As many insiders and Yale hockey lovers know, legendary coach Tim Taylor is suffering these days. In what many fear might be his final hockey act, he helped lead Team USA World Juniors to the Gold Medal in January in his role as director of Player Presonnell, the second time in 5 years he has captured WJC gold. He is currently listed in the same role for Sweden 2014. He could use everyone's thoughts and prayers that he returns to the rink in that familiar back corner, studying players and team trends. Yale assistant coach Dan Muse was his scouting partner in Ufa, Russia; they were inseparable. Coach Taylor was the last on the ice to join his American mates on the victorious blue line in Russia to sing the Star Spangled Banner. You should be able to see and hear Tim at the :30 second mark of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPdcS1o_yzk
You know how teams who have tilted the ice in their favor in late games and OT (i.e. Yale vs Lowell) sometimes get burned on the odd chance given up in their own end on a cold goalie? Yale avoided that @ 2 minutes before captain Andrew Miller cashed in. Two Grade-A chances by Lowell were thwarted before they reached fruition: 1) Malcolm anticipated a pass from the side of the net and deflected it safely away; and 2) intense back checking by Yale broke up a pass to a Lowell sniper at the bottom of the circle. Alert kids, well-coached kids. Might have to credit Coach Allain for that.
The Elis were at rock bottom when they busted out of Atlantic City with no goals scored in two forgettable games in march, blowing off the mandatory press conference. EVERYONE thought their season was done. Somehow in 6 days Allain had them prepped, pumped and believing for their Indiana Jones-like run through the NCAA west regional. Most coaches would have lost their kids after that ugly spell in A.C. This was reminiscent of the Allain effect when he was coaching Team USA at the 2011 Buffalo World Juniors. The Yanks had just been demolished by Canada 5-1 in the semis in a game that was not that close. Two days later they were scheduled to face a brilliant Sweden club in the consolation. Consensus in the press box was that USA would merely go through the motions after their miserable performance on the big stage. Yet Team USA got off the mat and beat what was arguably the best team in the tourney to salvage a medal. Allain comes across as brusque, and occasionally haughty to the working press, and has never let a TV crew anywhere near the sanctity of his team's locker room, but he has never lost the ear of any of his teams. This year's Yale squad is the shining example. His victory leap off the Yale bench after their thrilling overtime victory Thursday was one for the ages. Most astute Yale hockey observers have yet to see him smile, let alone launch himself.
Highlights of The Allain "Launch" 6:18 into this video
The 2012-13 college hockey season prior to the NCAA tournament allowed those who followed it to get a feel for who were the contenders and who were the pretenders. Hockey East and the WCHA played the game at a quicker pace and with greater skill than the rest of the Division I teams. Late in the year top-ranked Qunnipiac looked like just another team, except with garish gold jerseys. Yale, who stumbled repeatedly down the stretch, looked like absolute fodder when they were sent out west to face the vaunted Minnesota Golden Gophers in the NCAA first round. The Elis hadn't scored in nearly 7 periods, and after being humiliated in their own conference tourney they skulked out of Atlantic City under the cover of darkness without addressing the media. Going into the NCAA's it was a foregone conclusion that they were essentially dead men skating.
The sentiment out west was that only Boston College could threaten the vastly superior WCHA, which sent an unheard of SIX teams into the 16 team bracket. This extremely clever video captures their regional fever.
And then the tournament began. The top ranked Gophers were out before the majority of teams even laced up their skates. Yale did the unfathomable, defeating WCHA legendary powerhouses Minnesota and North Dakota within 26 hours. Impossible, except in the NCAA hockey tourney, it's simply business as usual. Ponder the recent journey of ECAC Hockey regular season champs Quinnipiac.
On March 22, the Bobcats are victims of a 4-0 beatdown in their own tournament semifinals by Brown, the 9th ranked team in ECAC Hockey. Fans who had made the trip from Hamden down to Atlantic City were furious, hurling insults and spewing inebriated venom at their own team as they made the long walk to the ice for the third period. In response assistant coaches raised voices, players raised sticks, and a potentially ugly incident was narrowly avoided. Following the game Q head coach Rand Pecknold humbly described how his club played horribly, conceded that they have been struggling for over a month and frankly admitted that they are clearly not the #1 team in the country. The next day they stave off Yale in their consolation game, and a day later the entire club is lounging back in Connecticut with ESPN's Steve Levy, crowing about being the top seed in the NCAA's on the nationally televised hockey selection show. Their reality check from two days ago is conveniently ignored.
The next Friday Quinnipiac is in serious trouble in their NCAA opener against Canisius, an anonymous school with a .500 record from an anonymous conference, trailing 3-1 midway through the final period. There were plenty of college hockey purists not the least bit surprised. The Bobcats had impressed no one down the stretch. But they scored on a splendid effort by Matthew Peca (remember that name) and came to life, eking out the regional semifinal victory 4-3 in regulation. The game winner came from 4th line left wing Kevin Bui, his second heroic game winner in his last four games. His two post-season snipes match his regular season goals, for a total of four. Bui is a senior who was cut his sophomore year and missed an entire year of hockey. Hey, things get strange this time of year.
The next night Quinnipiac faces Union College, a tiny little school in Schenectady that is the insiders' favorite to win the regional in Providence. But Union were kept in the building well past midnight in their shocking upset of defending national champ B.C. the night before and were drained. They were easy pickings for a now confident Quinnipiac club, who ran the Dutchmen out of the Dunkin Donuts Center 5-1. The aforementioned Matthew Peca scored on three consecutive shifts in the first period to sew up the game with 48 minutes of hockey remaining. For Peca, it was his first multi-goal game of the year. Expect the unexpected.
So now the "paper tiger" Bobcats, #1 in the country most of the year based on complicated computer rankings, enter the NCAA Frozen Four as the biggest name in the tourney. Hockey loving ESPN commentator John Buccigoss has been advocating the Peca hat trick via Twitter for ESPN's Play of the Week, and the fact that the Quinnipiac campus is barely half an hour from ESPN's Bristol "campus" has made them the darlings of Barry Melrose and company. A team that was dead in the water three times in the last 3 weeks is now carrying the banner for March Madness and nationally televised hockey. Go figure. They face St. Cloud State, the last team standing from the "powerhouse" WCHA. Another victory for the traditional weak sister ECAC? Why not.
If this trend of unthinkable results being commonplace is to continue, let's consider this scenario. In the other semifinal Yale takes on Lowell, the dominant team of the prestigious Hockey East Conference all year long. Other than that day long dream-sequence in the NCAA west regional Yale has been a losing club against ordinary competition since February. So based on the insanity of NCAA outcomes, let's just say Yale wins to set up a final against Quinnipiac for the title on April 13. That would make a border war for two schools separated by less than 10 miles. Forget BC-BU, or Michigan-Michigan State or even Minnesota-Minnesota Duluth, New Haven County becomes the epicenter of big time college hockey. The battle of Whitney Avenue. A world turned upside down.
Brits played 'World Turned Upside Down' after Yorktown Upset
One possible reason for the insanity of NCAA hockey results? Start with the TV timeouts. Timeouts in hockey are short, and in most cases, rare. Most games aren't televised. Now in the NCAA's there a 2:30 timeouts, over twice as long as the rare TV timeouts college hockey teams rarely experience, and three of them per period. Preposterous. It changes the flow of hockey dramatically, screwing up the game on ice in many radical ways. Hockey people in Providence watching live shook their heads in disbelief. It is an example of NCAA hockey being dictated by powers that don't give the sport itself any consideration. It was obvious that Union was shot from its late night semifinal, and it ultimately ruined the regional championship. Any sporting momentum college hockey may have gained from 12 single elimination games in 3 days on national cable has been quashed by a two week NCAA moratorium in order to squeeze in men's and women's hoops onto the airwaves. An April 13 college hockey National Championship, a month after every other hockey season is over in the U.S. It's clear that hockey to the NCAA is simply low priority programming fodder for lower tier platforms of ESPN. Pity.
