NCAA Hockey 101: Why home ice is so important in the playoffs

It should come as no surprise in any sport that being able to play at home is important. In hockey, though, it is particularly important, because you get the benefit of last change, which has more of an impact than most people likely expect.

There are other reasons for this type of dominance in college hockey as well, with varying rink dimensions, familiarity with how the rink “feels” (i.e., lively boards vs. dead boards, etc.), the ability to play in front of their rather lively home crowds, and so on. There's also the benefit of not having to ride a bus for a few hours for teams in the east, or flying and staying in a hotel for a few days for teams out west.

The benefits add up. The data suggests that home teams over the last few years win a little more than 56 percent of games, meaning opponents win only about 44 percent. That's a huge difference in and of itself. They also score nearly 54 percent of the goals and take almost 53 percent of the shots.

The reason I bring all this up now is that conference playoffs are starting for Hockey East, the ECAC, and Atlantic Hockey this weekend, and having attended both games of last week's pivotal Boston College/UMass Lowell series, the importance of home ice for the latter team was put into stark contrast.

After BC and BU won on Friday night, the path to a first-round bye and home ice in the league quarterfinals became clear: Lowell had to win at home and hope BU lost at Notre Dame on Saturday. And that's exactly what happened, with a 3-1 win for the River Hawks and a 1-0 defeat for the Terriers a few minutes later sealing Lowell into the first-round bye.

But the reason this was important for Lowell is that it, in particular, seems to be a juggernaut at home. In Lowell, it went 6-2-3 in league games (a .682 winning percentage), and outscored opponents 30-17. Away from home, it went 6-4-1 (.591), and only outscored opponents 28-20. That's a decent enough difference in and of itself, but when it comes to playing top teams, Lowell's stay-at-home dominance was very much on display.

Not to draw too many conclusions from an incredibly small sample, but Lowell clearly does something at home that it cannot do on the road:

As you can see, Lowell is dominant at home in terms of winning and goalscoring, but those other numbers are a little misleading. In college hockey, score effects loom quite large, and Lowell spends a good portion of its home games leading against everyone, including the top teams. That's going to skew the shots and shot attempt numbers away from their favor, and given the amount of time they spent leading versus trailing in those five games (136:54 with a lead, and just 8:06 trailing), that speaks quite well to their dominance in those games.

Conversely, Lowell spent exactly zero seconds(!!!) leading in their three road games against top teams — at Providence, at BU, and at BC — but 127:39 trailing. And that's out of a little more than 180 minutes. When you hold a lead for zero-point-zero minutes on the road, that's going to help your non-goal and non-winning numbers, so for Lowell to only be marginally better than its opponents in this regard speaks to their actual quality of play. 

Lowell coach Norm Bazin was characteristically coy on Saturday when asked about what advantages playing on home ice gives his team, saying the team really likes playing in front of its home fans. But clearly last change is a huge benefit to them, as is the ability to deploy the club's forecheck in a more effective way.

Consequently, it's been tough not to think about the teams that that benefit most from playing at home in general. Shockingly, over the course of the whole season, Lowell only sees the 13th-largest improvement in home winning percentage versus road. It's actually Clarkson that enjoys the biggest bump here (plus-.457!), and also has the second-best improvement in goal differential as well as the 15th-best improvement in shot differential. So it behooves the Golden Knights that they earned home ice for at least the first round of the conference tournament. But when they go on the road in the second round, likely to face the juggernaut Quinnipiac Bobcats, they're in for some tough sledding.

Other noteworthy teams that suffer quite badly on the road include Minnesota (fifth-largest drop-off in winning percentage), Merrimack (the third-largest drop in goal differential, at 2.54), and Robert Morris (an 8.6 drop in shot differential, 13th-largest in the country). There are, meanwhile, a few teams which actually do better on the road than at home in some ways, including Yale, Harvard, and Boston College.

Finally, just to illustrate how important it was to get a first-round bye, let's return to Hockey East. The Boston University team that lost out to Lowell for the fourth and final home ice spot on a tie-breaker — and which got belted in its only game at Lowell, 6-3, after a 2-1 overtime win the night before — could end up ruing its inability to take care of business on the road. It was only a .467 team away from home this season, including going 1-3-1 against the top four teams in Hockey East (a win at Notre Dame and a tie at Providence were its only points). BU's goals per game drops by 13 percent on the road, while its goals allowed jumps nearly 48 percent. They also allow more shots on goal and score fewer. When they beat UMass and advance to the second round, these numbers don't bode too well for that series at Lowell.

Which just goes to show that if you can't win consistently on the road in the regular season, your path to postseason glory gets much more difficult in a hurry.

A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)

1. Quinnipiac (beat Brown and Yale)

2. Boston College (split a home-and-home with UMass Lowell)

3. North Dakota (swept at Omaha)

4. Providence (swept UMass in a home-and-home)

5. St. Cloud (swept by Minnesota-Duluth)

6. Michigan (split at Minnesota)

7. Notre Dame (split with BU)

8. UMass Lowell (split a home-and-home with BC)

9. BU (split at Notre Dame)

10. Yale (won at Princeton, lost at Quinnipiac)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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