effort to be first one to the puck in the dirty areas from this group.
 
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The guys on ESPN+ said there was an injury for Welsch, that's why he wasn't even dressed. I hadn't heard anything about it.

I have said this repeatedly on these boards, what keeps killing this team is the awful giveaways, over and over and over again, in their own zone. It's horrendous to watch, and 50% of the time, even I (as someone who never played the game) can see it coming. I did like the heart and passion they EVENTUALLY showed, but it was too little too late.

Anyone have any idea why the game was moved to 6? Weirdly, UConn's game yesterday was at 4. These are really strange starting times for a weeknight game.
 
UMLFan said:
The guys on ESPN+ said there was an injury for Welsch, that's why he wasn't even dressed. I hadn't heard anything about it.

I have said this repeatedly on these boards, what keeps killing this team is the awful giveaways, over and over and over again, in their own zone. It's horrendous to watch, and 50% of the time, even I (as someone who never played the game) can see it coming. I did like the heart and passion they EVENTUALLY showed, but it was too little too late.

Anyone have any idea why the game was moved to 6? Weirdly, UConn's game yesterday was at 4. These are really strange starting times for a weeknight game.
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I don’t know this for sure but I can imagine Norm wanted the game moved up to give the team a little more time to recover before a very quick turnaround at UConn.
 
UMLFan said:
The guys on ESPN+ said there was an injury for Welsch, that's why he wasn't even dressed. I hadn't heard anything about it.

I have said this repeatedly on these boards, what keeps killing this team is the awful giveaways, over and over and over again, in their own zone. It's horrendous to watch, and 50% of the time, even I (as someone who never played the game) can see it coming. I did like the heart and passion they EVENTUALLY showed, but it was too little too late.

Anyone have any idea why the game was moved to 6? Weirdly, UConn's game yesterday was at 4. These are really strange starting times for a weeknight game.
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the decision processes of these players are what bothers me the most. To me that's what makes great teams. When players know where to go with plays.
 
Patman said:
I can't imagine at any level that this is, or should be, a norm decision
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Obviously not a decision solely up to him but I can imagine he pushed for it heavily. He seemed very frustrated with the quick turnaround in the postgame presser last night. He said something along the lines of “Now we play again in 20 hours which the league approved of but didn’t tell us until a few weeks ago. It’s nice to have a 3:30 game and they’ve been out since 4 o’clock, that’s a whole separate issue”. From a competitive standpoint and even a player safety standpoint, would you be shocked if he went to league office and complained? The league then meets him in the middle-ish and moves it up an hour.
 
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