So you view the 25 game regular season as a 25 game exhibition slate? I disagree with that, because unlike football, hockey is a sport which is sorted out in the long run, not the short term. An inferior team can have short term success with a bit of puck luck, but in the long run cream will come to the top. I have always thought that at the very least playoffs should be 2 game race to 3 points series. (Ideally that should be a 3 game series, but just getting to two would be an improvement.)
As for what is going on in Northfield, since it has been 4 years since I left, my sources are drying up - my peers are getting older and I'm not in the day to day loop with admissions and athletic staff that I used to be, thus I can't make judgements about recruiting at all. The one thing that has changed is that with the expansion of DIII hockey over the last few years (which isn't a bad thing), the competition for recruits has become more challenging - We can see that with historical powers like Middlebury seeing a real slide in their level of success. The landscape is changing, and some of the new players seem to be taking the Adrian model of getting good fast rather than starting slow and building up like Castleton did when they started.
Thirty years at Norwich hasn't changed my appreciation for what has been built there - anybody who watched games at Taylor Arena knows that NU hockey has come a long way - I think the sustainable success may look different today than it did 10 years ago.
These are just the rambling thoughts of a guy who will watching as many NU games as I can from a distance at age 70, and wants to see success, but I also know the recruiting pie has to be sliced in smaller slices so it becomes harder and harder to have the same kind of dominance that NU used to have.
