Sabres prospect Devon Levi and Northeastern need to win this weekend to keep their NCAA Tournament hopes alive – a pair of current Sabres shared what that experience is like
A lot of Sabres fans eyes will be on the big club this weekend, and perhaps in future weekends, keeping tabs on a handful of the college hockey prospects taking part in their conference tournaments. None will be watched closer than Northeastern goalie Devon Levi.
Northeastern sits in a perilous position in the Pairwise rankings, the mathematic methodology the NCAA uses to determine who goes to the NCAA tournament, sitting at 18 before they face Providence in the Hockey East quarterfinals. Only 16 teams make the NCAA tournament which means the Huskies will need to go deep in, if not win, the Hockey East tournament title. Winning the conference tournament gets a team an automatic bid to the ice dance.
In Levi’s case, he returned to Northeastern this season because he wanted to run it back with his teammates and make amends for what they felt was a disappointing finish, bowing out in the first round 2-1 against Western Michigan, the No. 1 seed in their region. Being the big man on campus is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and you can’t fault any player for wanting to go back. But the Huskies are in a must-win situation the rest of the way and that kind of pressure is something else.
“It’s totally different (than the regular season),” Sabres defenseman Jacob Bryson said. “It’s tough because if you lose those games, you’re done for the year, but you’ve got to prepare for them like you would any game during the year. Any team can win in those games. There’s no bad team when it comes to making the tournament or the semis or quarters or whatever it is for your league. It’s tough, it’s just like any playoff game in the NHL or AHL or wherever you are.”
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Bryson was a defenseman for Providence College and was a key player for the Friars when they advanced to the Frozen Four in 2019, coincidentally in Buffalo. Playing in Hockey East and going through the rigors of the season and the conference tournament provided some of the best college hockey in the country.
Mattias Samuelsson was a defenseman at Western Michigan University from 2018-2020. His Broncos team was on the path to the NCAA Tournament before COVID-19 shut everything down that spring. Battling your conference foes before even getting a shot at the NCAAs sets the table with a fiery centerpiece.
“In college hockey you hate the other teams way more,” Samuelsson said. “More than anything else, there’s rivalries between the school and there’s rivalries before you even get there.”
Rivalries in college hockey aren’t so much created through conflict as they are handed down through time. That kind of built-in heat helps make the conference tournaments feel much more intense, especially if a team is playing spoiler as much as they are for a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
“My first year, we played (Colorado College) at home best two out of three, and it was a bloodbath. It means a lot more. Because after the two out of three, it turns into a Frozen Four but with just NCHC teams, so that two out of three is the bigger one…All we had to do was beat CC and we were top seed, so it was in our building and we lost the first game and we lost the third game. We dropped out of tournament ranking when we lost. It was heartbreaking.”
For Northeastern, they’re not in a tournament spot in Pairwise and even getting past Providence won’t guarantee them anything and with Hockey East’s tournament being all single elimination games, no best-of-three to be had, an off night could mean the end of the season, and in Levi’s case, begin the countdown to when he’ll sign with the Sabres.
The twisting turning mathematics of the Pairwise creates strange bedfellows as the season clicks down. A team’s Pairwise ranking is affected by the quality of opponents they face, how they fared against them, and then how those opponents handled their business along the way as well. That’s an extremely simplified way to describe it, but the math never lies. The math also doesn’t care how much you hate a team, once you’re done with them, you want them to win.
“When the worst team in your division loses to some bad out of conference team, you get pretty pissed and you don’t like it,” Samuelsson said. “When Providence is ranked No. 1 and you don’t think they should be and then North Dakota goes in there and smacks them, you’re cheering for North Dakota.
“You want to be the best in college hockey, but in order to do that you’ve got to be the best in your conference. You want to say your conference is the best, but then you want to beat all the teams in yours. So, it’s this weird dynamic of cheering for your conference when they’re (playing someone) out of conference, but then you want to kill them when you play them.”
Working in Northeastern’s advantage is that they have one of the best goalies in the country, and even if Levi isn’t having an encore of the all-time performance he had last season, he’s the exact kind of goalie no one in a tournament wants to deal with. He’s also the exact kind of goalie the Sabres are eager to bring into the fold, and as eager as they are to bring him in, they’ll want him to go deep and win a national championship.
First thing’s first for Northeastern, however, they’ve got to beat Providence to have a chance.