UMass’ own Joe Meloni has an eloquent article on Casey Wellman for the College Hockey News.  It’s good to see Wellman get some national press.  I think a lot of accomplishments and skills are being overlooked because of the fact that he plays on a line with James Marcou, one of the elite playmakers in the country.  But much of what Wellman has accomplished in his stellar rookie season and the current one are through his hard work and talent.  The play that Meloni details was one of those plays, where Wellman played smart, was in the right place, hustled, and put a shot exactly where it needed to go to hit the net.  Unassisted.

Wellman and James Marcou are mentioned in this USCHO blog regarding the Hobey Baker race.

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McKeen’s Hockey has an interview with recruit Mike Pereira.  He states that BU, BC, Providence, Yale, and Quinnipiac were all involved in his recruiting.  Here’s why he’s coming to UMass:

I really liked what UMass and its staff had to offer to me. It is a place I could really see myself going to and enjoying it there. It isn’t a BU or BC where it has a ton of history. I want to be apart of a team at UMass where we could continue the progress they are making now. Each year they are getting better and I want to be apart of it. I am looking forward to coach Cahoon’s coaching style. He doesn’t “handcuff” his players. He lets them play, while they still follow the systems he has to offer. He is a very similar coach to coach Gardner (Avon coach) and coach Marotollo (former South Kent coach).

I’m glad to report that UMass recruit Joel Hanley, who broke his leg in November, made his return for the Newmarket Hurricanes.

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Matt Vautour of the Gazette says his New Year’s resolution will be to blog more about hockey.  What many people probably don’t know is that, while he writes mostly about basketball, Matt actually is a self-proclaimed hockey guy, so I look forward to seeing some more of his hockey blogs.  Of course one of his first blogging ideas was to detail how the teams for the NCAA tournament was picked.  Which is funny since in a similar vein I was thinking about doing a blog on the pairwise, which is used to pick the NCAA tournament.  Of course he found a pretty good explanation from College Hockey News which I’ll also just choose to pass along rather than try to recreate.  However, as things get down to the wire and if UMass is still in the mix, expect to see some more pairwise blogging in the future.  Since I’m a numbers guy in real life I always keep a close eye on the formulaic rankings and stats. 

We already saw an interesting event with the pairwise this past weekend whereas UMass went from 6th to tied for 5th after losing to UVM on Sunday.  While many may think this was due to some odd, fuzzy math that rewarded UMass for a loss, what actually happened was the win over the Minutemen gave Vermont a better record against Teams Under Consideration than St Cloud, the team previously in 5th, resulting in them losing a pairwise point and dropping into a tie with UMass. 

Scanning the individual comparison table of the PWR it really looks like UMass’ 8-5-0 record against teams under consideration is what’s making the most difference in the pairwise.  Their 9th best RPI ranking doesn’t hurt either.  What was largely criticized as a soft schedule to begin the year (including by yours truly) has materialized into the 11th toughest according to the RPI formula.  Just because I felt like breaking it out, here’s strength of schedule for all the Hockey East teams as of today:

UNH 5th
Vermont 10th
UMass 11th
Boston University 14th
Boston College 18th
Maine 19th
Northeastern 20th
Merrimack 22nd
Lowell 27th
Providence 31st

Vermont’s schedule has certainly helped them and is one of the key reasons they find themselves 10th in the pairwise currently despite only being four games over .500.  Schedule is also a reason why a team like Lowell finds itself on the outside looking in of the tournament field currently despite having only a slightly worse record than UMass.