Colorado College looking to get back into NCAA tournament

This article is presented by Everything College Hockey.

Ask any college coach who takes over a struggling programme how long it takes to get things back on track, and they'll tell you it's usually Year 3 when you take your biggest strides.

And of the many great programmes of the 1990s and 2000s, few have struggled more in recent years than Colorado College.

From 1995 to 2011, the Tigers made the NCAA tournament 12 times in 17 tries and went to the Frozen Four three times. They were one of the best college hockey programmes in the country and produced two Hobey Baker winners, plus another finalist. If there had been a Mike Richter Award back then, at least a couple of CC goalies would have been in the running. That's how good the programme was on a consistent basis.

Since then, though, things haven't gone great. In 2012, they finished 18-16-2, and then didn’t have another season at or above .500 until last year.

But in 2023-24, the win total climbed from 13 to 21 under third-year coach Kris Mayotte and CC narrowly missed its first tournament berth since they stopped making Harry Potter movies. They missed that NCAA tournament by .0004 comparison points — one of the narrowest cutoffs ever — finishing 15th in the country and only getting bumped out by the Atlantic Hockey and WCHA autobids. This year, the hope is to return to the promised land, not just by squeaking in, but by kicking down the door.

"We consciously stayed away from the transfer portal, and invested in incoming freshmen… with the goal of coming in, playing them a lot, going through adversity with them," Mayotte told EP Rinkside. "Then by the time they're juniors, they've just been through a lot together. Guys have a lot of experience, they've played a lot of minutes, they've played in big roles. I think that's what we've done: We played them a lot, we played them against other teams' best players, and now they're juniors and seniors and we feel like we finally have a veteran team, not just in experience but in what they're prepared to go after this year."

Multiple top players on the team were offered NHL deals over the summer but chose to return, and CC dipped into the transfer portal to bolster its defence from top to bottom and its forward depth. Just as important was replacing the leadership from the players who did leave. Mayotte is also excited about the quality of the freshman class they've put together.

"If you look at the way we're playing through our first three games, you'll notice a difference in how active our defencemen are," he said. "It just fits what we're trying to do as a team."

Now, after more than a decade of losing (total record in that stretch: a dismal 153-272-43), they appear to be considered favourites to make the tournament once again, as Mayotte enters his fourth season. They were 11th in the USCHO preseason poll; picked third in the NCHC media poll, including one first-place vote, with two players on the preseason All-Conference team; and placed 10th in our own EP Rinkside preseason power ranking.

And with the weight of those expectations, it's so far, so good. Now, granted, it's only two games against Northern Michigan, not exactly a team many have high expectations for as far as national relevance is concerned, given how tough their offseason was. But the Tigers won both games of their season-opening series this past weekend. They outscored the Wildcats 10-4 on aggregate, outshot them 85-31, and attempts were 183-55. Again, this is a team they should have beaten, but there's not a coach on earth who will turn his nose up at 71 per cent of the goals and 73 per cent of the shots.

"It goes back to that .0004," Mayotte said. "We have a belief, we have a swagger, but we also have an urgency to the way that we play not just with the puck, but without the puck. Usually it takes some time to develop that. We're operating at a pretty high level right now. We know adversity's gonna come, it's only gonna continue to get harder, but in terms of winning habits, and a winning formula, we're really happy with where we are."

Starting 2-0-0 isn't exactly 2-0-0, though, because opening night went to overtime, meaning CC won't get all the Pairwise comparison points available — something that haunted them last season. The Tigers had 11 games go to OT last year, and if even one of the ties had flipped to an OT win, or an OT game had been won in regulation, they would have snapped their NCAA tournament drought last year instead of hoping to do it this time around. However, there's plenty of reason to believe that first-night 4-3 OT result was little more than a blip.

For one thing, junior goaltender Kaidan Mbereko gave up three goals on 19 shots, which is very unlike him. He is an elite goalie who should have been in the top 10 for the Mike Richter Award two seasons ago as a freshman (he seemingly didn’t have enough wins to impress enough voters, but that wasn’t his fault). Then last year, he deservedly finished in the top 3. He was one of CC’s two All-NCHC preseason picks and frankly, it’s surprising he wasn’t a unanimous selection. So something like only stopping 16 of 19 — and it should be noted only one of those goals came at 5-on-5, which probably helps you feel a little better — feels like it’s not likely to be repeated too often this season.

Mayotte called his star goalie “an absolute sponge,” saying he carries a notebook to every meeting with every coach on staff so he has every possible detail recorded in case he needs to refer back to it later. Add in a great understanding of the game itself and a high level of athleticism, and that’s a recipe for reliably great goaltending of the sort most coaches wish they had.

“He really values being able to outwork other people, and then being able to execute it,” Mayotte said. “I think the thing that gets overlooked a lot is how high his IQ is. He makes a lot of plays in a lot of situations look really easy that just quite honestly shouldn’t be. He doesn’t have to use his athleticism very often, and that’s a big credit to how smart he is as a goalie and how well he anticipates and reads plays.”

So yeah, tough bounces maybe, but little reason not to trust the goaltending. And the good news is that this wasn’t them taking five of six points, so to speak, in a way where you’d be a little worried about the offence. They scored 10 times and got goals from nine different players.

Offensively, Colorado College is led by junior forward Noah Laba, who's grown to be a 6-foot-2, 210-pound power forward since he arrived on campus, was a unanimous preseason All-NCHC player and showed why, setting up five goals in addition to scoring the OT winner on Friday. Last year, they scored at a similarly strong clip out of conference (47 goals in 10 OOC games), but they only finished 23rd in goals per game for the full season. Not that anyone expects Laba to maintain a 3-points-a-game pace, but he's a difference-maker in all game situations, and is an elite faceoff man (he went 29-12 this past weekend after being 57 percent last year). If he can take a step from the 20-17—37 he posted last season? He is probably in the Hobey Baker conversation, and CC is comfortably in an NCAA tournament spot.

"His 0-60 [acceleration] is as good as it gets at this level, and it's gonna be a plus asset at the next level, too," Mayotte said. "You pair that athleticism and that body with his mentality — he's just a relentless player. He doesn't let you off the hook, you can't shake him, he doesn't go away, and when he has the puck he's always attacking. Whether it's the net, a defender, finding a 1-on-2 or 2-on-1. It's really taken him to another level. … It's pretty easy to put him over the boards."

Something the Tigers wanted to address coming into this season was how much of the offense flowed through their top line of Laba, Gleb Veremyev and Zaccharya Wisdom in 2023-24. Together, they scored 45 of CC's 111 games. At least this past weekend, Wisdom had been moved to play with Ryan Beck and Owen Beckner — with fellow sophomore Bret Link swapping in on the top line — and if he can have even a similar amount of success as the 10 goals he scored last year with two other players, that's an obvious bonus. 

"I think we're just trying to find the right chemistry," Mayotte said. "Bret Link, in our preseason, has scored more goals than anyone on our team so far, and we like the step that he's taken from last year to this year. It's trying to find the right combinations, and we're confident we can always go back to the Gleb-Laba-Wisdom line and we're confident what they can bring on a given night."

Part of the thought process was separating speedsters like Laba and Wisdom so there was more up-tempo ability deeper in the lineup, while Link can slow the game down and create plays, giving the Tiger attack a little more variety on multiple lines.

Against NMU, Veremyev and transfer defenseman Ty Gallagher, each had four points on the weekend, and guys like Link, Beck, Max Burkholder had two apiece. If distributing the goalscoring talent more evenly throughout the lineup works, that's another obvious bonus that could bump the win total up just enough to end the tournament blight.

So, too, is the fact that the NCHC feels a bit more wide open than usual this year, especially after adding a well-regarded Arizona State team to the conference, which is probably part of the reason four different teams got first-place votes in the preseason media poll. CC finished third in the NCHC last season (meaning they mostly took care of business when it really mattered) but dropped a non-conference game or two they shouldn’t have. A little better performance in probably the top-to-bottom toughest league in the country — 8 of the 9 NCHC teams were in the preseason top 20, and a recent back-to-back national champion like Minnesota-Duluth somehow finished seventh of eight last season — or in non-conference games is likely to be enough to push the Tigers back into the tournament.

"It really is a bear of a league, and I think that's why you see so much success at the end of the season coming from this league," Mayotte said. "It's because we're so battle-tested throughout the year, because there really is no off weekend. When you're looking at a programme like Duluth, and they're in seventh place, and you're playing them at the end of the year, they're still Duluth. They're just so hard to beat because they're used to winning."

If they're able to keep racking up points in extremely winnable OOC games in their next few series — they're at Alaska-Anchorage this weekend, then have a crosstown home-and-home with Air Force before conference play begins — they'll be in a good position to improve their own chances at NCAA, and that of their conference as a whole by boosting comparison advantages that are crucial to the formula used to determine seeding and eligibility.

You don't need elite goaltending from an Mbereko-level difference-maker to make it to the NCAA tournament. You don't need an elite scorer like Laba to make it to the NCAA tournament. But it obviously helps, especially when you have both at your disposal every night on top of ever-improving depth. So for the first time in a long time, the Tigers look primed to take advantage of that high-end talent, and the restored feeling that comes in Year 4 under a new coach, to finally get back into that national title mix.