Sun Devils miss fourth straight NCAA Tournament: What it Means

(Photo: Sammi Maxwell/WCSN)

On March 24th, the NCAA Ice Hockey Tournament Selection Committee revealed the 16 teams that will compete for the 2024 Division I National Championship. And for the fourth consecutive season, the third post-COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona State men’s ice hockey did not hear its name called on Selection Sunday.

The Sun Devils’ fate this year is no different than that of the three prior, but that’s not to say that their most recent campaign unfolded similarly to seasons past. It couldn’t have transpired much differently than the previous two.

Head coach Greg Powers’ squad won a program-best 24 games and picked up several marquee victories over the likes of then-No. 1 Denver, then-No. 9 Providence and then-No. 17 Cornell, just to name a few. The Sun Devils finished with a 24-8-6 record and spent the majority of the season as a top-20 team in the PairWise Rankings — a system designed to emulate the criteria used by the tournament selection committee — and USCHO.com’s Top-20 Poll.

While it will become a member of the highly-respected National Collegiate Hockey Conference beginning in the 2024-25 campaign, ASU being an independent program without a rugged conference schedule has been a major hole in its resumé across its first eight seasons as a Division I program.

But in 2023-24, that didn’t seem like it should matter. On paper and in the polls, the Sun Devils were among college hockey’s best. So how is it possible for ASU to miss the big dance in its most successful season despite qualifying in previous years that yielded lesser results?

This is a question that many fans have asked over the recent weeks. Due to the mere landscape of college hockey, there is no simple answer.

Explaining The NCAA Hockey Tournament

As noted earlier, one of the most common arguments as to why ASU shouldn’t make the tournament has been because it doesn’t have a conference to call home. After this season, it appears that the committee, on some level, agrees with that sentiment. However, it’s hard to make this claim with certainty when solely looking at the Sun Devils’ previous campaigns.

In the eight seasons before 2023-24, ASU reached the postseason twice — in 2018-19 and 2019-20 — winning more than 20 games on both occasions. There was little to no question that it would qualify either time, as it finished No. 10 in the PairWise in 2019 and No. 13 in 2020 before the tournament was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Sun Devils finished well below .500 in four of the other six campaigns and eclipsed the 10-win mark three times during that span. Below-average seasons are to be expected from a team in its first decade as a Division I program, but there simply hasn’t been an instance where ASU was “on the bubble”.

Instead, consider the season Alaska Fairbanks, the Sun Devils’ bitter rival on the ice, enjoyed in 2022-23 as a perfect testament to the challenges of being an independent program.

Last year, the Nanooks were one of the peskier teams in college hockey, playing to a physical, hard and heavy identity that Powers has strived to establish in Tempe. If Alaska had a late-game lead, it likely wouldn’t let it slip away, as an extremely sound defensive structure generally stifled the opposition’s last-minute pushes, and this was reflected in the statistics. At the conclusion of the 2022-23 season, the Nanooks ranked top-five in the nation in shots against per game and goals against per game.

Unsurprisingly, such a strong defensive approach led to more games won, even against the stiffest of competition. Alaska took games from both then-No. 19 Notre Dame and then-No. 1 Denver on the road en route to a 22-10-2 season, the program’s best since 2001-02.

The Nanooks were rewarded for their historic year, slotting in at No. 15 in the final PairWise Rankings. However, when Selection Sunday came around, Alaska was left out of the tournament for reasons out of its control.

College hockey operates identically to college basketball in the sense that a team winning its respective conference tournament earns it an auto-bid into the NCAA Tournament, and that’s exactly where the problems started for the Nanooks. No. 25 Colgate and No. 41 Canisius, two teams nowhere close to the No. 16 spot, won the ECAC and Atlantic Hockey tournaments, making them both shoe-ins for the tournament.

With the two conference champions all but forcing their way into the big dance, the committee had no choice but to bump down the lowest-ranked at-large team, which happened to be Alaska. It isn’t “fair” by any means, but that’s just the way college hockey works.

Put in the simplest of terms, making the NCAA Tournament is difficult, independent or not. There are only 16 spots for 64 teams to battle for, long odds for any program in the country. Of course, that doesn’t pose a major problem for the nation’s most elite teams, but for the average-to-above-average groups, it means they will likely be in a dogfight for most of the season.

When the Sun Devils qualified for the postseason in 2019, they became the first independent program to accomplish such a feat since Alaska Anchorage did it in 1992. It’s a testament to the rarity of an independent playing into late March, but also shows that if a squad without a conference wants to make the postseason, it needs virtually everything to work in its favor.

Why Did ASU Miss the 2024 Tournament?

Realistically, if ASU wanted to make the tournament, it at least needed to find itself at No. 13 in the PairWise at the regular season’s conclusion in order to feel comfortable about qualifying for the tournament. That didn’t happen.

Despite a 6-2 mark in their final eight games of the regular season, the Sun Devils mostly hovered around the No. 20 spot in the rankings, where they’d end up after conference tournaments concluded. Even when ASU was red-hot during the first half of the season, it had trouble cracking the top-15 of the PairWise. There are a couple of reasons for this.

An easy answer is that compared to teams in strong conferences like the NCHC or HockeyEast, ASU’s strength of schedule just wasn’t there. During the second half of the season, the Sun Devils began playing fellow independents, with No. 25 Alaska being their best opponent during that stretch. By comparison, most leagues are in the thick of conference play at this time, so there is no question that teams in these conferences will get the nod for facing tougher competition throughout the season.

The largest component to the PairWise seemingly refusing to reward the Sun Devils for their strong play is the criteria it uses to rank teams. While winning games is most important, there are two types of victories that the PairWise loves: those in regulation and those on the road. Unfortunately for ASU fans, their team did not record enough of either this year.

A high number of overtime games made the Sun Devils an exciting team to watch, but so much free hockey proved detrimental. A whopping 14 of 38 regular-season contests required extra time, with ASU going 6-2-6 in those games. While overtime wins are valuable for teams in conferences because they guarantee points in the league standings, this is not the case for independent programs.

Because the Sun Devils don’t play in a conference, the only ranking that takes these overtime results into account is the PairWise. The problem with this is that in the eyes of the PairWise, winning in overtime doesn’t equal winning in regulation. An overtime win, despite counting as a win in a team’s record, is only worth ⅔ of a win, while a loss is worth ⅓. Ties, which occur after the conclusion of the five-minute overtime period and include shootout results, are not factored into PairWise’s calculation.

So, this means that four of ASU’s biggest victories this season — over Denver, Providence, Cornell and Omaha, who while unranked at the time ultimately qualified for the tournament — didn’t even count as full wins. It also means that the Sun Devils’ six ties hurt them more than anything, especially draws against lower-ranked teams like Lindenwood, Miami and Dartmouth (twice).

There was also little opportunity for ASU to pick up all-important road wins with only 10 games away from Mullett Arena scheduled in 2023-24. The Sun Devils posted a respectable 5-3-2 mark in those contests, but it simply wasn’t enough. There was much left to be desired, too, as ASU went 0-1-1 in an early-season series at Miami, who finished dead last in the NCHC by a sizable margin.

A lack of away matchups isn’t completely on the Sun Devils, who needed to schedule a home-heavy slate because certain teams essentially owed them home games. Between 2015 and 2018, a stretch spanning three seasons, ASU played 57 away contests before adopting an away-only, 26-game Big Ten schedule during the 2020-21 season, which took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, based on the PairWise’s mannerisms, a team only playing 10 road contests in a season means it must finish with an exceptional record in those games. At only two games over .500 in that category, the Sun Devils’ resumé in road games didn’t cut it.

There’s no doubt that ASU put together an unforgettable campaign in 2023-24. But when comparing them to teams that made the tournament, it makes sense why the Sun Devils didn’t hear their names called on Selection Sunday.

A Conference Doesn’t Come With Guarantees

Next year, ASU will usher in a new era of its young Division I tenure and join the NCHC, one of the top conferences in college hockey. The move was a long time coming, as the opening of Mullett Arena was seemingly the final missing piece of the puzzle. Joining such a strong league will provide the Sun Devils with a much stronger strength of schedule and a conference tournament, two integral parts of being an NCAA Tournament team.

The benefits of a conference schedule are tenfold. When ASU began playing other independent teams during the second half of the season in recent years, teams in the NCHC were gearing up for the second leg of the season, conference play, which provides far more competitive play than what the Sun Devils have been accustomed to in the past couple of years.

But an above-average conference record won’t make the Sun Devils NCAA Tournament shoe-ins. Not even close.

Four NCHC members qualified for the postseason — No. 3 Denver, No. 5 North Dakota, No. 11 Omaha and No. 14 Western Michigan — a perfectly reasonable number considering it makes up ¼ of the teams in the field. However, there was one more team that had a strong case to get in: No. 14 Colorado College.

In 2023-24, the Tigers finished with a 21-13-3 record, their best campaign since going 28-12-1 in 2010-11 and by far the most successful under third-year head coach Kris Mayotte. Their marquee wins during the regular season were just as impressive. Colorado College swept a pair of two-game sets over No. 1/2 North Dakota and also picked up victories over then-No. 4 Denver, then-No. 16 St. Cloud State, then-No. 9 Minnesota and then-No. 12 Western Michigan twice.

When conference tournament season rolled around, the Tigers earned the fourth overall seed and had a difficult, but viable, path to a deep tournament run. After all, it was Colorado College that marched to the NCHC Championship game as a 7-seed. However, Mayotte’s group was upended in the first round of this year’s tournament by fifth-seeded Omaha, a major wrench thrown into the team’s NCAA Tournament plans.

Nearly 2,000 miles east in Boston, the Massachusetts Minutemen — a 5-seed in the Hockey East tournament with a 20-13-3 record — defeated Providence in the quarterfinals. Because it plays in college hockey’s deepest and most competitive conference, that win gave Massachusetts the edge over Colorado College in the eyes of the Tournament Selection Committee.

This example proves that to truly feel comfortable about making the tournament, ASU needs to put up a strong regular-season conference record and can’t exit the NCHC’s postseason early. Accomplishing such a feat is easier said than done: the Sun Devils are 6-6-2 against opponents in their future conference over the past two seasons, but facing top-notch competition week in and week out is much different than seeing NCHC opponents three to four times per year.

Starting next year, ASU will have everything any big-time hockey program could offer. A shiny new arena in an extremely desirable location, improved recruiting and now a top-tier conference all provide the Sun Devils a golden opportunity to rise to prominence in the college hockey world. The only remaining missing parts are postseason accolades.

That’s not to say ASU is expected to become a blueblood like North Dakota or Denver — at least not for the foreseeable future. What is true, however, is that for Powers, the time is now. The 16th-year head coach has proved he’s capable of winning at the Division I level, as he was named a finalist for the Spencer Penrose Award, given to college hockey’s coach of the year, in 2019 and 2020.

If there’s any bench boss who deserves to lead the Sun Devils to their first-ever NCAA Tournament victory, it’s undoubtedly Powers. He led the program entirely through its pioneer era at Division I and was instrumental in the completion of Mullett Arena. Over the past three seasons, ASU has shown that it’s more than capable of hanging with the big guys, and gave itself something to build off of after a historic 2023-24 campaign. So now, entering a brand-new era in ASU hockey history, it’s time for Powers and the Sun Devils to take that next step.