Rick Comley

There were some swift reactions today to two incidents that everyone was talking about this weekend.

On the one hand, Denver reacted to coach George Gwozdecky’s on-ice tirade and subsequent ejection with a statement that said his behavior was not “condoned.” It took no further action. The WCHA then sent out a statement saying it endorsed the “serious tone” Denver took with its coach. “We appreciate the rapid response the University took in addressing the issue that occurred on January 24 and now consider this matter closed.”

In the other case, Michigan State — and the CCHA to some extent or another — suspended Corey Tropp and Andrew Conboy for the rest of the season for their malicious hit from behind and slash on Michigan’s Steve Kampfer near the end of Saturday’s game. That means 10 games, plus playoffs.

I’m not saying either one was right or wrong, but the difference is interesting.

Denver will get some criticism for not suspending Gwozdecky, the way North Dakota did when coach Dave Hakstol was caught on camera making an obscene gesture at officials. Hey, who hasn’t made obscene gestures at officials — especially the WCHA ones.

But what Gwozdecky did was not going to hurt anyone, so not by any means am I suggesting that what Gwozdecky did warrants a suspension like MSU’s. It’s just … interesting.

On the other hand, no one is really going to argue much with Comley’s decision to suspend his players. But taking a contrarian position — while not defending the play by any stretch — it is a very lengthy suspension when compared against other similar plays. Those things happen frequently, and it was just plain stupid. But as Comley said, it wasn’t pre-meditated. It doesn’t make it right — so please don’t anyone think I’m defending it … it just seems like a lot of games for something like that.

However, let’s say this: kudos to Rick Comley for showing yet again he is a man of integrity and of his word. He has always been quick to discipline his own players swiftly, and not deal kindly with “problem childs.”

I would say the MSU suspensi0ns are more about Comley sending a message to his own team, and keeping control, than it is about the “correct” punishment for the crime.

Which again, is fine. Neither way was right or wrong. It’s an inexact science.

Ironically, Gwozdecky has always been the type of coach similarly respected for doling out quick punishment to his players. He famously suspended Lukas Dora for the 2004 NCAA final, although that’s only the most well-known episode.

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Donovan McNabb may not have known that a football game could end in a tie, but at least there’s a legitimate reason for his ignorance. Is there anyone out there who honestly believes that a football game should be allowed to end in a tie?

When it comes to hockey, it seems that we are now being asked by the powers that be to believe that premise as well. The NHL has banished the tie for the last four seasons now, and this year the CCHA became the first league to refuse the concept that two teams could be evenly matched.

In the four major North American sports, hockey is really the only one in which ties can really be deemed acceptable. Basketball and football both feature different ways to score different multiples of points, meaning that ties can usually be broken pretty quickly in an overtime period. The NFL still allows ties to occur, but they’re pretty rare (and fixing that issue is a column for another time and another site). Baseball scores things one at a time, but there’s no clock, so teams can just play until there’s a winner. Sometimes it takes all night, but that’s the way the sport evolved.

Hockey has the combination of a clock and a one-at-a-time scoring scheme, which is the perfect combination to allow for teams to finish the game without determining a winner and loser. As we’ve seen during the playoffs, simply continuing until finding a winning goal can sometimes take forever. That’s why the NHL and the CCHA have resorted to shootouts in their quest to abolish the tie – it ends the game faster than more regulation play.

But why this crusade against the tie? I have heard it said that fans simply don’t like ties, that people expect a winner to come out of every game. I have also heard it said that the leagues want to discourage teams from playing tentative hockey in overtime to avoid losing a guaranteed point in search of a second one (which brought us the silly “overtime loss” category in the NHL). The latter has at least some merit to it, but the former seems pretty ridiculous.

Is a tie the most satisfying result possible? Of course not. Both teams go home with less than they could have. Neither gets the satisfaction of a win, but neither takes the sting of a loss. And yet, at the same time, a tie can be a satisfying or a highly disappointing result. The underdog team that comes in and fights tooth and nail with the powerhouse and earns a tie can walk away with a sense of accomplishment. The team that was down 3-0 during the second intermission and comes back to tie can engender the same feeling. The “satisfying tie.” The reverse – the powerhouse that ties an underdog and the team that blows the big lead – the “disappointing tie.” And then, of course, you have the “sister kissers,” those games that are just evenly matched throughout.

Want to encourage the teams to go all out during the overtime period? Set up a points system that rewards wins more and provides an opportunity cost for a tie. Major League Soccer, along with most international soccer leagues, does just that already. A win is worth three points, and a tie is worth one. If you sit back and wait for the tie, you lose a chance at two additional points, but if you push for the win and give up the goal, you’ve only lost one.

Instead, the NHL decided to create a system that rewards the losing team in overtime with a point – the only major sport where you can lose the game and still advance your cause.

Now, all of this would be relatively moot if the shootout were an acceptable derivation of the game as a whole so as to be a worthy substitute, but the idea of one shooter taking on one goaltender is such a microcosm of the game of hockey as to render it generally unacceptable for determining the winner of a team sport.

Penalty shots are exciting when they take place during the course of the game, and often times their success or failure does determine the outcome of the game. Shootouts take far too many important elements out of consideration when determining a winner – passing, physical play, and team defense are rendered completely useless.

Then there’s the smell test. If shootouts were truly an acceptable method for determining a winner of a hockey game, there’s no reason they wouldn’t use them in the playoffs as well. Since there really can’t be ties in the post-season, why waste everyone’s time by playing long into the night to find a winner?

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just too much of a traditionalist and I need to just embrace the shootout – after all, it’s becoming more and more popular in various leagues.

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This week is the first of two weeks for the holiday tournaments in college hockey. Five holiday tournaments will happen this week, with three of them starting today.

Let’s take a closer look at the three tournaments, beginning with the first one the Great Lakes Invitational, that starts in a few hours.

GLI:

The Teams: Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan Tech, North Dakota.

The games today: Michigan vs. Michigan Tech (3:05 ET), Michigan State vs. North Dakota (6:35 ET)

Outlook: Both Michigan and North Dakota are red hot. Michigan’s last loss came against Wisconsin on November 29. That same day North Dakota’s last loss happened against Cornell. These are unquestionably the two strongest teams in the field. Michigan State is on one of its worst losing skids in recent memory, while Michigan Tech is coming off a sweep of Northern Michigan. Expect a Michigan-North Dakota final, which could mean a lot of implications in March.

The Badger Classic:

The Teams: Wisconsin, Lake Superior, Harvard, Alabama-Huntsville

Games Today: Lake Superior vs. Harvard (4:07 CT), Wisconsin vs. Alabama-Huntsville (7:07 ET)

Outlook: Since their 0-6-1 start, the Wisconsin Badgers have been red hot, going 9-1-1 in the last two months. Wisconsin should take this. The Harvard vs. Lake Superior game should be interesting as both teams are looking for answers.

Florida College Classic:

The Teams: Colgate, Cornell, Maine, St. Cloud State

Games Today: Colgate vs. Maine (4:05 ET), St. Cloud State vs. Cornell (7:35 ET)

Outlook: This is the most interesting tournament this week. Maine has surpassed expectations up to this point, Colgate will look to gain some momentum as well as St. Cloud State, and Cornell is doing quite well also. Cornell and St. Cloud State should be a great first round game as the matchup features a great offensive attack in St. Cloud State and a potent defensive scheme with Cornell. The Sunshine State could be seeing great hockey after all this weekend.

Other Tournaments:

Ledyard Bank Tournament (Dartmouth, Bemidji State, Army, Massachusetts)

UConn Holiday Classic (Connecticut, Air Force, Quinnipiac, Merrimack)

Tournament Final Predictions:

GLI: North Dakota over Michigan

The Badger Classic: Wisconsin over Harvard

Florida College Classic: Cornell over Maine

UConn Holiday Classic: Air Force over Quinnipiac

Ledyard Bank Invitational: Massachusetts over Dartmouth

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Yes, I have broadcasted 128 Minnesota-Duluth men’s hockey games.

Yes, I am continuing to support the program as a season-ticket holder.

Yes, I despise the Minnesota Gophers with every fiber of my being.

However, I am not an idiot. My respect for Don Lucia’s work as a college hockey coach is as high as it gets. Evidence can be found here and here.

The fact that he is a great coach and a wonderful ambassador for the sport doesn’t change the fact that he is capable of being dead wrong.

Evidence of that can be found here.

“I have never discouraged or encouraged [playing football], but that may change now in light of what happened to Zach (Budish, Gopher hockey recruit who suffered a torn ACL playing football) and what happened to Garrett, too,” said Lucia, who also watched recruit Garrett Smaagaard of Eden Prairie miss his senior year of hockey after tearing his ACL in the 2000 Prep Bowl.

Budish’s injury and Lucia’s stance underscore a growing conflict between the two sports. Overlapping schedules, competition for varsity spots and the growing trend of specialization have the relationship between football and hockey, as Hill-Murray activities director and hockey coach Bill Lechner said, “at an uncertain point.”

Kim Nelson of Edina and Vince Conway of Hill-Murray, who coach football at schools where hockey is king, worry that Budish’s injury might make hockey players — particularly elite-level players — reconsider playing football.

Their concerns have merit. Just weeks after Budish’s injury, Lucia received a verbal commitment from an athlete who played both football and hockey.

“We had a talk,” Lucia said. “I said, ‘It’s time to be a hockey player, not a football player.’ He agreed and he’s not going to play football next year.”

I’m all for coaches advising their recruits. I’m not all for coaches telling their recruits not to play football. High school is a time for enjoyment, a time for hanging out with friends, and a not a time to be specializing in one sport over anything else.

To me, coaches who try to steer their recruits to a single sport are afraid. They’re afraid that the kid will start to like a different sport and want to play that instead.

Such fears didn’t overcome anyone in the Minnesota-Duluth program after Matt Niskanen committed there in 2004. Niskanen was a three-sport athlete in high school, playing hockey for the co-op Virginia/Mountain Iron-Buhl program, and playing football and baseball for Mountain Iron-Buhl. He continued to play football and baseball in his senior year, and was a top-notch player in all three sports.

Listen, I’m not trying to hold up Niskanen as some sort of evidence to a greater rule. And I’m not trying to make Scott Sandelin out to be automatically smarter or a better coach than Lucia because he didn’t try to keep Niskanen from playing those sports in his senior year.

But if you ask Niskanen, and I have, the fact that he played all three sports made him a better hockey player and a better person. And you can’t argue with the outcome in either realm. Not only is he one of the better young defensemen in the NHL, but he’s also one of the nicest people you could ever meet, and he truly hasn’t forgotten his roots.

And Lucia is not alone. Around the country, there are coaches trying to dissuade their kids from playing other sports as they grow older. For every Don Lucia, there is a college football coach practically begging his recruits to stop playing hockey or basketball or baseball. And there are high school coaches who go so far as to demand their star players not play any other sport.

These things happen. And they need to stop.

We can’t be in such a hurry to get kids through the developmental stages of sports that we don’t allow them to be kids. Yes, there will be kids like Aaron Ness, a Gophers freshman defenseman who accelerated his high-school education so he could graduate and join the Minnesota program as quickly as possible. But Ness didn’t do that because Lucia told him to. He did it because he wanted to.

And that’s how this should be done. Not with pressure, threats, or even subtle requests from college coaches. If a high-school kid wants to play three sports and star in all three, that should be his decision and no one else’s.

Yes, there is risk.

But there’s also risk in letting that same kid drive to school every day. You don’t see coaches banning their players from driving, do you?

Silly? Absolutely. So is a hockey coach worrying about a potential star recruit getting hurt while playing football, or any other sport.

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I’ve always been pleased as punch with the fact that the NCAA doesn’t incorporate polls into the selection process for the NCAA Hockey Tournament.

Of course, it means that the polls are nothing but discussion fodder. But that’s a good thing. Polls should never be more than that. The opinions of human beings should mean nothing when you’re determining who the best hockey teams are. Same goes for football, basketball, baseball, tennis, volleyball, bowling, and any other sport.

We have tournaments and postseasons so we can decide these types of important things on the field of play.

This week, college hockey pollsters are faced with an interesting, difficult, and nearly-impossible dynamic when it comes to WCHA teams (and others, mind you, but I’m going to focus for a moment on the WCHA).

Minnesota State is now 8-5-3. They have impressive wins over Colorado College and North Dakota, but lost twice over the weekend to St. Cloud State, and they also have a loss and a tie against Minnesota.

St. Cloud State sits at 10-6, just swept MSU, but has lost twice to Minnesota-Duluth by matching 5-1 scores.

UMD is unbeaten in their last five. The Bulldogs, now 7-4-5 on the season, chased Colorado College star goalie Richard Bachman with a five-goal second period explosion Saturday. The 7-4 win follows a three-point weekend against North Dakota and a second four-goal win over St. Cloud State.

Who gets ranked where?

Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. These three teams settle their differences and decide their rankings with their play on the ice. In January, various sites will start to publish their guesses on what the PWR looks like. CHN has already started publishing the KRACH ratings (waiting until everyone has lost one game).

The only day the PWR matters is on Selection Sunday, but it’s always interesting to watch the ebb and flow over the course of the season’s second half. While there are always quirks with logic involved, they aren’t nearly as bad as the quirks with logic that are involved in the polls.

Of course, it’s always easier to except the quirks when you realize the polls don’t matter one lick. It’s nothing but blog and message board fodder to keep us interested until another full slate of games on Friday night.

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I don’t think he ever had much chance to win — probably very little — but at least someone at Sports Illustrated sought to nominate someone from the College Hockey ranks as Sportsman of the Year. The someone who did the nominating is Kevin Armstrong, and the someone that was nominated is Boston College coach Jerry York.

York, of course, led the Eagles to their third national title last April, and it was York’s third title as a head coach, giving him more than any other active D-I coach. The nomination also cited how York overcame prostate cancer in 2005.

The winner of the honor was, of course, Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won more gold medals in one Olympics than anyone ever, this year in Beijing.

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The NCAA is once again talking about restricting travel during the NCAA tournament of most sports, thanks to concerns over the economy. The last time it did this was in the aftermath of 9/11, forcing the hockey tournament to take travel into consideration in ways that caused unbalanced brackets. While seemingly with pure intent, the restrictions really did nothing to limit travel as a whole, and instead just messed with the brackets unnecessarily, and the whole thing was scrapped the next year.

This time around, it’s because of the economy and not terrorism concerns. But again, the hockey community is hoping to convince the NCAA it’s unneccessary. So reports that this will affect hockey are a bit premature. It’s only gone past one phase of NCAA legislation and still needs to be approved at the January convention. Before then, hockey commissioners are hoping to do some lobbying, and I have high hopes they will be successful.

The hockey tournament makes money, unlike many of the other NCAA sports, so it has that on its side. And with only 16 teams in it, it leaves very little wiggle room when creating brackets. This risks some really unbalanced brackets, something hockey doesn’t want since it’s been so religious about sticking to a Pairwise-strict bracket integrity even since going to the 16-team field in 2003.

So breathe easy for now, and hope the lobbyists can make some headway.

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Apparently, last year, the CCHA athletic directors made a command decision to have schools remove Dates of Birth from their rosters. This decision slipped under the radar, mainly because the information could still be gleaned from other sources.

But this year, other leagues have unofficially followed suit. And consequently, the official sites that track statistics, have also followed suit — specifically collegehockeystats.net, which is our official source for rosters and statistics. In fact, even team sites have purged this information from their pages, in many cases including the individual player profile pages.

As a result, many of our rosters do not have complete information this year. And it has effected our listing of “oldest teams” and “youngest teams,” and the average age comparison on our matchup page. We’re looking into solutions, but if nothing good comes along, we may have to succumb to the trend, and just live with ages only, not exact birth dates.

By the way, the explanation I’ve heard is that there’s privacy concerns. OK.

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As Denver Post writer Mike Chambers pointed out in his blog post after last night’s 4-3 win by Ohio State over the Pioneers, Denver coach George Gwozdecky got very upset when J.P. Testwuide was forced to stay on the ice despite an injury. That’s because the new rule in college hockey this year states that a team can’t replace the players on the ice after an icing call. The rule, as the NHL implemented a couple of years ago, is supposed to further penalize a team for icing the puck.

But the NHL rule, as you can see here, makes an exception for injuries:

81.4 Line Change on Icing – A team that is in violation of this rule shall not be permitted to make any player substitutions prior to the ensuing face-off.  … However, a team shall be permitted to make a player substitution to replace a goalkeeper who had been substituted for an extra attacker, to replace an injured player or goalkeeper, or when a penalty has been assessed which affects the on-ice strength of either team. The determination of players on ice will be made when the puck leaves the offending player’s stick.

The college hockey rule doesn’t appear to include that language. This seems like something that needs clarification. But as far as I can find, the college hockey rule book did not add language on injuries. If so, that’s a bad oversight.

Other observations from the weekend: Did you see where Alabama-Huntsville defeated Tennessee 13-0 in an exhibition game. The shots were 64-8. Yeah, Tennessee — a club team, obviously, since the Volunteers are not playing varsity hockey. Why did UAH bother playing this game? They may as well have played the Delaware Valley Midget team from down the road. It would sure be great if Tennessee had varsity hockey … but I don’t see this as being a stepping stone to that.

Of course, as one astute observer pointed out — and, it’s funny, but he wasn’t kidding — this game will draw more in Huntsville than a game against Colorado College. … Also, it seems UAH lost to Tennessee when it kicked off its program in 1979. So this was revenge. Ha.

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You may remember former Maine goaltender Ben Bishop, who led the Black Bears to back-to-back Frozen Fours in 2006 and 2007.

Well, thanks to — of all people — vice-presidental candidate Sarah Palin, Bishop made his NHL debut on Friday night, playing for his hometown St. Louis Blues against the Los Angeles Kings. What did the Alaska governor have to do with all this?

Well, regular Blues starting netminder Manny Legace suffered a hip injury after slipping on a red carpet on the ice, which was in place for Palin to drop the ceremonial first puck. No word as to whether this will affect Bishop’s (or Legace’s) vote in a couple of weeks.

Two other observations around college hockey from Friday night:

— The CCHA has only had 10 league games so far, but 6 out of its 12 teams have already experienced a game-deciding shootout — a feature that the league introduced to settle ties this season. On Friday, Western Michigan earned an extra point against Ferris State, while Michigan State earned an extra point against Northern Michigan.

— After somewhat impressively playing two close games at Colorado College two weeks ago, Alabama-Huntsville was back on the ice… for a 13-0 drubbing of Tennessee in an exhibition game. Some fun facts: the Chargers outshot the Volunteers 66-8, including 24-0 in the third period. 15 of the 18 skaters for UAH recorded at least one point, with 9 different players scoring at least one goal. Obviously there was a significant talent gap.

But a little research finds the possible real reason for the Chargers running up the score: way back in 1979, UAH lost its very first home game… to Tennessee.

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