Re: RPI Hockey 2019 - 2020 Part II: Moving on with 2020 Vision!
My understanding is that it was a combination of factors, but basically that to get good teams, we would have to guarantee them two games in their arena and we, of course, would only play them at most once in ours. This was after it was switched from a round robin to a two-day format. It was completely impossible to get teams willing to play three games. The best thing was to get other teams who also ran tourneys at a different time of year since they might be willing to do a swap.
The last year the RPI tournament used the round robin format was during the 1980-81 season, and they really had to do some digging to get teams to come and play three games. They wound up inviting Vasby (a club team from Sweden) and Holy Cross (Mike Addesa's old team), and still had trouble finding a third team.
Finally, Maine agreed to come and join the tournament, but only on the condition that their game against RPI would count as an ECAC league game. (This was before Hockey East split from the ECAC.) They didn't want to come all the way to Troy to play a tournament game that wouldn't count in the league standings and then come back to Troy later in the season to play a league game.
There was a problem with this. Traditionally, overtime periods were never played in the RPI tournament, on the grounds that playing three 60-minute games in three nights was as much as college hockey players should be asked to do. But in order for the RPI - Maine game to count in the ECAC standings, they would have to play overtime if the game were tied after 60 minutes.
It was finally decided that if RPI and Maine were tied at the end of 60 minutes, they would play overtime, but for the purposes of the tournament, the RPI - Maine game would be considered to end at the end of 60 minutes. The overtime would count in the ECAC standings but the championship of the tournament would be decided as if the overtime had never happened.
The rules of the tournament specified that if two teams finished with the same W-L-T record over the three nights, the championship would be decided by most total goals scored. Against Vasby and Holy Cross, two defensively-challenged teams, RPI rang up a total of 22 goals - and Maine scored even more.
This led to the interesting situation where, if the RPI - Maine game had gone to overtime and if RPI had scored in the overtime, it would have been possible for RPI to go 3-0 over the course of three nights and not win the tournament, since Maine would have been declared the tournament champion on the basis of total goals over 180 minutes.
But that didn't happen. Maine beat RPI 5-3 and won the tournament, no questions asked.
