Once or twice a month, the USHL’s Madison Capitols send several buses down the road to the University of Wisconsin’s campus, pick up students and bring them back to the team’s 2,600-seat barn, all so they can pay a dollar to drink beer. At Dollar Beer Nights, among other things, the crowd has thrown empty cans on the ice — the home team once took a penalty for that — and heckled players while shirtless.
Chris Delaney’s dad, also named Chris, happened to be at one of the Dollar Beer Nights with the entire family last season.
“It was wild,” he said. “The place was like a frat party with a hockey game in the middle.”
The one usually bringing the house down was the smallest player in it.
That was Chris Delaney, a 5-foot-7, 155-pound winger now at UMass Lowell, who scored five times on Dollar Beer Nights, nearly half of his total goals from his lone season in Madison. The Capitols eventually caught on to the trend, and now, it’s the story they tell when asked about their beloved, “goofball” former teammate, nicknamed “Dingo.”
“We knew there was a high likelihood he was going to get a goal for us,” Capitols coach and general manager Andy Brandt said. “Because he rose to that occasion.”
Delaney’s own rationale: “I love to celly in front of crowds, and when you got college kids going crazy in the stands? Those are some of my favorite games.”
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His go-to celebration is throwing both hands up — the “let me hear it,” he called it — and from those fans, he certainly did. Almost everyone interviewed for this story said a version of the same thing when asked what first comes to mind about the Hopkinton, Mass. native. “A ball of energy,” as Brandt put it. No surprise, then, that he couldn’t stop scoring when things got rowdy.
“Just happened naturally,” Delaney said.
No surprise, either, that Delaney wound up in Lowell, which, under 14th-year head coach Norm Bazin, is known for seeking out tenacious and competitive players. The freshman finished with nine goals and 18 points for the resurgent River Hawks, a surprise contender after their worst year in more than a decade in 2023-24.
When Delaney decommitted from Massachusetts early last season, Lowell’s staff immediately jumped all over it, and now, the tied-shortest player in Hockey East regularly played on the River Hawks’ top line and power play.
“He plays like he’s 6-foot-2, so I don’t worry about size one bit with him,” Bazin said. “I’m all about how much fight there is in the dog, not how big the dog is.”
Delaney, too, doesn’t care about his size, and despite perhaps being an easy target in a heavy, physical conference, he jumps right in before the whistle or after.
This is nothing new.
When he was 14 and everyone around him was going to prep school or joining U-14 club teams, Delaney chose the Boston Junior Bruins’ U-16 team, still at only 5-foot-4, because he knew he wanted to play Division 1 hockey and needed to prove himself. The Chicago Steel, a USHL powerhouse, drafted him in the third round in 2020, and after a final season with the Junior Bruins’ NCDC team, Delaney headed out west a year ahead of schedule.
The typical disadvantages of being undersized aren’t present with Delaney — if anything, he can do things bigger players can’t.
“I do think being undersized allows you the ability to get underneath guys automatically, but it only works if you’re willing to do it,” Brandt, the Capitols coach, said. “A lot of smaller guys use their size as an excuse to be a perimeter player and not engage physically. Or they can use it as a gift, and that’s what Chris does really well.”
The other gifts of Delaney’s size are obvious — quickness, agility and elite skating, which Brandt summed up as “pace.” Bazin used the word “tempo,” which he said is one of the biggest things the program looks for when recruiting.
“He thinks quick and he plays quick,” Bazin added. “We didn’t have that piece last year. We didn’t have a kid who’s ultra-quick, who could disrupt the way Chris can.”
There are myriad reasons for Lowell’s revival, and Delaney, of course, wasn’t around last season to compare everything. Still, he credited a “bond that’s becoming unbreakable” between the entire group. The River Hawks do everything together — “they live next to the rink in a beautiful condo,” Bazin made sure to note — and there are no siloed social groups separating under and upperclassmen.
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“I think that’s the most important thing for teams right now,” Delaney said.
Naturally, the youngest of six kids is in the middle of all that, despite being a freshman.
“We always say he’s liked the ‘Pied Piper,’ ” Delaney’s father said. “And I think it’s because he’s the youngest of six, but on these teams with older guys — and it would be funny because he would always look like their little brother — he was always making them laugh.”
When Delaney was finally the eldest, his last year in Madison, Brandt admits he asked a lot of him and the rest of the older players — basically, to turn a losing culture into a winning one during everyone’s first year in town. Delaney wound up wearing the ‘A’ on a playoff team, finishing with 43 points in 62 games while gluing together a similarly tight-knit group to the one he joined in Lowell.
“A lifelong friend,” said Sam Rice, a teammate in Madison now at Minnesota State.
“I would always say to people when he was younger, you’ll see him in games, but he makes your team better during the week,” said Delaney’s father, who played at Bowdoin. “Because people come to practice and he’s working, he goes to the gym. He makes it fun and keeps it light, and he’s all about the boys and the team, but he works at it.”
Rice said his favorite memory of Delaney is playing “sewer,” a popular pregame ritual where players can’t let a soccer ball touch the ground, for a rather unscientific reason: “He’d always — I don’t even know how to explain it — the way he would kick the ball, it was just funny.”
Brandt, meanwhile, remembered the bus rides. “They’d make guys sing rap songs,” he said. “And it was usually Chris getting guys to do that.”
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It’s silly, but there is substance to that stuff — a year after finishing 17-41-2-2, the Capitols doubled their win total and made the Clark Cup playoffs in Brandt’s first season in charge.
Lowell did something similar. The RiverHawks doubled their win total from a year ago. If not for winning only one of its final nine regular-season games, Lowell would've likely been in the mix for the NCAA tournament.
Perhaps, for an added boost, the River Hawks could introduce Dollar Beer Nights.
