Check it out - we finally know something! (warning: moderate geekery factor)

Ta-da!

Harvard and Cornell have both accumulated 24 points, and the best Princeton or RPI could muster by winning their remaining games would be 22, so Princeton's and RPI's best possible finish is 3rd, with the corollary that Harvard and Cornell cannot finish 11th or 12th.

Additionally, the best that SLU could muster would be 24 points, currently tied with Cornell and Harvard. However, Cornell and Harvard still have to play each other, so SLU cannot finish above BOTH of them. Cornell would win a two-way tiebreaker with SLU, but a many-team jam at 24 points could work out differently. In any case, the best SLU could finish is second in a complicated tie-breaker, and they are therefore eliminated from first place.

Bottom line: the race for the regular season crown is down to 9 teams.

While the crown is a nice thing to have, here are the numbers of practical importance for the conference tournament: with at least three points this weekend, Cornell clinches a home-ice berth (finish of eighth or better). The magic number of points to be certain of a bye into the ECAC quarterfinals is 9.

Well, we already know we've clinched a playoff spot. Of course, so has Princeton...

Yeah, I noticed this this morning when I checked out the magic number table. If there were still ten teams in the playoffs, we would have clinched this weekend.

But this is probably as good a time as any to plug the return of:

The ECAC Race in a Nutshell:
[slack.net]

The ECAC Playoff Possibilities Script:
[slack.net]

This might not be news to some, but it was to me...

The schedule for the ECAC tournament is at [hockey.ecac.org]

It says that there is no reseeding after the first round. The pairings are given as 1 vs. 5/12; 2 vs. 6/11; 3 vs. 7/10; and 4 vs. 8/9.

This doesn't make any sense to me at all. I would think that in each round, you'd want the highest seed playing the lowest, 2nd highest v. second lowest, and so on. The only way that happens in the quarterfinals under these pairings is if all four lower seeds win (on their opponents' home ice). IIRC, in 3 points/best of 3 series during the tenure of the Final Five, the lower seed/visitor defeated the higher seed/home team only 4 of 25 times (twice in 98, once in 99, once in 01). Thus, what I would think should happen seems unlikely to occur. Of course it's quite possible that the ECAC has a different intended consequence, but if so, what that consequence is escapes me...

That's gotta be a typo, it's just not how it's done. If there's no reseeding it's always

1 vs. 8/9
2 vs. 7/10
3 vs. 6/11
4 vs. 5/12

so that ideally the next round ends up 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5 .

Of course, if there's reseeding, everything's taken care of. I do believe I remember the press release saying there'd be reseeding after each round, I'll see if I can find it.

Edit: Here's USCHO bracket - sans reseeding - which at least looks better. [uscho.com]

Exactly - the goal would be 1/8, 2/7 etc. My concern was the fact that under "Quarterfinals" on the page I linked to above, it states explicitly, "Teams will be re-seeded after quarterfinals round". The same wording does not appear under "First Round". If they had specifically mentioned reseeding under both rounds, or not mentioned it at all, I would have thought nothing of it.

Not reseeding would be monumentally stupid, especially after the first round--but this is the ECAC.

This is just a question of taste, but I have always preferred having the bracket set in advance without reseeding as a way of rewarding Cinderella teams.

I am comfortable giving the #1 seed the hypothetical easiest route to the championship without, by rule, handing the actual easiest route to them.

bigred apple wrote:

This is just a question of taste, but I have always preferred having the bracket set in advance without reseeding as a way of rewarding Cinderella teams.

It also makes it much easier to run an office pool.

It's subtle, but it does look like they're re-seeding. The only teams that are mentioned in the semifinals are Seeds 1-4. They either re-seeded or (he says tongue-in-cheek) #5-#12 are not allowed to play in the semifinals. But, like Al said, "this is the ECAC."

I'd rather re-seed to reinforce what value the RS has left, but the worst seed to advance to the QF is by definition the team with the win over the "best loser." A #12 QF survivor beat a Dartmouthish #5, whereas a #8 QF survivor only beat a Vermontish #9. The #12 might be actually be peaking and trouble even for a #1.

For the history buffs out there, the ECAC used to be bracketed (i.e. 1-8 winner played 4- 5 winner, 2-7 vs. 3-6) until 1971 + or - one year. Since seeds 1, 2 and 3 all won in '70 and '71, I'm not exactly sure in which of the three years ('70 to '72) they switched to the unbracketed format.

So....we can't finish 11th or 12th. And we're currently in 1st. And we're all eagerly tracking this. Yup, we're big big dorks.

> Yup, we're big big dorks.

I don't think we needed hockey to tell us that...

The weird bracketing on that page was indeed a misprint; they've corrected it to say the teams will be re-seeded after the first round as well. (The description of the quarterfinal pairings is still a little weird, but we know what they mean...)