Re: LSSU Laker Hockey 2011-12
Any thoughts as to the major shakeup coming to the CCHA and its impact on Laker Hockey? College Hockey has an excellent article on the matter and is suggesting that some schools will have to step up financially in order to remain in an elite conference.
Link
http://www.collegehockeynews.com/news/2011/05/24_strange_days.php
Something tells me that it won't be LSSU that will be making a major financial commitment to its program.
Hard to say how things will turn out. The changes/realignments may not be as great as some have suggested. What Notre Dame and Miami do may be key to what happens, especially in the CCHA, but I’m not sure things from Notre Dame’s perspective would be as extreme as the article writer thinks. Notre Dame already is playing Div 2 and MAC schools in hockey, so why does that have to change? The 6 Big 10 schools are going to have a lot of room on their schedules for non-conference games, so if Notre Dame and Miami did stay in the CCHA I would expect them to still schedule non-conference games against UM and MSU and Ohio State fairly regularly, even though not the same frequency as the CCHA dictates now. Why would Notre Dame all of a sudden feel they should no longer play Div 2 or MAC schools?
If Notre Dame and Miami stayed with the CCHA, that leaves an 8 team league which is a comfortable size. If everyone played the other 7 schools 4 games per season, that makes 28 games, the same as today, leaving room for the same number of non-conference games, and the remaining CCHA schools would all still try to schedule some games against UM, MSU and Ohio State each season. I’d still like to see UAH added to the CCHA, and if another team was added (e.g. Mercyhurst or Robert Morris or someone else from Atlantic Hockey), that could bring the CCHA up to 10 teams. In that scenario, you could have 2 divisions (rotating clusters if you wanted) of 5 teams. Each team could play 4 games against the other teams in its division each season and 2 games against each of the 5 teams in the other division, giving you a total of 26 games, leaving even a little more room for non-conference games.
It’s possible we might see Notre Dame and Miami and some of the bigger (remaining) WCHA schools form a new league as has been rumored, but that would entail higher travel costs for pretty much all the schools involved so I’m not yet positive that will happen. The economy in this country is still pretty much a mess and still going downhill. Maybe the bigger schools all have enough money such that increased travel costs aren’t an issue for them, but many of the rumors about league realignments seem to ignore cost factors. For similar reasons, I’m not so sure all of the Hockey East schools would welcome Notre Dame into their league as the writer supposes. It would again mean travel cost increases for all of them. Maybe they wouldn’t care, but maybe they would.
If Notre Dame and Miami both left the CCHA, then it would be important to bring in at least 2 teams to replace them. But there are candidates for that (UAH, Mercyhurst, Robert Morris, other Atlantic Hockey teams). Depending upon how many Atlantic Hockey teams might be interested in switching to the CCHA, perhaps it could even become a 10 team league. Then there’s always the possibility that either Notre Dame or Miami leaves the CCHA, but not both, in which case it would only be necessary to bring in one team as a replacement (although more than that could be added).
