(Photo: Kylee Meter/WCSN)
For a few moments on Sunday afternoon, the room which held Arizona State’s men’s hockey team, including players, coaches, school administration, families and media members was tense. ESPNU was airing an extra inning college softball game, leaving many to wonder whether the Selection Show, the one which announced that ASU in just its fourth Division-I season had indeed qualified for its first NCAA Tournament as a No. 3 seed, would be delayed. Players, seated in six different rows of five players each, waited on and stared at the TV screen.
Finally, the screen changed. The transition faded out the softball game and brought up the NCAA logo for this year’s Frozen Four, and graphics that read “Selection Show” appeared under it. A mixture of claps and cheers rang out.
The anticipation for Sunday’s tournament announcement was high. Even after the Sun Devils’ 21-12-1 season and No. 10 ranking the PairWise, the words confirming they had made the 16-team field still almost seemed too good to be true. Sun Devil players and coaches had skirted out the certainty of the subject for the past few weeks, despite multiple sites projecting ASU as a lock. That became reality Sunday night.
“It’s a tremendous day,” said ASU head coach Greg Powers. “We’re going to enjoy it. The guys earned this.”
Alas, the Sun Devils will face the No. 2 seed Quinnipiac Bobcats in Allentown, Penn., on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. AZ time on ESPN3. The Bobcats finished No. 7 in the Pairwise rankings and ranked No. 2 in the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference.
Sunday’s announcement capped off a dream regular season for the Sun Devils, who nearly matched the win total from their first three D-I seasons (23) this year alone. ASU is also the first independent program to make the tournament since 1992 when Alaska Anchorage pulled off the feat, and the quickest program to qualify for postseason play after doing it in its third full season playing a D-I schedule.
The tournament appearance joins a list of firsts for this year’s Sun Devils, who completed the first home series sweep in program history (and finished the year with six home sweeps in all), broke into the USCHO rankings for the first time, and collected a victory over a top-10 team against then No. 6 Penn State.
Their No. 3 seed was based off their No. 10 spot in the PairWise rankings – the metric exclusively used by the selection committee to pick at-large bids. Like the NCAA’s basketball tournaments, each round of the hockey championship is a single-elimination game on a neutral site.
If the Sun Devils win on Saturday, they will face the winner of Minnesota-Duluth and Bowling Green on Sunday. If the team is victorious in the second round as well, it will advance to the Frozen Four in Buffalo in two weeks.
Before any of that though, ASU will have to get past Quinnipiac, which is making its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament since it went to the Frozen Four in 2016.
“We have to focus on not just being content on making it, and [rather] going in and doing some damage,” Powers said.
The Bobcats are a talented and battled tested team. They finished the year with a 25-9-2 record after fighting through their tough conference – which sent four other teams (Quinnipiac, Clarkson, Cornell and Harvard) to the tournament – and a schedule that included teams such as Clarkson, Massachusetts, Princeton, American International, Boston College, Cornell, Boston University and a Brown squad that made a strong run late. They have perhaps the best goaltender in the country in Andrew Shortridge (the nation’s leader in save percentage) and allowed the second-fewest goals in the country this season. They also scored the sixth most goals in the nation.
“There’s no lay-offs in the tournament,” Powers said. “Everyone that gets in is really good. It’s a 16 team tournament; anyone can win it.”
Powers cited Quinnipiac’s coaching, which he called one of the best in the country, as the driving force behind the Bobcats success this year.
ASU has been off since their regular season finale at Minnesota, where they were swept by the Golden Gophers while playing without their leading scorer Johnny Walker.
But Walker, whose 23 goals are tied for second in D-I, is expected to be fully healthy for Saturday’s game. In net, the Sun Devils are set to start star junior goalie Joey Daccord, who is the country’s leader in shutouts and ranks top 10 in save percentage.
“The detail and the habits of our guys were literally at an all-time high,” Powers said of ASU’s practices during the long break. “They’re very focused. They’re competing hard.”
Powers said the possible rust accumulated doesn’t concern him “even a little bit.”
No matter what comes out of next weekend, Sunday’s announcement couldn’t be a bigger step for the program–one that was a club team just four years ago. In a speech prior to the selection show, Powers pointed out three men standing in the back right of the crowd. Those men, Kory Chisholm, Jordan Young and Liam Norris, were all alumni of the 2014 ACHA National Championship team, and, according to the Powers, were the foundation that allowed the program to be where it was Sunday.
That also holds true for the seniors on this ASU team.
“They came here to set a standard and ‘Be the Tradition’, and they’ve now set the standard,” Powers said.
Though ASU was a bottom-dweller at the D-I level the last three seasons, members of this year’s squad never thought this day was impossible.
“My freshman class coming in… our goal was to go far in the tournament before our time was up here. Our goals are starting to happen,” said junior defenseman Brinson Paschinuk
And for the newcomers, the same holds true.
“Once we got going in the beginning of the year and won some games, I thought we had something special in this room,” said freshman forward Demotrios Koumontzis. “I think we proved everyone that we did.”
Despite the nay-sayers and doubters, which range from friends and family of Koumontzis and Joey Daccord, who questioned both’s decision to commit to ASU, to ESPN’s in-studio host worrying about ASU’s long break in action before next weekend, and to those who can’t comprehend that a Division-I hockey team based in the desert of Arizona is going to play for a chance at NCAA Hockey National title, ASU has prevailed.
The tournament has gone from a pipe dream to a possibility to an actual reality for the Sun Devils this season. From the Evie Pavillion near Papago Park, golfers looked on at what was happening inside the open gazebo hosting ASU’s watch party. When one asked what team it is, the reaction when told “ASU hockey celebrating it’s NCAA tournament berth,” was “Ohhh, wow” with a sign of surprise, a reaction that could hardly sum up this season for ASU hockey, and their celebratory Sunday afternoon, any better.
