(#101): 59 Thoughts: Hockey East, CCHA, Atlantic Hockey

In today’s edition of the newsletter (#101), I begin this week’s 59 thoughts, focusing on Hockey East, the CCHA, and Atlantic Hockey. One of the top 2005-born players is back on the market after a de-commitment. Minnesota has a player suspended. We have mailbag submissions on the aforementioned 2005 as well as Cal Thomas, who is now headed to Minnesota.

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I’m going to change things up a bit. At this point in the season, now that the Pairwise and KRACH are beginning to come into focus, power rankings and polls are becoming irrelevant. They’re fun at the beginning of the year when we have no data to rank teams, but now that we do, I’ll let the computer models (especially the Pairwise, the one that matters) do the ranking.

From now on, every week I’ll dedicate two newsletters to providing at least one take on every team in college hockey. We’ll begin the week with Hockey East, the CCHA, and Atlantic Hockey. Then, I’ll hit on the NCHC, Big Ten, ECAC, and the independents.

We’re fortunate nowadays. Not only is almost every college hockey game available to stream online, but many of the games are archived for on-demand viewing throughout their various streaming services. I don’t watch every game — there’s just too many — but I watch a lot of them. Thanks to the “skip ahead” button, which jumps the stream for 30 seconds, I can skip whistles and intermissions and get through entire games in just about an hour. The ones I can’t watch in full, usually you can at least find highlights for the goals.

We’re all lucky to be fans of college hockey in this era, because the technology allows you to see such a wide variety of teams and games. As recent as 15 years ago, if games weren’t on TV, or you weren’t in the building, you didn’t see anything. Schools weren’t cutting highlight packages and streaming games online.

Anyway … enough about that. Let’s get on to the first 29 of this week’s 59 thoughts …