Sunday PWR: Big Doin's

Some movement in the PWR with consequences for Cornell. Minnesota moves into #4 ahead of the Hockey East contingent, and Ferris State jumps up to #6. Obviously, if the rankings stayed that way there is no way Cornell would go west.

As of today the top 14 arranged by grouping are:

1 CC
2 Maine
3 Cornell
4 Minnesota
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5 UNH
6 Ferris
7 BC tied with BU
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9 Michigan
10 NoDak
11 Mankato
12 St. Cloud tied with Providence
14 Denver tied with Ohio State

If Providence finishes at 12, we would avoid a first round matchup with the Friars, right? Maybe we want them to beat BU after all. . .

Well, if the bottom 4 were: MAAC, CHA, St. Cloud, Denver and the top 4 were: CC, Maine, Cornell, Minnesota, that would leave us with a guaranteed matchup against the MAAC or CHA team.

Greg - how do you figure that? If 2 of the top 4 are WCHA, and 2 of the bottom 4 are WCHA, wouldn't the top WCHA teams get non-WCHA bottom teams, leaving us with SCSU or DU? I'm confused....

Yep, of course you're right. Can't beat those 1 am posts.

But hey, it is deterministic! Just in the opposite fashion.

Excluding the MAAC game today, which I can't possibly see affecting stuff much, her are the new seeds after the UND loss, by my count:

West:
1. Minn
2. UNH
3. SCSU
4. CHA champ

Midwest:
1. CC
2. BC
3. Mich
4. MAAC champ

Northeast:
1. Cornell
2. BU
3. MSU-Mankato
4. UND

East:
1. Maine
2. Ferris
3. Prov
4. Denver

MSU-Man and SCSU are pretty much interchangeable, as are Denver-UND, though this lineup is closer to the 1-16, 2-15, etc ideal . I could also see them flipping us and Maine, but I'm hoping they'd let us be slightly closer to home, thereby avoiding the Providence region.

I saw that Dartmouth jumped Harvard in PWR. If Dartmouth wins out from this point on, but doesn't win the ECAC Championship, could they get an at-large bid?

North Dakota continues to fall....They lost to Minnesota-Duluth today.

They're actually tanking so they can face us in the first round...

Tanking or not, I don't think that's a team any top seed would be too happy to draw in the first round

That's a good question:

Would you rather play North Dakota in a first-round, neutral-site game, or Providence on the road?


ZD

The way NoDak's playing right now? No contest.

RedAR makes a good point. The way I see it, winning out (without a Conf Championship) has a pretty decent chance of getting Dartmouth into the tourney. They win a few comparisons against the other bubble teams. I think their chances are better than Harvard's, actually.

Both Dartmouth and Harvard are long shots though. I don't think either can get in without help from one of the bubble teams. Conference tourneys could provide this help, but it won't be easy.

Harvard screwed themselves by losing all five of their decent non-conf matchups. If they'd just won one or two they'd be solidly in the tourney right now. (At one point I think their loss to Northern Michigan was actually keeping them out...)

Dartmouth screwed themselves by being unable to win on the road.

Remember, a lot of those teams on the bubble have to play each other in the playoffs. Some of them will lose because someone has to. So, just the fact these games are played should provide the help the Big Green will need. If Dartmouth wins 3 games in the ECAC tourney, their non-conference wins set them up well in the PWR. And a game against Cornell would help their RPI quite a bit. Harvard is a much longer shot because they didn't win any of their key nc games.

Dartmouth's "good wins" over Cornell and BC would help them if they needed a small boost to get in. Harvard has nothing like those--and let's hope it stays that way.

Dartmouth's "good win" over Cornell doesn't count because it was against a conference opponent.

When you're fudging, you're fudging--and looking for reasons to do so.

True. I don't see any reason to expect that the Selection Committee will fudge things to help Dartmouth, though.

Who knows? Maybe they'll decide they really don't want the seventh place team from the ten-team WCHA in the tournament.

The games that cost Dartmouth the most - the loss to UVM at home which they had no business losing and the loss at UMass in the letdown game following the BC win.

I think the Vermont one had the potential to be the biggest one though, had Dartmouth not pulled a road sweep out of its ass and gotten the first round bye. That game was looking like it was going to be the difference between 4th and 5th. And were Dartmouth to have played the RPI-black hole known as Princeton 2 or 3 more times, there was no way in hell of getting an at-large berth.

Dartmouth needs to sweep the quarters against Union or Clarkson (2 most likely opponents), and they need to get a W over Harvard in the semis to avoid going 0-3 against the Crimson. At that point of course I'd like a W over Cornell in the finals, but if Dartmouth finished 21-12-1, I'd like to think they'd be very much on the bubble. And even if they came up an inch short, it'd still be the best season in roughly 25 years.