NCAA Fantasy Hockey Week 19: Post Weekend Standings

Hands up if you forgot that Minnesota had the weekend off

Good Tuesday everyone! You want standings, you got standings:

Fantasy standings, 2019-02-12

#ChangeTeamManagerPoints2nd half points2nd half rankings
1⬆︎ 1MooseGregg Cockrill591.15261.652
2⬇︎ -11.21 GigaWattsGrant Salzano (@salzano14)591.1264.051
3⬌ 0The House of Seven Gabelsanonymous577.2223.757
4⬌ 0I'm Going To Be Perfectly FrankelNate Vaughan559.85231.254
5⬆︎ 1Team Bewarefulanonymous547.4225.855
6⬇︎ -1Birch TwigsBirch Davis545.6224.856
7⬆︎ 1Tower of GabelWilliam Whyte (@wwhyte)524.6231.953
8⬇︎ -1Moves Like Giguère@jay32600521.65193.0510
9⬌ 0And Don't Call Me Shirley@bridgetfparker513.75215.48
10⬌ 0Going RoqueSydney Kuntz, @sydneykz12496.6185.9512
11⬌ 0Team Watts Up!Michelle "reluctant BC fan" Jay485.1183.5514
12⬆︎ 1Norwalk NarwhalsDavid F. Pendrys Esq.484.95194.559
13⬇︎ -1Mokas GalsE. Peña484.2174.116
14⬆︎ 1Frankel My Dear, I Don't Give A Damn@strongforechecks474.3184.113
15⬆︎ 1Peaky GrindersBrian Convery472.35188.811
16⬇︎ -2Rooney TunesMike Murphy471.25173.117
17⬆︎ 1Rink RodentsAndrew Kalman454.55171.220
18⬇︎ -1The Mueller InvestigationJohn Deutzmann454.35172.918
19⬌ 0Legends of the Hidden WempleChris Dilks441.55170.122
20⬌ 0DoghouseAndrew Hiza440.8179.7515
21⬌ 0Shirley You Can't Be SeriousBob Wiedenhoeft (Bucky's 5th Quarter), @rwiedenhoeft434.25168.223
22⬌ 0Rooney's Mad DogsBob Spencer432.1172.2519
23⬌ 0MUELLER TIMEMike Lopez419.3147.7526
24⬌ 0Goin For Three-peatBrian Devins-Suresh419.15170.5521
25⬌ 0Wingsanonymous391.35156.7524
26⬌ 0Proof through the KnightsLexa Bauer388148.725
27⬌ 0Holmes Sweet HolmesValerie Fox376.2128.1527
28⬌ 0The Daryl Watts'up With Yous@NathanielAOlivr374.75126.228
29⬌ 0Jaycee SuperstarKyle Rossi (@puckandrally)370.9115.0529
30⬌ 0LaBahn Sieves@clamckbes250.0599.330

It’s nip and tuck between those two titans of NCAA fantasy women’s hockey, Moose and 1.21 GigaWatts, Last week Moose was ahead by 0.05 points out of 541; this week, Moose is ahead by ... 0.05 points out of 591. MASSIVE. (Moose is showing as having gone up a place because at the end of last week, after the Beanpot, 1.21 GigaWatts snuck into the lead).

Meanwhile, a huge week for I’m Going To Be Perfectly Frankel puts Nate Vaughan clear of the cluster from 4th to 6th — there was just 2.3 points between 4th and 6th last week, and this week Nate has widened the gap from 4th to 5th to an almost comfortable 11.95.

Lower down, there’s only 14ish points separating 11th (Michelle Jay’s Team Watts Up!, the only team to end with punctuation) from 16th (Mike Murphy’s Rooney Tunes, which won the preseason Best Team Name Based On A Pun award but has failed to press that advantage). Full standings are on the summary tab of the sheet.

The highest ranking team to have made no trades at all this year is Moves Like Giguère in eighth. We should all be so Zen.

What’s going to happen to mess up the standings?

There are two midweek games this week, BU v Harvard for ALL OF THE BEANS, and BC v Northeastern for ALL OF THE CONSOLATION BEANS. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this change some of the rankings again, and it’ll almost certainly shake up the team of the week.

AND... although the Comp Schedule on the spreadsheet has it wrong, Maine is playing at BC at 7 pm on Thursday. This means a three-game week for BC, and Megan Keller (BC, $63.50, 54 SP, 6 WP, 11 picks) already has six points just from the first one. The highest weekly score for any player this season is 8.6 for Loren Gabel back in Week 5. It would be crazy to bet against Keller shattering that record.

(And this in a week where Allie Munroe (Syracuse, $32.60, 28.8 SP, 8.5 WP, 1 pick) has become just the fourth player to break eight points in a weekend. It would have been reasonable to expect that 8.5 points would be enough to win her player of the week.)

Managers who haven’t picked Keller yet may or may not be THROWN INTO DESPAIR by the realization that BC only has one game next week, and one the week after. Where is your god now, indeed.

Provisional team of the week

I’ll hold off on the weekly awards till Friday given the games that are left to be played, but the provisional team of the week is interesting enough to be worth publishing:

  • Roster: Allie Munroe (Syracuse, D, 8.5), Maggie Connors (Princeton, F, 7.), Sarah Fillier (Princeton, F, 7), Megan Keller (BC, D, 6), Josefine Hansen (RPI, D, 5.3), Emily Curlett (Robert Morris, D, 5), Claire Thompson (Princeton, D, 4.7), Tera Hofmann (Yale, G, 4.6), Gabby Billing (Dartmouth, F, 4.3), Brooke Avery (Syracuse, F, 4.3), T.T. Cianfarano (Clarkson, F, 4.2), Nicole Guagliardo (Lindenwood, F, 4.1), Mekenzie Steffen (Wisconsin, D, 4.1), Lovisa Selander (RPI, G, 4.05), Kassidy Sauvé (Clarkson, G, 3.2)/

Things to note:

  • This is the first time Syracuse has had a player in the team of the week since week 4, when they beat Lindenwood 5-4 OT and then 6-3. Just like in week 4, this week they have not one player but two.
  • It’s the second time in four weeks that Princeton has had three players in the team of the week, and it’s the exact same three players.
  • It’s the first time Dartmouth has had a player in the TOTW since week 7.
  • It’s the first time Lindenwood has had a player in since it happened three times in October.
  • Though you don’t think of RPI as high-scoring, it’s the second time in a month that RPI has had a skater (i.e. not Selander) in. So, basically, RPI has a skater in the TOTW every time they have a game where they score more than three goals.
  • And it’s the first time since our very first week doing this that Clarkson has had a skater in the TOTW without having Elizabeth Giguère, Michaela Pejzlová or Loren Gabel. /

(Why yes, I did spend some time putting together a tab with historic TOTWs when I meant to be writing this post, how did you guess?)

What happened this weekend?

In the Beanpot, BU took down Northeastern in a shootout after the game ended 3-3. In the late game, Lindsay Reed quarterbacked Harvard to a 4-1 victory over BC despite being outshot 53-26. Her 52 saves were a new season record, beating her 49 saves in a 1-0 loss to Colgate on 10/27 which kicked off her 16-game run as the starter and included a 47-save performance in a 3-2 OT loss to Wisconsin. It was the first time Harvard had beaten a ranked team all season. Doesn’t count for this week’s points, of course, but you can’t ignore the Beanpot.

In the CHA, Robert Morris @ Penn State went 5-1 and 2-2. Syracuse @ Mercyhurst went 6-5 and 4-0, yikes. RIT @ Lindenwood went 3-2 and 4-3.

Terra Lanteigne (RIT, $49.20, 43.4 SP, 2.7 WP, 1 pick) and Jenna Brenneman (Penn State, $30.10, 29.5 SP, 1.3 WP, 0 picks) have both been more than solid this year, but otherwise the CHA seems to be the place where goaltending goes to die.

... having said that, although this weekend saw Syracuse become the first CHA team to reach 100 goals against this season, every other conference already has at least one team that’s reached that mark: Union (ECAC) are on 113, St. Cloud (WCHA) are also on 100, and poor Holy Cross (Hockey East) are on 131 (and a goal difference of -98).

In the ECAC, RPI beat Dartmouth 5-2 despite being outshot 32-22. Crazily, it could even have been 5-1, but the team gave up the last goal to narrow it to 5-2 at 19:07 of the third while on a power play. RPI then, in a battle of enormogoalies, lost 2-1 to Harvard though Harvard outshot them 56-24 (and 25-4 in the second). In that game, Lovisa Selander (RPI, $49.20, 44.5 SP, 4.05 WP, 1 pick) broke the NCAA career saves record of 3,809, previously held by Brianne McLaughlin who reacted very classily:

RPI’s travel partner Union lost 5-1 to Harvard, with Beth Larcom starting in goal for Harvard; and then beat Dartmouth! 4-1! Union victories get an exclamation mark! More points for Katie Sonntag (Union, $4.40, 2.6 SP, 1.5 WP, 0 picks), who you may remember from a three-game goal streak two weeks ago! And if you’re wondering how Gabby Billing (Dartmouth, $11.50, 10.4 SP, 4.3 WP, 0 picks) got 4.3 points on the weekend despite only having two goals and no assists... I don’t... know? Maybe a goal from earlier in the season was reassigned to her?

In the ECAC’s top v. bottom contests, Princeton beat Brown 8-2, with Maggie Connors getting 4 goals, and then beat Yale 4-2, in Carly Bullock’s first three-point game of the year. Princeton split the goaltending between Steph Neatby and Rachel McQuigge. Princeton’s travel partner Quinnipiac tied Yale 2-2 and beat Brown 4-2. After only scoring four goals in a game once in the fall — against Brown the last time they played them — Quinnipiac has now scored four goals in a game two weekends running. It’s probably too late for them to make a deep postseason run, but it will at least give them a positive note on which to end a season in which they’ve underachieved relative to their talent on paper. Meanwhile, Brown has a chance next weekend to relive their glory weekend at the start of the season, as they take on Colgate and Cornell again.

Maggie Connors and Sarah Fillier got ECAC Player and Rookie of the Week, which, but they’re both rookies, so.

The heavyweight ECAC clashes of the weekend were Clarkson / St. Lawrence v Colgate / Cornell. Surprisingly, the most one-sided was Clarkson v Cornell. Clarkson led 4-0 after one period, and that was also the final score. Clarkson got only one goal from their top line. In the game against Colgate, there was never more than one goal in it: Colgate tied it up 3:30 into the third and then won a minute into overtime. Elizabeth Giguère (Clarkson, $77.20, 59.2 SP, 2.2 WP, 15 picks) had 2.2 fantasy points on the weekend and Loren Gabel (Clarkson, $73.70, 54.6 SP, 0.9 WP, 18 picks) had less than one, which is something Clarkson will be hoping to fix coming in to the postseason. Meanwhile, St. Lawrence got two ties, 2-2 v Colgate and 1-1 v Cornell.

In Hockey East: Providence @ Maine went 2-1 and 2-2; Vermont @ UConn went 2-3 and 1-1, no goals for you Natalie Snodgrass. The second game was at the XL Center in Hartford, which is a nice facilities upgrade for the UConn women, though attendance doesn’t seem to have been great.

Two big names in Hockey East goaltending had tough losses. BC beat UNH 7-1 in a bounce-back game after the Beanpot loss. Kelly Pickreign (BC, $5.60, 2.4 SP, 1.05 WP, 0 picks) got her second start in net and her first win with a .947 save percentage, though in the other game, a 1-0 loss to Merrimack, her save percentage was actually higher at .967. Kyra Smith (UNH, $33.50, 32.75 SP, 1.7 WP, 1 pick) had a game save percentage of .794, which is her only game save percentage under .875 this season. Northeastern went to Merrimack and won 6-3, with Samantha Ridgewell (Merrimack, $41, 37.4 SP, 2 WP, 0 picks) pulled after 4 goals on 14 shots. Merrimack outshot Northeastern! 30-26. Amazingly, given that her season save percentage is up at an elite .935, Ridgewell’s single-game save % of .714 was not even her worst of the season: that was .667 in Merrimack’s 5-4 loss to Vermont back on January 12th.

Aerin Frankel seems confirmed as the sole starter for Northeastern now, having played the last 12 games. However, even looking at just the last ten games rather than the whole season, there are a number of goalies (Hoffman, Schroeder, Reed, Smith) at around the same cost who are projected to score more than her, so maybe hold off on a hire.

In the WCHA, OSU lost to Bemidji 3-2 and then won 5-1. Ohio State started its second and third goalies, Amanda Zeglen and Lynsey Wallace, against Bemidji. Zeglen had by far her best game of the year, Wallace didn’t.

UMD beat St. Cloud 4-2 then lost 3-2, one step forward one step back. UMD outshot St. Cloud 47-23 and 53-29. Both teams split goalies; Maddie Rooney was in net versus Emma Polusny for the UMD win, Emma Söderberg was in the UMD net against Janine Alder for the UMD loss.

Wisconsin steamrolled Minnesota State 7-2 and 4-1. And, of course, still only got one player in the team of the week. And that player, Mekenzie Steffen (Wisconsin, $37.7, 32 SP, 4.1 WP, 2 picks), will probably be pushed out as as result of the two BC games coming. Abbey Levy  didn’t play the first game, and in the second she posted only her third save percentage over .9 since Christmas.

That’s it!

There’ll be a trade tips post coming, but for now, just note that every single team has two games next weekend, except for BC which has one and Ohio State which has the weekend off. Costs are on the Cost tab, projections based on the last ten games are on the Last 10 tab, and trades are due to tigFantasyHockey@gmail.com by 11:59 pm Eastern on Thursday February 14th. What better way to spend Valentine’s Day?