Friday Notebook 11.22.24
Musings on the latest messy changes bound for college hockey; Nick Moldenhauer, puck management, and tracking or dying; and plaudits for the seven WoHo Wolverines set for the World University Games
College sports are an enormous mess. This statement probably applies to every moment in time since Harvard and Yale held a Regatta on Lake Winnipesaukee in 1852, and intercollegiate athletic competition began. Still, there is something unique about the present mess, and not just because it’s the one we’re dealing with right now: It’s not just that we are in a sea change moment in college sports, but that so many different seismic changes have arrived, all at once and, in keeping with NCAA tradition, free from clarity from leadership.
In 2018, the NCAA introduced the Transfer Portal. Three years later, its hand forced by legislation in California, the era of Name, Image, & Likeness arrived. Despite the three-year gap between their formal introductions, the two have become central to the landscape of college sports and also more or less inextricable from one another.
Now, college sports (and, more specifically for the purposes of our newsletter, college hockey) have a new dyad of change looming on the horizon, poised to strike closer to the foundation of the NCAA’s model: the House settlement (and its resulting roster cap and revenue sharing) and the newly granted eligibility of CHL players. There is more to unpack here than we possibly have time for, but let’s try to do this piece by piece.
The House settlement (so-called because it is the result of the court case House v. NCAA) will cost the NCAA and its member schools $2.8 billion. It includes back-pay for athletes who were denied the fruits of their labor power by the NCAA’s long-time fealty to amateurism (i.e. unpaid labor), and it establishes a framework for revenue sharing with current and future collegiate athletes.
A key mechanism for implementing the new revenue sharing model is a reworking of roster and scholarship limits. In hockey, rosters will now be capped at 26, with schools able to give all 26 players a scholarship. Teams used to be limited to 18 scholarships, but the average Division I hockey team had a roster of 28.5 players in the ‘23-24 season, so while the number of scholarships available is climbing, the number of actual roster spots will shrink.
Perhaps the NCAA will eventually decide it has erred in that roster cap and raise it, but for the time being, teams across the country will be in a fundamentally more precarious position when it comes to navigating injuries, and there will be fewer roster spots for athletes to find a DI home.
As a starting point to making sense of this change (and the mess the NCAA created for itself), it’s crucial to point out that this shift (away from a scholarship limit and toward a more stringent roster limit) is a perfect illustration of NCAA leadership and governance: reactive rather than proactive and done with little more than fear of future litigation in mind. As Denver University coach David Carle pointed out to me over the summer, the NCAA’s objective here in that shift is to avoid antitrust lawsuits by positioning itself as governing no more than roster size, as opposed to capping something with financial implications like a scholarship. That is the NCAA: fearful, precariously perched on technicalities, and legislating for the sole purpose of self-protection.
Then, you have revenue sharing, which promises to see schools begin sharing $22 million annually with their athletes. The roster cap and revenue sharing will be on an opt-in basis for the schools, which will create a stark economic stratification within the sport, between schools that can budget for that payment and schools that can’t or won’t. It’s fairly obvious that, for example, the Big Ten hockey schools will opt in, while the little DII schools that play DI hockey presumably will not, but that leaves a ton of gray area between, including prestige programs like Carle’s Denver, Boston University, or Quinnipiac.
Beyond the basic revenue sharing dividing line, there is also the question of how the schools opting in will allocate those funds. Presumably, the B1G schools will want to set a big chunk of that money aside for football and perhaps men’s basketball. But what about North Dakota? Sure, the Fighting Hawks are a competitive FCS football program, but there is no doubt about the sport that school derives its athletic identity from. Will that lead to significant variation amongst the schools that do share revenue? We also have no clarity on how Title IX will apply to revenue sharing.
Then we have the newfound eligibility of CHL players to join the NCAA ranks. On the surface, that’s a win for college hockey in its longtime rivalry with Canadian major junior as dueling paths to the pros, but it also has enormous potential for a downstream impact that could very easily harm the overall landscape of American hockey, particularly where the USHL and NAHL are concerned. It also represents a dramatic increase in the player pool that comes at a moment when, as discussed above, the number of roster spots available is shrinking.
CHL eligibility also raises a major logistical question with respect to NHL Draft rights. An NHL team selecting a CHL player retains their draft rights for two seasons, while for an NCAA player, those rights don’t expire until August 15th of that player’s graduation year. How will those rules apply to a player who begins his career in the CHL, then enters the NCAA? The NHL will need to provide a clearer framework for that process, but a world in which CHLers arrive in the NCAA already free from their Draft rights has major potential to throw a monkey wrench in the sport’s already strained gears.
As if all that weren’t enough change, there is also the unignorable possibility that all of these changes will be rendered moot if the right lawsuit comes around to unseat the NCAA entirely, or if the Big Ten and SEC decide to simply break away from NCAA governance in football. The TL;DR on all of this is that it is an enormous mess that will surely have consequences that we can’t yet foresee. I am skeptical of anyone who expresses with certainty the long-term impacts of all these swirling winds of change arriving at the same time, but still, I thought I’d hazard a few predictions as to where we’re heading:
(I) The USHL will lose so much of the progress it has made as a league in the next decade if it can’t figure out some sort of working relationship with the CHL leagues (e.g. Memorial Cup participation, some sort of interleague play, or at the most extreme, a straight merger).
USHL-to-CHL defections have already begun, and they are only going to keep coming. However, the CHL—which is hoping for a system in which its players graduate from the CHL into the NCAA, rather than defecting early, something the NCAA has no incentive to go along with—is also going to start suffering defections. It seems fairly clear to me that both leagues would benefit from some sort of cooperation, but that will require cooperation and setting egos aside in ways I’m not sure we will see.
(II) College hockey will become an incrementally older sport
It’s already true that your average college hockey player arrives on campus at a riper age than your average non-athlete first year, but I suspect these changes will only make it harder for an 18-year-old freshman to find a home on an NCAA roster. As discussed above, the player pool is growing as the number of roster spots decreases, and that suggests the threshold to become a DI hockey player will only climb. It’s never been easy to be a teenager in college hockey, but now it will be harder than ever to prove your worth, when coaches could simply lean on CHL graduates.
(III) Competition across economic tiers of the sport will continue in hockey in ways it will won’t in football
Union, Yale, and Quinnipiac are all (relatively) recent NCAA Men’s Hockey national champions. Quinnipiac—a dominant force in the sport’s 21st century with a slight list of NHL alumni—provides great evidence that hockey, especially at the collegiate level, is a weak link sport rather than a strong one (i.e. the quality of your worst player informs your results more than that of your best one). Rand Pecknold’s Bobcats have a few alums skating around the NHL, but by and large, they’ve risen to the pinnacle of the sport with depth and discipline.
In theory, that will remain possible, but it’s hard to say exactly how feasible it will be for a team that doesn’t opt in to the new roster cap and revenue sharing to seriously compete for championships. In football, the clear trend is toward increased separation between the (economic) elite and everyone else, with the seemingly inevitable destination a super league, when the B1G and SEC decide to cut loose the perceived dead weight of the Vanderbilts, Northwesterns, Mississippi States, and/or Illinoises. Hockey will theoretically leave room for its underfunded upstarts to compete with the blue bloods, but, in practice, will that be true competition or Globetrotters-Generals?
(IV) The (pipe) dream of western or southeastern expansion of college hockey seems more fanciful now than ever
Like a lot of college hockey enthusiasts, I dream of seeing SEC schools or the B1G’s new western members (USC, UCLA, Washington, and Oregon) add Division I hockey. There have always been practical impediments to making this work, but, now more than ever, it seems far-fetched, if not ridiculous. At a time of tremendous uncertainty and increasing expense, it’s just hard to imagine any of those schools deciding now is the time to get in on a sport as cost prohibitive as hockey.
To wrap up, I wanted to share some perspectives on these changes from the University of Michigan men’s hockey team’s coaching staff and players, beginning with head coach Brandon Naurato.
For Naurato, there is legitimate excitement in the prospect of the increased player pool but also evident frustration with the ever-changing landscape. “You have a plan, and you have to take it for what it is and just constantly adjust,” he said, when asked this week about the challenge of long-term planning in such an uncertain environment. “There’s this big pool of people, but to find the right people is important,” he went on to say. “So you have to interview 200 or recruit 200…to find the right five. That’s why it’s a lot right now. And NIL and transfer portal and revenue share and scholarship caps, and we have no clue what any of the numbers are. So you’re running a business, and you don’t know what your cash flow is…So we’re just trying to win hockey games.”
He offered this last line with a grin, but there is a clear underlying vexation from a coach who prides himself on preparation staring down such an uncertain future. Meanwhile, Naurato has emphasized culture and people in fostering a familial environment within his team since he took over as head coach on an interim basis, so it should come as no surprise those are ideas he is quick to return to amidst the present maelstrom of change.
He pointed out that facing this sea of new recruits, it will be paramount to identify those who are truly eager for everything college hockey entails. “The biggest thing you think about is you don’t want this to be a stop-gap,” Naurato said. “It’s big time for culture. [Prospective recruits] have to appreciate what this place is about and how do they do that before they get here? I don’t think anyone really knows until you’re here, but you just have to make sure you have the right people. That’s the hardest thing…We’ve had all these first rounders here: There’s major pain and a ton of growth,” he points out. “So they have to be willing to grow in this environment and in this culture, and there’s just a lot you don’t know, because it’s kids from all over the world [for whom] this wasn’t the path.”
Assistant coach Rob Rassey—who coached and served as a general manager in the USHL before his time at U-M—stressed the fact that it will take time to truly understand the impact of all this change.
“It’s hard to say,” he said, when asked last week about how these changes will re-shape the landscape of American hockey, collegiate and below. “I think there’s a lot of people that are gonna have a lot of opinions. All I know is that it completely blows up everything we’ve known about recruiting and everything we’ve gotten comfortable with, and it’s completely blown that up…For us, in the recruiting process of both identifying players and maintaining those relationships and getting comfortable with guys taking different paths and going to play for different teams in different leagues. I think from an initial standpoint, the first couple of years, I think…finding that groove of what that path is gonna predictably look like over—it’s probably gonna take two or three years for that to happen. It’s gonna be the same thing I feel like as the transfer portal. The impact that the transfer portal had to college recruiting and the fifth year being added through the COVID year and what that did to college recruiting. I feel like with so many players becoming recently available and eligible all of a sudden, the player pool just got doubled, and half of it’s not committed. It’s gonna be a lot different. As to how the different leagues are going to adjust, I’m not sure. Teams are gonna have to adapt and do things and try to think outside the box and do things a little bit differently. From the USHL, some of the teams and players—a couple of whom have already changed their mind and gone the CHL path already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear about more stuff like that happening soon. We don’t know, but I’m hopeful that it’ll get ironed out here.”
Rassey’s expression of general uncertainty strikes me as the correct attitude in this moment of change, and identifying a predictable path to college hockey is of course a crucial area for the college hockey world to come to terms with, but that will take time. And more than likely, it will take trial and error.
“I started coaching in college hockey at Harvard in 2013,” Rassey added. “The conversations that were having then at the Coaches’ Convention, versus the conversations that we had this past year at the Coaches’ Convention, could not be more far apart if you’re looking at the biggest issues. And it’s not just hockey. It’s all of college athletics. With what NIL has done and what the transfer portal has done to every sport, and now for us specifically in hockey, opening up to the CHL, it’s a lot happening at once.” Per Rassey, back in 2013, “The gentleman’s agreement for verbal commitments, honestly, was the biggest thing” up for discussion. How quaint those times were.
Meanwhile, from a player perspective, what struck me most is that in talking to just two Wolverines about the subject, it’s immediately clear that our assumptions about how the relevant 18-22 year olds will approach their new options are more than likely misguided.
Freshman Michael Hage is exactly the sort of player the new rules could affect most. He is a Canadian who had long been pegged as a first-round NHL Draft talent before that was made official last summer, and he decided to go the USHL, then NCAA route. When asked whether he thinks these new options might have altered his path, Hage replied, “I don’t think it would have changed my decision. I’m sure I would’ve looked at it differently when I made the choice, but I don’t regret going to Chicago or making the choice to come to school at all. I enjoyed my time when I was in the USHL and loved it there in Chicago.”
As Hage explains it, he settled on the Chicago Steel late in his U-16 season, before he was even certain he wanted to play college hockey. “Probably late in my U-16 season, before the OHL Draft, I took a look at Chicago and skated down there, and I knew right away that that was where I wanted to be. The coaching staff, the players, and what those guys were producing at the next level was something I wanted to be a part of right away…I think going to Chicago also kept my options open, which is what I wanted at the time.”
There is, for very good reason, major concern around the USHL that prospects like Hage—or Adam Fantilli and Owen Power before him—wouldn’t want to go south of the border any longer, even if they eventually wanted to play college hockey. Hage’s idea of keeping options open is no longer relevant, but his thought process shows that there remains a path for USHL teams to sell high-level players on the development their programs can help steer.
Meanwhile, sophomore Nick Moldenhauer explains that his decision as a Canadian to play in the USHL for the Steel was driven by straight situational pragmatism. “It could have been a factor when I was making my decision, but COVID was kind of a big thing when I was deciding to go to school or the CHL,” he explained last week. “There was nothing going on in Canada when I was supposed to go to the O[HL] and then I went to the States and just loved it.” From there, he stayed on and settled on college hockey as his next step. The specifics of those circumstances hopefully won’t recur any time soon, but nonetheless, Moldenhauer’s process is a reminder of the myriad and unpredictable factors that can inform a collegiate decision.
In the end, some measure of pain was inevitable to enact the necessary change of abandoning the NCAA’s outdated and exploitative notion of amateurism. However, as this uncertain onslaught of change washes over the sport, the continued lack of proactive NCAA leadership will only accentuate that pain—for athletes who no longer have a place in the (DI) game, for programs that can no longer keep up with the economic landscape, and for everybody downstream of the NCAA.
Moldenhauer, Puck Protection, “Track or Die,” and Managing Risk
With a goal and four assists, sophomore forward Nick Moldenahuer hasn’t exactly lit up the scoresheet ten games into the new season, but he has embodied the ideals Naurato is looking for from a Wolverine side with a different texture from its recent predecessor. This Michigan team isn’t teeming with first round draft picks, so it’s had to lean more heavily on work rate away from the puck to find its success. Michigan has been rewarded for that effort in the form of four consecutive wins (five if you include the exhibition victory of the U.S. NTDP U-18 squad), and Moldenhauer has helped model what that work looks like.
Naurato praised the Ontarian winger after the first of his team’s two wins over Notre Dame for “Winning races and battles, being hard, coming back and breaking up some plays on the backcheck, carrying pucks through the neutral zone, which to me just shows confidence. Every time the puck left his stick, for the most part, it was a positive play.” This week, he added that Moldenhauer’s underlying numbers suggest an offensive breakthrough may be in order, with the head coach saying of the sophomore, “He leads our team in high-danger chances. He’s a little snake-bit right now, but he’s really working. He’s playing winning hockey, so you just hope it goes in for him, for his confidence, but he’s been doing a lot of really good things.”
Moldenhauer pointed out last week that those habits of winning hockey that Naurato alluded to have been a natural offshoot of his team’s points of emphasis each week in practice. “When you work on it in practice and talk about it throughout the week, it just kinda subconsciously develops into your game habits,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been focusing on as a group, and definitely, it’s bleeding into our game style, and I think it’s been good for us.” “I think a big thing in our group has been ‘Track or Die,’ so…just taking pride in those things. You gotta work no matter what,” he adds of the emphasis on getting back into the right defensive positions.
You can see an example of Moldenhauer putting that mantra into action in the GIF below, in which his full bore hustle makes up serious ground to put him in position to break up a would-be royal road pass, as center Michael Hage does his best to fend off a three-on-one:
As far as managing the puck is concerned, Moldenhauer emphasizes picking the right time and place for creativity while maintain a sense of responsibility to his teammates. “You’re not gonna try to dance a guy when there’s two minutes left in the third period, but I think a big thing was just setting each other up for success, making the next guy have a better opportunity than you did,” he says. “Just setting the rest of your teammates up for success, shift in and shift out really helped us and is something we’re gonna look to continue to do moving forward.”
For Naurato, that idea of putting teammates into better positions than the ones you inherited has emerged as the central pillar of winning hockey. “There’s 10 really good teams, and it’s who’s hot at the end of the year. You win two games, and you’re in the Frozen Four, and you win two more, and you’re National Champion. It’s not always the best team, but I think it’s who limits risk the best,” the coach explains. “So puck management is when the puck leaves my stick, do we still have the puck? And if we do, it’s a good play. If they have the puck, then it wasn’t the right play. Especially [against] Penn State, they play that 1-1-3 [neutral zone]. They got three on the [defensive] blue line every time. If you don’t dump it in, then you’re gonna turn it over, and then they’re right back at you. If you do dump it in, and you’re patient, patient, patient, they get sick of getting forechecked, they turn it over, and then you have the puck.”
When asked whether he would have cited limiting risk as the number one priority when he took over as head coach, Naurato replies, “That’s probably something I’ve learned. And then even with this team being different, it doesn’t mean this team doesn’t have talent, but imagine if we weren’t focusing so much on defense. We’d probably be in big trouble, so just trying to put it all together and help guys grow…We just have to defend. We can’t outscore our mistakes, and you really never can. In the playoffs, you never can.”
Naurato’s Wolverines will look to maintain their defensive stinginess this weekend as they travel to State College to take on Penn State.
Six Wolverines, plus Coach Trubiano, Set for Winter World University Games
We’ll save a longer WoHo update for the time being, with the University of Michigan women’s team in the midst of a home and home with Indiana Tech. The Wolverines won 3-2 last night at Yost on the strength of a third period winner from Julia Lindahl, ahead of a rematch tonight in Fort Wayne. However, I’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to commend the six Wolverines set to represent their country on an international stage in the new year.
Last week, the ACHA and USA Hockey announced their women’s hockey roster for the 2025 Winter World University Games, set for this January in Turin. Goaltender Sandrine Ponnath, defender Keegan Gustafson, and forwards Julia Lindahl, Kelsey Swanson, Lucy Hanson, and Emily Maliszewski will represent the American side.
No ACHA program can match the Wolverines’ six player representatives, and coach Jenna Trubiano will be on the American coaching staff, serving as an assistant under head coach Lindsey Ellis. Trubiano met Ellis—who serves as the head coach at Arizona State—through a teammate at Little Caesars who had gone on to play with Ellis at Miami (Oh.).
We owe a hearty congratulations to all the Wolverine representatives and look forward to following their exploits abroad.
Thanks to Michigan Athletics for this week’s preview image. Please also check out THN.com/Detroit for daily Detroit Red Wings coverage.