(Photo: Riley Trujillo/WCSN)
For Arizona State, it could be easy to overlook the last two games of the season. Despite their national and historical prominence, the Minnesota Golden Gophers are 13-15-4, a very pedestrian record for one of the most prestigious programs in the country. Meanwhile, multiple college hockey news outlets have locked the upstart Sun Devilan into a NCAA Tournament spot already.
According to bracket experts, ASU is only playing for seeding in its final weekend of the regular season. But that’s not the mantra in the locker room.
“Doesn’t matter,” ASU head coach Greg Powers said of the recent headlines. “It doesn’t change our approach.”
Despite USCHO.com writing that last Saturday’s 5-4 win over AIC was “likely to clinch a NCAA at-large bid” for the Sun Devils, and College Hockey News saying that ASU “has all but sealed NCAA bid,” Powers declined to acknowledge the program already has its first NCAA Tournament appearance in the bag. Before his team returned to practice this week, Powers made sure to deliver that message to his group.
“Until we hear our name on March 24, to us we’re not in,” Powers said. “We can’t approach it any other way.”
For Powers and the whole team, this thinking is nothing new. It’s been a habit of the team all year and throughout program history to maintain the “one game at a time” philosophy.
“It’s the last two games of our season,” said freshman forward Demotrios Koumontzis. “No one knows what could happen.”
He isn’t wrong. Conferences throughout the country are getting tighter and tighter, as teams like North Dakota and Yale have heated up and entered the fray among teams like Denver and Northeastern. Tournaments are still to come, which could knock other teams down but also bring others up, especially in conferences like the ECAC, which features Quinnipiac, Cornell, Harvard, Clarkson and Yale.
What ASU does know is that a couple more wins couldn’t hurt, especially considering that if the Sun Devils do make the Tournament, they’ll have to wait three weeks between the Minnesota series and the opening round while the country’s six conferences – none of which ASU is a member of – hold their end-of-season tournaments. Powers doesn’t want his group entering the prolonged break on any sort of slump.
“We control our own destiny,” he said. “We have for the past couple of months. That’s how we’ve approached it, and there’s no reason to stop that.”
