Polls and NPI 2026

[stereax]

How about we simply do not lose bad games? I think that will do wonders.

We'll almost certainlty lose at least one bad game.  ALMOST everybody does.

For sure, realism is absolutely a thing and it's way more likely than not we cough up an extra game or two. On paper, though, the biggest "trap" games on the docket are Princeton and Clarkson. Besides the Q game, we can absolutely sweep the rest of the regular season.

You're not implying that we can't sweep including Q, are you?

We can absolutely win Q. I would like to. But they match us well and it's not the game I would bet on us to win 😅

[stereax]

Speaking of NPI, Harvard winning bronze bumped us from 56.11 to 56.17 in the NPI, I'm pretty sure.

[marty]

Speaking of NPI, Harvard winning bronze bumped us from 56.11 to 56.17 in the NPI, I'm pretty sure.

Also bumped Dartmouth .06   -  Q hasn't played them twice so they got a smaller increase.

[stereax]

Speaking of NPI, Harvard winning bronze bumped us from 56.11 to 56.17 in the NPI, I'm pretty sure.

Also bumped Dartmouth .06   -  Q hasn't played them twice so they got a smaller increase.

BU on track to lose this. That would drop us to 56.14. If BU manages to come back and win this, we go up to 56.19. It's all so marginal.

[Trotsky]

Just gotta play them one game at a time.

And the good lord willing...

[BearLover]

Speaking of NPI, Harvard winning bronze bumped us from 56.11 to 56.17 in the NPI, I'm pretty sure.

Also bumped Dartmouth .06   -  Q hasn't played them twice so they got a smaller increase.

BU on track to lose this. That would drop us to 56.14. If BU manages to come back and win this, we go up to 56.19. It's all so marginal.

Just for completeness, since I said this in the other thread—the important thing here was BC losing which would hurt their NPI, more so than BU winning (barely) helping ours.

[Jeff Hopkins '82]

Just gotta play them one game at a time.

And the good lord willing...

Write it down!

[Trotsky]

They're your friends.

[Trotsky]

Weekend damage: we fall to 10th in NPI.  Survivable if we don't make a habit of it.

Frankly I thought going L / T / L against three bad teams would hurt us more.

[BearLover]

Weekend damage: we fall to 10th in NPI.  Survivable if we don't make a habit of it.

Frankly I thought going L / T / L against three bad teams would hurt us more.

Notably we basically went T/T/L since the NPI treats an OT loss as 40% of a win, which is much closer to a tie than a loss.

One of the issues with college hockey counting OT results differently from regulation results is that we don't have the right verbiage for these results. While most sources such as the Sun and CHN treat an OT loss as a "loss" (eg. references to our record treat it as a loss), I think it's a lot more accurate to treat it as a tie. More accurate from an NPI perspective and also for judging the team, given 3x3 OT is not representative.

Basically, if a game goes to OT, it should be referred to as a tie, unless you want to be granular and differentiate OT wins/losses from regulation wins/losses. But doing this differentiating is cumbersome and most sources don't bother.

[ugarte]

Weekend damage: we fall to 10th in NPI.  Survivable if we don't make a habit of it.

Frankly I thought going L / T / L against three bad teams would hurt us more.

feels like it didn't hurt us a lot in the standings but did hurt us in the way that you see a fading luger's split times and hope that there's enough track left for course correction on the bottom turns if that analogy is relevant to your february 2026 viewing experience

[Snowball]

Weekend damage: we fall to 10th in NPI.  Survivable if we don't make a habit of it.

Frankly I thought going L / T / L against three bad teams would hurt us more.

feels like it didn't hurt us a lot in the standings but did hurt us in the way that you see a fading luger's split times and hope that there's enough track left for course correction on the bottom turns if that analogy is relevant to your february 2026 viewing experience

Agree, we are not in Mikaela Shiffrin or Ilia Malinin territory.

[BearLover]

It feels silly to talk about any of this given that our own play is by far the biggest determinant of whether we make the NCAAs, and we played like garbage this weekend. But, looking at the NPI now, there's a huge gap between Wisconsin at 15th and Mankato at 16th. Meanwhile, 10 (us) through 15 are bunched closer together than the difference between 15 and 16. If you assume 10-15 are the bubble teams, then we have to beat out X of these other five teams, where X is the number of teams outside the top 15 who get an automatic bid minus 1.

For example, if the Atlantic Hockey winner is the only autobid outside the top 15, then we don't have to finish better than any of these five teams. If Atlantic Hockey and the CCHA both get an automatic-bid, then we have to beat one of these five teams. Etc.

From that perspective, this is very doable.

[stereax]

It feels silly to talk about any of this given that our own play is by far the biggest determinant of whether we make the NCAAs, and we played like garbage this weekend. But, looking at the NPI now, there's a huge gap between Wisconsin at 15th and Mankato at 16th. Meanwhile, 10 (us) through 15 are bunched closer together than the difference between 15 and 16. If you assume 10-15 are the bubble teams, then we have to beat out X of these other five teams, where X is the number of teams outside the top 15 who get an automatic bid minus 1.

For example, if the Atlantic Hockey winner is the only autobid outside the top 15, then we don't have to finish better than any of these five teams. If Atlantic Hockey and the CCHA both get an automatic-bid, then we have to beat one of these five teams. Etc.

From that perspective, this is very doable.

It would be deeply surprising if NCHC or B1G's autobids aren't a top 16 team. Atlantic obviously will not be. CCHA, I'd wager wouldn't be - only St Thomas is still in the top 16, and Augustana, Mich Tech, and Bowling Green are clumped in 17-19. That being said, whoever wins the CCHA might climb the NPI anyways, so who knows. Hockey East is a massive tossup, and it truly wouldn't surprise me if a Maine, a BU, an NEU, or a Merrimack made a surprise championship run. Really, anyone in that hellhole could do it. ECAC should be one of us, Q, or D, but it's also a tossup given D hasn't been great either recently and Q chokes like it's going out of style. So doing that math, - 10+ is automatically in no matter what. 11-12 is almost assuredly safe. 13-14 is the worry zone, 15 or down and we're probably out.

If we can pull off a win against Q next week, that will be HUGE. Otherwise, we just have to stay the course, not cough up (m)any more easy points, and pray on a bunch of teams' downfalls. Ideally make a deep ECAC run anyway. None of this autobid business even matters if we win at Placid, but it'd be nice to have that security going up there.

[adamw]

Weekend damage: we fall to 10th in NPI.  Survivable if we don't make a habit of it.

Frankly I thought going L / T / L against three bad teams would hurt us more.

Notably we basically went T/T/L since the NPI treats an OT loss as 40% of a win, which is much closer to a tie than a loss.

One of the issues with college hockey counting OT results differently from regulation results is that we don't have the right verbiage for these results. While most sources such as the Sun and CHN treat an OT loss as a "loss" (eg. references to our record treat it as a loss), I think it's a lot more accurate to treat it as a tie. More accurate from an NPI perspective and also for judging the team, given 3x3 OT is not representative.

Basically, if a game goes to OT, it should be referred to as a tie, unless you want to be granular and differentiate OT wins/losses from regulation wins/losses. But doing this differentiating is cumbersome and most sources don't bother.

You're right - it's a pain in the ass. But we have to treat it like a loss, because that's what goes in the team's official record, and coach's record, for example.

There are numerous places on the site where we separate out these things into distinct columns or put OT records in parentheticals.