NCHC announces playoff format for 2025 Frozen Faceoff
Aug. 23—GRAND FORKS — The National Collegiate Hockey Conference will be a nine-team league in a year when Arizona State joins.
Every team will still make the league's annual playoff.
The NCHC announced Wednesday the format it will use for the 2024-25 postseason.
The big change is a play-in game between the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds on Wednesday, March 12, 2025. It will occur at the site of the No. 1 seed. The winner of the play-in game will advance to a best-of-three quarterfinal series beginning two days later.
The NCHC Frozen Faceoff will feature the four quarterfinal winners — as it does now — on March 21-22, 2025, in St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center.
The winner of the tournament receives an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
"I had a call with the head coaches a couple weeks ago," NCHC commissioner Heather Weems said. "We recognize the parity in our league 1-9. In any given year, any of our programs could have a run, depending on injuries. It was important to our coaches and programs that, even while expanding to nine teams, that each would have an opportunity for postseason play or have an opportunity to get an automatic qualifier given the depth in our league."
Last season, No. 7 seed Colorado College made a run to the NCHC title game and nearly snuck into the NCAA tournament with an automatic bid.
"That (scenario) came up," Weems said. "Early in the season, you see ups and downs. But in a lot of cases, teams will get on streaks or have some young kids step up in the last part of the season. Coaches really felt — and athletic directors supported them — that as part of the expansion, at least initially, all of our teams should have an opportunity to play on."
Arizona State coach Greg Powers has been vocal about the importance of having that opportunity.
As an independent, there have been years where Arizona State fell out of the mix in the Pairwise Rankings in early February with no shot at the NCAA tournament via an automatic qualifier. Those Sun Devils teams fell apart with little to play for.
"We wanted to make sure, in a changing world with the transfer portal, players feel bought in and have an opportunity all the way to the end of the season," Weems said.
The NCHC's three-year contract with the Xcel Energy Center ends in 2025, opening the door for another change to the league's playoff format in 2025-26.
The NCHC Frozen Faceoff has been held at three different locations.
The first four events in league history — 2014-17 — were held at the Target Center in Minneapolis. The event was moved to the Xcel Energy Center in 2018.
In 2021, the tournament was played in Grand Forks' Ralph Engelstad Arena because of the COVID-19 pandemic. UND, the No. 1 seed that year, won the tournament. That marks the only Frozen Faceoff title for the Fighting Hawks. UND has won the regular-season title five times in 10 years.
