Re: West Regional: North Dakota, Michigan Tech, St. Cloud State, Quinnipiac
It's interesting. I do prefer being the underdog going in, but didn't expect St, Clooud to be so heavily favored when Tech has the advantage in the polls, PWR, KRACH, W/L record, goals for, goals against, goaltending, defense, coaching, and good looks. I wonder what it's based on? The fake huskies being "battle tested", perhaps?
It's awesome not being able to sleep. Here's the last post. For a bit.
Want to know why SCSU is favored? Well, they aren't if you look at the betting lines but yes, seems like the college hockey writers are thinking so. Battle tested is exactly it. Already called out the majority of the team has two trips to the NCAAs in their resume. Frozen Four trip and a loss in a regional final to the eventual National Runner-up. And back-to-back regular season conference championships before clearly falling short this year. Experience does matter.
They had quite a few wins on Friday nights followed by not getting the job done on Saturday far too many times. Second toughest strength of schedule in the country. Yes, that gets driven a bit by the success of the conference they are in but there were definitely quality opponents outside of conference as well in Colgate, Union, Quinnipiac and Minnesota. Split with all four of them. Two of those ended up being conference champions. Against their own conference champions, SCSU beat UND twice and Miami twice. Not forgetting about losses to them as well, but they did have wins against them too. Tech? No wins against any conference champions (caveat, you can only play the teams on your schedule and outside of Mankato, nobody you played really was in position to win one except possibly Michigan). Will definitely give you credit for beating a good UMD team and Michigan as well.
Tougher conference when comparing the entire conference. I'll preface this by calling out the OOC records. NCHC at 53-25-4 vs. WCHA at 30-29-9, including a 14-8-1 record in direct competition. Forget the top teams for a moment. Look at the bottom teams. NCHC has Western Michigan and Colorado College. Consider those easy wins. SCSU went 4-1-1 against them with only two games against CC with both being blowouts. WCHA has Northern Michigan, UAH, UAA and LSSU that fall into that band. Tech went 14-1-1 against those schools. Good news, you beat teams you should but I think you can make an easy argument SCSU would have had a similar record against those same teams.
You can argue the top four teams in each conference are equal, I wouldn't agree, but let's go ahead with that argument. Even if you do, no logical argument can be made that would offset the volume of poor teams at the bottom of the WCHA. Essentially there is no where to hide in the NCHC amongst the top 6 teams and with those teams 18 of their 24 conference games were against each other. Definitely different level of competition over the majority of the conference season vs. the WCHA.
Will any of this matter? I think it will. We'll see on Friday. I'll say it once again, wouldn't be surprised to see Tech win but don't overlook or underestimate SCSU because of their W-L record.
