NESCAC Regular Season Finishes

Next week the NESCAC playoffs start, and the regular season records become a moot point. But for now, let's take a look at how all ten NESCAC member men's hockey teams have done historically in final regular season standings for the first 20 years of conference play. The NESCAC became an official playing conference in 1999 and held its first men's hockey postseason tournament in 2000.

The NESCAC doesn't have the standings listed for 1999-2000 on the conference website, but thanks to William Costello, we have the playoff results from that year, which tell us the top seven seeds. ("What happened to the eighth team," you say incredulously. more on that below). Using the USCHO scoreboard for the final week of the regular season in February 2000 ,we can extrapolate that Trinity finished eighth and Conn College finished ninth.  So, we present below the final regular season standings from 2000-2013.

 The NESCAC has gone under considerable changes in the first decade and-a-half of conference play. Here are some quick notes:

*The conference only had 9 teams for the first two seasons (1999-2000, '00 -'01) as Tufts played in the ECAC Northeast until 2001-02.

*The first three seasons had a seven team playoff format. The one seed got a buy into the semi-finals (which they hosted) with opening round games of  2 vs 7, 3 vs 6 and 4 vs 5.

*Prior to the 2011-12 season, the conference regular season consisted of  the famous "interlock": nineteen total games (nine against the fellow 'Cac schools and ten against the ECAC East schools). The ECAC-E had its own playoffs, as only the ten NESCAC schools were eligible for the eight spots in the 'Cac playoffs. Starting in the 2011-12 season, the NESCAC regular season became eighteen games: a home-and-home with the other nine NESCAC schools.

On to the results. There's a lot to digest here, but here are some quick notes:

* Two teams (Amherst, Williams) have never missed the playoffs, which speaks to the consistency of the stewardship of Jack Arena and Bill Kangas. Middlebury had never missed the playoffs until 2017 and Bowdoin until 2018, which also speaks to the steadiness of retired coaches Bill Beaney and Terry Meagher. 

* Conn College has only made the playoffs six times (2007-09, 2014, 2015 and 2018). 

* Colby's The drop from first in 08 to last in 09 is the largest single season change in conference history. 

*Middlebury still has the best average finish (3.5) despite being in the bottom half of the league (6) on average since 2011. This represents the largest difference between all-time and since 2011 (-2.5) and speaks to how dominant they were in the first 

*Wesleyan, Conn College and Tufts have never finished atop the regular season standings.