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Outlook bleak for Gophers to qualify for NCAA field
Wisconsin's victory in the WCHA third-place game appears to have been the boot that kicked the U out of the NCAA tourney.
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Share on DiggThe Gophers' streak of eight consecutive appearances in the NCAA men's hockey tournament is over, in all likelihood.
The Gophers needed most of Saturday's eight games in five conference tournaments across the country to go a certain way, and that didn't happen.
"Wisconsin was the biggest nail in their coffin," said Scott Brown, the executive editor of U.S. College Hockey Online. The Gophers needed the Badgers to lose in the third-place game of the Final Five, he said.
Instead Wisconsin beat conference regular-season champion North Dakota 4-1 at Xcel Energy Center.
Brown's website, uscho.com, features the PairWise Rankings system, which mimics the process the NCAA selection committee uses to fill its 16-team men's hockey tournament field. Six teams get automatic bids for winning their conference tournaments, 10 teams get at-large bids.
The Gophers (17-13-7) were hoping for one of those at-large spots, especially since the West Regional on Friday and Saturday will be at Mariucci Arena.
Minnesota's last hopes died at 5:17 p.m. Saturday, when the third-place game in the Eastern College Athletic Conference tournament between St. Lawrence and Princeton ended in a 2-2 tie in Albany, N.Y.
"St. Lawrence had to beat Princeton" for the Gophers to have any chance, Brown said.
Gophers coach Don Lucia was in Thief River Falls, Minn., on Saturday watching his younger son, Mario, play for Wayzata in the Bantam A state tournament.
"I do not want to know about the games," Lucia said when reached by phone at 7:30 p.m. "I do not want to go through the agony. I am going to wait until the end of the night."
At the end of the night, the Gophers were tied for No. 15 in the PairWise with Ohio State and Wisconsin. But those other teams had a higher RPI, an index that considers strength of schedule. So the Buckeyes are in the NCAA tournament because of their .5338 RPI, while Wisconsin (.5336) and the Gophers (.5328) are out.
How close is that? If the Gophers could turn any of their ties into a victory, or any of their losses into a tie, they would be the team adavancing.
There is still a slim chance for the Gophers -- if the selection committee could overlook the RPI, the traditional tiebreaker.
"I would be stunned if they took Minnesota," Brown said. "There is no plausible basis for breaking ties in Minnesota's favor. Ohio State is the last team in [the NCAA tournament] if the committee does what they have done the last 10 years."
The four teams expected to be No. 1 seeds in the NCAAs are Boston University, Notre Dame, Denver and Michigan. DU, Minnesota Duluth and North Dakota are the only WCHA teams that appear to have made the field.
Bemidji State, which is not in the top 16 of the PairWise, got an automatic bid for winning the College Hockey America tournament, preventing an at-large team, likely Wisconsin, from making the NCAA field.
The field for NCAA tournament will be officially announced at 10:30 a.m. today on ESPN2.
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