Northeastern, Providence, UMass Lowell, BU vying for 2nd in Hockey East

While the race for the ECAC’s Cleary Cup came down to a tie between Quinnipiac and Clarkson on the final day of the regular season, the race for first place in Hockey East has already been decided with five regular-season games still to be played before Saturday night.

UMass clinched its first Hockey East regular-season title in program history with last Thursday night’s 4-2 win at Merrimack and will make a Friday night visit to Connecticut with the No. 1 seed already solely in hand. Northeastern and Providence trail the first-place Minutemen by seven points with one game to play on their respective schedules.

Here is a breakdown of the Hockey East standings entering the final weekend of the regular season:

Though this weekend’s schedule is light, there is still plenty to be decided throughout the remainder of the standings. The eight teams that will advance to next weekend’s quarterfinals have been decided for more than a week, but the four teams behind UMass — the Friars, Huskies, UMass Lowell, and Boston University — are separated by only two points. Two points also separate sixth-place Maine through eighth-place New Hampshire.

Providence would be locked into the No. 2 seed with a Thursday win over Boston College. Northeastern would draw even if it beats UNH the following night, but the Friars control their own destiny for the higher seed as sweeping the Huskies in January gave them the tiebreaker.

UMass Lowell does not own the tiebreaker against any of Northeastern, Providence, or Boston University, but that unpredictability gives the River Hawks an outside shot at second place if they win and both the Huskies and Friars lose.

BU is only involved should Lowell drop a point at Vermont, but the Terriers would be locked into fifth if they lose or tie themselves. Maine would slot into sixth with at least one point out of its Saturday game against the Terriers, which will be the final regular-season game involving Hockey East clubs.

BC would slide up a spot if it gains one more point than Maine, but could slide down to eighth if UNH gains one more point. The latter scenario would set up a quarterfinal series between the league’s last two regular-season champions in the Eagles and first-place UMass. A loss to Northeastern would automatically keep the Wildcats eighth.

Three out of four in the AHC

Three of the top four teams in the Atlantic Hockey standings hail from New England for only the third time in conference history as first-time No. 1 seed American International, second-place Bentley, and fourth-place Sacred Heart all received postseason first-round byes.

However, this has not happened since 2005-06 when Holy Cross won the league and completed the historic NCAA tournament upset of No. 1 Minnesota in Grand Forks, N.D., and Sacred Heart and Bentley respectively finished third and fourth.

For the Yellow Jackets, junior Zackarias Skog made 30 saves in Saturday’s title-clinching, 4-1 win and his 15 wins this season put him one shy of tying Mark Buckley’s all-time program record set in 1987-88. Among other categories, AIC has already set new benchmarks for overall and Atlantic Hockey wins (both at 18) and goals scored (112).

Bentley took three points from Army West Point last weekend and concludes its season with 34 points, the second-highest total in program history. The Falcons of 2013-14 finished Atlantic Hockey play with a 16-13-5 record, good for 36 points and second place.

Recapturing the Cleary

Quinnipiac posted identical 4-1 wins over Brown and Yale to conclude the regular season with six weekend sweeps and its fourth Cleary Cup title in seven seasons. The Bobcats share this ECAC regular-season title with Cornell but own the No. 1 seed after beating and tying the Big Red during November and January meetings.

Head coach Rand Pecknold’s team enters the postseason fifth in the PairWise Rankings that are used to select the NCAA field. Among New England schools, only UMass ranks higher as the Minutemen are tied at the top with St. Cloud State.

Norwalk, Conn., native Nick Jermain led the Bobcats with three goals and one assist last weekend. Entering the final regular-season series, the junior had only five points in 20 games this season. All five of his goals have come in the last eight games.

Pair of fives

It’s no surprise that BU junior defensemen Chad Krys and Dante Fabbro shared Hockey East Player of the Week honors after combining for 10 points in the Terriers’ 5-1 win over Merrimack on Saturday night.

Krys scored twice and added three assists, while Fabbro scored BU’s first goal and assisted on the four others. They are the first Terrier blueliners to record five points in a game since Chris Kelleher did so on in a Hockey East playoff game against Merrimack on March 14, 1998.

The Terriers are 4-0-1 in their last five games and have not allowed more than one goal in any of those contests since a Feb. 15 overtime loss at UConn. Junior goaltender Jake Oettinger has a .981 save percentage with 151 stops on 154 shots in that span.

Loose pucks

― UMass sophomore Cale Makar scored twice and added two assists during last week’s wins over Merrimack and Maine, becoming the first Minuteman to reach the 40-point mark since James Marcou and Casey Wellman in 2009-10. Makar’s one assist against Merrimack was his 26th of the season, setting a single-season program record for assists by a defenseman; he also scored the game-winning goal in that contest.

― Freshman Tomas Vomacka has provided a spark in the Connecticut goal with four wins in his last six starts over junior Adam Huska. Vomacka established a new career-high with 34 saves in Friday’s 5-1 triumph against Vermont at the XL Center, while freshman Ruslan Iskhakov had three assists and Jonny Evans scored twice.

― Speaking of goaltenders and Vermont, junior Stefanos Lekkas continues to move his name in the Catamount record books after his 32-save effort against UConn. Lekkas reached 1,000 saves in a season for the second time in his career, a mark that has been amassed only five times in program history.

In addition, his 2,912 career saves rank third all-time in the Vermont ranks as he passed UVM Hall of Famer Joe Fallon who graduated in 2008.

― Harvard finished the season with at least three goals in eight consecutive games. Freshman defenseman Jack Rathbone (West Roxbury, Mass.) has points in the last four of those and eight points in that total span, while sophomore Reilly Walsh (Andover, N.H.) has 15 points in his last 13 games and four goals in the last five.

― Dartmouth’s Drew O’Connor earned his second ECAC Rookie of the Week award this season with three goals last weekend at Union and Rensselaer. He scored twice in a span of 2:31 during the second game, including his second game-winning marker of the season. Also against the Engineers, junior Will Graber posted his second collegiate hat trick.