NCAA Men's Frozen Four: Why Union College Is The Pool's Biggest Underdog

Only Boston College has a better record or a longer active winning streak in men’s Division I college hockey than the Union Skating Dutchmen.

Union has the most prolific power play among all Frozen Four-bound teams with a 24.3 percent conversion rate. It has the nation’s best night-by-night scoring margin, best team defense and arguably the best goaltender in Troy Grosenick.

It is all deceptive, at least to some extent. Even if they are the favorite for next Thursday’s semifinal matchup with Ferris State, the Dutchmen will have the most to prove when they converge on the Tampa Bay Times Forum with BC, Ferris State and Minnesota.

Perhaps more than anything, they have a burden to shoulder on behalf of their conference.

For the first time in nine years, the men’s Frozen Four will feature one Hockey East team, one WCHA tenant, one CCHA representative and one ECAC ambassador. Translation: The four longest-tenured Division I conferences in the country will each rest their pride solely on one program for the climactic phase of the 2011-12 season.

With Union, the ECAC is likewise playing in April for the first time since 2003, when Cornell reached the semifinals.

The Dutchmen will try to become their league’s first ambassador to the national championship game since Colgate lost to Wisconsin in 1990. If they do that, they will subsequently vie to deliver the ECAC’s first national title since Harvard in 1989.

Since the Crimson’s crowning achievement, the CCHA has claimed six national laurels, Hockey East seven and the WCHA nine. Only six ECAC teams have so much as reached the Frozen Four in that span, with Union being just the third since 1996.

Why is that? It is likely a multitude of factors, but one that juts out is the discrepancies in conference tournament venues.

Since 1982, the CCHA has consistently held its postseason championship at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. Hockey East finalists have faced off over the Spoked-B at Boston Garden and now TD Garden for each of the last 22 seasons. And the Xcel Energy Center has been the home of the WCHA Final Five for as long as it has been the home of the Minnesota Wild.

The ECAC is the odd league out, having gone two decades without a tournament game in an NHL arena. Since 1992, it has migrated from Lake Placid to Albany to Atlantic City.

In 2001, Albany’s Pepsi Arena (now the Times Union Center) was effectively the last “less than major” sports building to host an NCAA men’s Division I hockey championship. Since then, the smallest site of a Frozen Four was the 17,500-seat Value City Arena in Columbus in 2005.

The final two rounds of the national tournament are now strictly reserved for NHL, NBA or, in the case of 2010, NFL venues. The regional portion of the tournament has gone to such places as the Xcel Energy Center, Denver’s Pepsi Center and St. Louis’ Scottrade Center.

With the ECAC’s failure to catch up with these trends, it is frankly little wonder that its tenants have found little or no success once they do step on an NHL pond. And the Dutchmen, who claimed their Frozen Four passport with a pair of regional victories at an AHL arena in Bridgeport, Conn., will have to defy the jitters next week.

Ferris State’s junior and senior class will surely recall their participation in the 2010 CCHA playoffs in Detroit.

That could prove negligible in their late Thursday afternoon matchup with Union, but then consider the general strength of the two teams' conferences.

Throughout their regular season, the Bulldogs had to deal with fellow bracket-bound programs from Michigan, Michigan State, Miami and Western Michigan a combined 10 times. Cornell was the only other ECAC team to accompany the Dutchmen to the national dance.

And regardless of who emerges from that game, they will then have to face either BC or Minnesota a week from Saturday under bright lights in front of a brimful audience of over 19,000 fans.

Each of the Gophers’ last three games have taken place at their local NHL arena. Their seniors have played five career games at the Xcel Energy Center and their juniors were around for a game against Wisconsin at Minneapolis’ Target Center.

All the Eagles have done in recent memory is win three straight Beanpot and Hockey East titles at TD Garden, riding a 12-game winning streak in that venue since Feb. 1, 2010. They also happened to be in this season’s Great Lakes Invitational at Joe Louis Arena and played an outdoor game at Fenway Park for the second time in three years.

Between Grosenick’s goaltending, the nation’s stingiest defense, reliable special teams and a Gung-ho offense piloted by Jeremy Welsh, the Dutchmen are certainly equipped with every basic winning asset.

But if they are to activate those pieces en route to a milestone triumph next week, they will first need to prove they have the intangible willpower to conquer unprecedented environmental pressure.