2018 Friars Hockey Looking Good

[billyjack]

The Providence men's hockey team is lining closing in on a 5th consecutive NCAA bid. Since returning from Christmas break, we're 8-2, with 3 ties.

The NCAA uses a formula called Pairwise to determine bids. After last night's 3-2 OT win over Maine, the Friars are in 8th out of 16 slots.

Funny, coach Nate Leaman was hired the same time as Ed Cooley, and both have taken our teams to 4 NCAA's in a row. With Leaman we won the 2015 National Championship of course.

A bunch of Friars are skating around in the NHL too!

[billyjack]

The 2015 National Champion Friars advanced to the Final Eight in the NCAA Men's Ice Hockey tournament, but lost to the Irish 2-1 when Notre Dame scored with 27 seconds left in regulation.

Providence, Hockey East runners-up, earned a 2-seed in the Bridgeport CT bracket, and had beaten Clarkson of the ECAC on Friday night, 1-0. Actually the Villanova win over WVa ended within a minute of the end of the PC-Clarkson game. So i kept flipping between two nail-biter games, and both had great endings.

Note that the hockey NCAA's have 16 teams. Win 2 games and make the Frozen Four. But the competition is high, because only the top teams get invited.

An amazing streak in Friartown currently is that both Ed Cooley's men's hoops Friars and Nate Leaman's men's skating Friars have qualified for the previous 5 NCAA tourneys. Apparently this has been done only twice before, by Michigan and by Michigan State.

The PC goalie has one of the best names in sports... Hayden Hawkey... whose last name has the same pronunciation as the way Bostonians say the word "hockey". It's the same as if the Red Sox shortstop was named "Billy Baycebawl".