NCAA Hockey 101: Big Ten also-rans off to hot starts

Maybe it’s that the college hockey media is getting smarter. Maybe it’s that years of underperformance have engendered significant skepticism.

But whatever the reason, it’s a little weird that a big-name program in a quote-unquote power conference with an 8-1-4 record is only 13th in the national polls as the nation approaches Thanksgiving.

That team is the Ohio State Buckeyes, and they’re one of only three teams in the top 20 with just a single loss. The others are conference-mate Penn State (11-1-1) and Harvard (which, as usual got a late start on the season and is 5-1-1). None are higher than eighth in the polls.

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These two Big Ten schools are interesting insofar as they’re winning a hell of a lot of games and it’s tough to tell whether they’re actually all that good. It’s been a weird year in college hockey in general to this point, because the teams you’d think would do well are mostly doing well, but to varying extents that make them tough to figure out. In this space earlier this season, we’ve covered teams like North Dakota and Union, two teams that have won national titles in recent years, and how their performances so far make them tough to judge. That’s weirdly true of almost everyone in the top 15 or so.

So if the entire top quartile of college hockey is getting weird results early in the season, one has to wonder why people aren’t higher on Penn State and Ohio State, the latter in particular.

To start with the Buckeyes in particular, you have to acknowledge that they haven’t played the toughest of competition. Right now their strength of schedule is 33rd in the nation, but you have to say that they’ve won the few tough games on the schedule (a win at Denver being the highlight) and despite leading for pretty much all of their season, they have solidly positive attempts-for numbers; their 52.8 percent would likely be higher if score-adjusted.

Again, you would expect to control the puck when you’re playing Bowling Green, Niagara, Robert Morris, UConn, and RPI for the majority of your schedule, but it’s not like the Buckeyes have covered themselves in glory the past few years. Generally speaking, there’s no game they really “should” win if recent program history is any way of judging things.

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You have to say that no team is 8-1-4 good based on possession numbers alone, so more losses will be coming, but it’s probably going to happen sooner than you’d think. Their PDO at 5-on-5 is 106.3, and that’s a number that will come down sharply. They’re not going to shoot 12 percent all year, and they’re not going to maintain a .943 save percentage. Senior Matt Tomkins is getting the bulk of the time in goal, and he’s a career .897 goalie. Right now he’s 16 points above that number, a little better than the national average, which typically hovers in the .909-.911 range.

It might be some time before that regression happens, but it might not happen this year at all. That’s because there’s a huge imbalance between his 5-on-5 performance (.951) and his PK performance (.773). No Div. 1 goalie is going to be that bad on the PK all season, full stop. That number will come up, and with it so will the apparent quality of OSU’s trash kill, currently second-worst in the nation.

The good news is their schedule doesn’t get significantly harder, because they’re about to enter Big Ten play, and the Big Ten mostly remains pretty bad. But if the goalscoring starts going away — which it will — and Tomkins can’t keep up this performance, potential trouble is on the horizon.

The Buckeyes generate some of the highest shot totals in the nation, but give up a fair amount too (likely due to score effects). With this in mind, it’s tough to see the Buckeyes totally collapsing as games get closer; they’ll likely continue to control the run of play. But again, no one is “8-1-4” good over the course of an entire season. If you’re about a third of the way through your campaign with just one loss, you’re at least positioning yourself well, so even if they slow down a bit in terms of their percentages they should keep taking points from mediocre Big Ten teams, of which there are many.

One that’s not mediocre, though, seems to be Penn State, the relative newcomer to all this. The Nittany Lions have attempted more than 1,000 shots in all situations through just 13 games: an average of almost 81 a night. That’s a ridiculous number, and no one is even close to it nationally.

To be fair, Penn State — like all teams coached by Guy Gadowsky — is one of those “Shoot From Anywhere” teams corsi-haters love to complain about. They really do shoot from anywhere. But the big difference is that they’re not really going shot-for-shot with other teams any more. As the program has amassed more talent, it’s slowly gained more control over the tempo of the game, and used that to its advantage.

Penn State’s attempts-per-game number is 81 to lead the nation, but its attempts-allowed-per-game is just over 46, which is fifth-best in the country. At 5-on-5, they’re the only team left standing in the nation with a CF% of more than 60, but they’re at 63 percent.

So yes, Penn State is 11-1-1 against the 28th-toughest schedule in the nation. In their one loss, they outshot St. Lawrence 46-26. But they’ve also led for the vast majority of the games they’ve played, and if 63 percent is what they look like when they’re protecting a lead, what do they look like when they’re trailing?

Pretty much all their underlying numbers are right where you’d want them to be. They have a .916 overall save percentage, which is above-average but not stunningly high. They’re shooting 10 percent, but even if that drops closer to the national average of 9.1 percent or so, it doesn’t matter. They have the most goals in the country, and they’re allowing the ninth-fewest. Whatever.

Of these two teams, you would obviously expect Penn State to keep this up a lot more than you would Ohio State. But because neither has too many games outside the Big Ten for the rest of the year, it also wouldn’t be a surprise to see them keep up their performances for a while.

Far be it for me to praise big-money programs, but frankly these deserve more credit for this level of performance than they’ve gotten.

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. Denver (tied Miami twice)
2. Minnesota-Duluth (swept at Omaha)
3. Boston College (lost at Harvard)
4. Notre Dame (split with Lowell)
5. UMass Lowell (split at Notre Dame)
6. Quinnipiac (won at Cornell and Colgate)
7. Boston University (split a home-and-home with UConn)
8. Penn State (swept Arizona State)
9. Minnesota (split with Minnesota State)
10. Ohio State (swept at RPI)

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