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NCAA Hockey 101: Boyle has Lowell leading Hockey East, but will it last?

UMass Lowell

UMass Lowell is off to the best start in the program's history, boasting a 9-1-3 record and sitting atop Hockey East with 13 points from eight league games (5-0-3).

Everything seems to be going pretty well for them, too, all things considered. They're scoring 2.77 goals per game, a number they'd like to see come up, but it doesn't much matter right now, because they're allowing just 1.31. Nine wins before Thanksgiving gets them a pretty healthy portion of the way toward the 21 they racked up all of last year, a season in which they ended up missing the NCAA tournament by a win (mathematically, if any one of the River Hawks' ties or losses had been a win, they'd have made the cut).

This weekend they took three points at home from a fairly impressive Notre Dame team, but the big issue some people have with their conference lead right now seems to be that all but a few teams behind them have games in hand. More important, two of those teams are Providence (2-0-2) and Boston College (4-0). As you can see, both of them are undefeated and have a whopping four games in hand on Lowell, but even if they swept their results in those games — which is obviously a big ask — they'd finish eight games with one and three more points than the River Hawks, respectively. This is the clear top-three in Hockey East, and everyone else is fighting for scraps.

I've written before about how Providence's start (now 8-0-3) was something of a surprise given its offseason losses, and BC obviously has an astonishingly strong defense and power offense (with a goal differential of plus-35 in only 11 games, and only one loss on the record). But Lowell was more of a known quantity coming into the year. Their only losses were a solid No. 1 college defenseman, a depth defenseman, and a No. 12/13 forward. Everyone else was back from a team that went to the Hockey East title game for the third year in a row.

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Now, with Lowell giving up just 1.31 goals a night, obviously the goaltending is going to be a big part of it. And indeed, Kevin Boyle has been phenomenal in net, playing every second for the River Hawks save for the 1:27 he was pulled in the only game Lowell lost this year (at Minnesota-Duluth). He has a big, big .956 save percentage, and while Lowell hasn't exactly played the iron of college hockey yet this season, the impressive weekend against Notre Dame — in which he allowed just three goals on 61 shots — is basically right in line with what he's done all year. His three shutouts already match his total from last season, and are triple what he produced in the previous two years of his career. He has been, in a word, titanous.

But here's the thing, for both his solo performance and what Lowell is doing this season: He's never really approached being this good before, or really anything even resembling this good. Not for more than a month here and there. To be fair to Boyle, he transferred to Lowell after an ugly two seasons for a UMass Amherst team totally bereft of any defensive system. He was, actually, cut from that team after suffering a few concussions (which is in itself gross from his old program) and came to Lowell as something of an unknown quantity.

Now normally, you'd say a guy with a career .890-something save percentage is very much a known quantity: It is known he is bad. But again, concussions and playing behind a clueless defense (UMass has finished bottom-three in the conference in goals allowed every year since 2009-10) are going to make you look worse than you are. Moreover, Lowell's ultra-efficient systems effectively limit opponent shot quality to the point that previously bad goalies like Doug Carr end up looking well above average, and well above average goalies like Connor Hellebuyck post career save percentages of .946.

Boyle was a little below league average last season at .915, which is nonetheless a major improvement from his play at UMass and was, you'll recall, still good enough to win Lowell 21 games (well, that and shooting 11.5 percent for the season). Such is the power of Norm Bazin's defensive systems, which stress collapsing defense and clearing rebounds with a near-religious fervor.

But the problem in going from Hellebuyck — who turned in the best two-season performance of any goalie in college hockey history — and Boyle isn't just one of quality, it's one of style. Hellebuyck was square to everything and didn't allow many rebounds at all. Boyle was a bit more freelance in his approach last season and rebounds were a problem. The Lowell defense, therefore, had to get to everything and clear it quickly if it didn't want to concede, but wasn't always prepared to do so. This season, Boyle has improved his own play and given up far fewer rebounds, but also the team seems to have tweaked things to give him a bit more help this time around. The results are immediately apparent.

“I think I’m seeing the puck pretty well,” Boyle said after a tie with Merrimack in late October. “Obviously the team in front of me is doing well keeping things to the outside, and allowing me to see the puck.”

After Saturday's 3-1 win over Notre Dame, he also said: “My job is to stop the first one, and if there’s a rebound they’re doing a great job of clearing it out.”

And that's the difference. Lowell has adjusted to what Boyle does, and the results are very much going their way as a consequence. However, one has to wonder if Lowell can keep it up (though there's no reason to think they'd suddenly stop), and obviously Boyle won't go .950 for the entire season, because no one can for 30-plus games. Bazin, meanwhile, can't stop raving about how much he believes Boyle's “maturity” has helped him get to this point.

(Another thing to keep an eye on that could lead to a brief River Hawks collapse: This weekend's upcoming Friendship Four in Belfast. Lowell, Northeastern, Colgate, and Brown are all trekking across the Atlantic to play a tournament, and as we've seen in the NHL, going to Europe and then coming back makes it really hard to win games. Fortunately for Lowell, they only have to play UConn the following Saturday and Sunday, then they head into break, so the effects shouldn't be too disastrous.)

Even if Boyle regresses hard for a month, as he did around last January and February (see above chart), the number of league points and wins Lowell is banking these days should be enough to get them where they want to be: Back in the conversation with the other top teams in the country.

Boyle is basically the biggest reason why.

North Dakota splits in first games under new nickname

Friday night was the first time ever that North Dakota took the ice without a racist nickname.

Now dubbed the “Fighting Hawks” — which is a boring nickname that really needed a little more time in the oven, but still a major improvement over the old one, which was racist — they went up to St. Cloud and won 4-3. Sure, fans kept chanting the old name, because they're racists and you gotta be stubborn to be racist.

At least the players were on-message, saying the nickname doesn't change how they play and the program's history, and so on. So that's good.

The next night, the Fighting Hawks got smoked 6-1, but y'know. Good to get that first one.

A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)

1. Quinnipiac (beat UConn, tied Clarkson, tied St. Lawrence)

2. Providence College (swept Northeastern in a home-and-home)

3. Boston College (won at UNH)

4. UMass Lowell (took three points from Notre Dame)

5. North Dakota (split at St. Cloud)

6. Denver (took three points at Wisconsin)

7. Nebraska Omaha (took three points at Miami)

8. St. Cloud (split with North Dakota)

9. Yale (tied Cornell, beat Colgate)

10. Harvard (idle)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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