Boston College men’s hockey’s loss to Denver this year marked the end of my time covering the team and jettisoned me into my next chapter as a full-time fan.
Thus, as I sat and watched the NCAA Championship, I couldn’t help but enjoy Western Michigan’s four-goal victory over Boston University. After all, it’s natural to root against your favorite team’s biggest rival, and you never want to see them achieve the ultimate goal of winning a national championship, especially after your own team’s season ended in disappointment two years in a row.
As we are encouraged to do at a Jesuit school, I reflected. That’s when I began to question whether rooting against BU was in my best interest as a New England native and longtime Hockey East fan.
In a way, BU was fighting the same battle that we were—it was a young team laden with some of the best prospects college hockey had to offer, trying to beat an older, bigger team from out west.
This story has played out countless times over the past decade between Hockey East and NCHC teams, and much like a former high-school sweetheart in a Hallmark Christmas movie, the National Championship always seems to stay in the Midwest instead of returning to the big city.
2015 was a fever dream for Hockey East. Not only did two Hockey East teams, Providence and BU, face off in the National Championship game, but they did so at TD Garden in Boston. It was the first time since 1999, when Maine and New Hampshire took the Border Battle to Anaheim, Calif., that two Hockey East teams competed for a National Championship.
I won’t delve into how it happened, but Providence took home the hardware in that 2015 matchup, marking the fifth national championship in eight years won by a Hockey East team, including an instant classic in 2009 in which BU knocked off NCHC foe Miami in a late-game comeback that some consider to be the best National Championship game ever.
Since 2015, that script has flipped on its head.
NCHC teams have won seven of the last nine national championships, with UMass being the only Hockey East team to win one in that timeframe.
So why is it that Hockey East teams can’t get it done against the NCHC? Is it playstyle? Is it age? Is whatever they’re feeding the guys in the Midwest the secret to winning a title?
Unless BC and BU ate clam chowder for a week straight before the last two national championships, I think it’s a combination of the first two and not so much the last one.
The goal of every college hockey team is the same: to win a national championship. How they build their team differs, though. Year over year, with a few notable exceptions like Zeev Buium, most of the best NHL prospects in college hockey play for marquee schools like BC and BU in Hockey East, or Michigan and Minnesota in the Big Ten, a conference that hasn’t claimed a title since 2007.
There’s a relatively easy pitch for Hockey East schools to get the best recruits, since the numbers back it up, too.
Eighty-two Hockey East alums suited up on the NHL’s 2024–25 opening night, compared to 50 for the NCHC.
It holds true among the NHL’s elite as well. On Team USA’s Four Nations roster this year, nine players came from Hockey East schools, compared to just three from NCHC squads. Seven of the nine Hockey East alumni went to either BC or BU, with goalies Jeremy Swayman and Connor Hellebuyck attending Maine and UMass Lowell, respectively.
Most of the players in the NHL and on the Four Nations Team played at Hockey East powerhouses after 2015, so it certainly may seem like there isn’t a real correlation between NHL talent and winning a national championship.
So, what does win championships? Well, in my opinion, it’s age and play style.
Average age isn’t really a good statistic to measure this because every team is going to have players of varying ages. Plus, the demonstrable differences in average age are mostly in teams from Atlantic Hockey or the CCHA, who aren’t regularly competing for national championships anyway.
Instead, I want to focus on the age of the key contributors on these teams. I’ll focus on two games in particular: BC-Denver in 2024 and UMass-Minnesota Duluth in 2021.
This BC team was one of the most loaded rosters college hockey may ever see. Cutter Gauthier and Will Smith jumped straight to the NHL after the loss, and Gabe Perreault and Ryan Leonard joined them in the pros this year.
All BC’s best players were 18- to 19-year-old freshmen, with Gauthier being the lone 20-year-old.
Denver’s team was a completely different story. Except for Buium, all of their best players were at least 20, most of them older. Matt Davis? 22. Jack Devine? 20. Aiden Thompson? 21. Carter King? 22. Massimo Rizzo? 22. Alternate Captain Connor Caponi was 24 at the time of the win, then stuck around another year and helped beat BC again this year.
Some may well play in the NHL, but most of Denver’s core was not deemed good enough by the teams that drafted them after their underclassman seasons, leading them to stick around and keep playing in school.
When push came to shove, DU knew what to do. Once they got a two-goal lead, all they had to do was sit back in David Carle’s 1-3-1 neutral zone scheme and keep BC’s talent uncomfortable. They did just that, and that’s how they knocked off one of the most prolific teams in Hockey East history.
2021 was a weird time in America. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were trying to remember how to participate in normal activities. During all of that, UMass remembered how to win a National Championship—the only time a Hockey East school has done it since 2015.
Just a few years after losing to NCHC team Minnesota-Duluth with Cale Makar—who in his young career is the best NHL player to ever play for UMass and probably the best player to play in Hockey East since 2015—UMass got its revenge on the NCHC.
The Minutemen beat St. Cloud State, who, to emphasize the point, beat another NHL-prospect-loaded BC team in the tournament that year on the road to the national championship game. UMass did so with its top-four point scorers being 21, 23, 19, and 23, and with a goalie tandem aged 21 and 22.
The formula for winning a national tournament seems pretty clear. So, should BC, BU, and Hockey East change how they recruit and play to help their chances?
Honestly, I don’t think so. What makes Hockey East so special is the fast-paced hockey featuring some of the NHL’s future stars. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, even if it means we’re less likely to see the national championship trophy come to New England.
Plus, Smith wouldn’t have come to BC if it meant four years of dumping and chasing.
Older, grittier teams have a much better chance of winning it all, and Hockey East probably won’t change to fit that model. So the next time BU has a chance to win it all and change this narrative, BC fans should probably try to root for them in regional and conference solidarity.
But just like the Green Line getting from BC to Kenmore in less than 30 minutes, I think we all know that’s pretty unlikely.
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