By Cameron Levasseur, Brandon Murdock
From the outset of the 2024-25 season, it was clear that this year would be much different for Quinnipiac men’s hockey.
For one, the Bobcats lost much of their depth from a national championship run that is now two years in the rearview. Hobey Baker Award Finalist Collin Graf turned pro in the offseason, as did Frozen Four hero Jacob Quillan, sophomore star Sam Lipkin, and the remaining four defenseman who made up the team’s core in the spring of 2023. Just one remaining player, junior forward Victor Czerneckianair, had dressed in the title game.
For another, nearly 40% of their roster was freshmen, and another 22% was sophomores, a makeup unfamiliar to head coach Rand Pecknold in recent years.
So, despite its four-consecutive Cleary Cups as ECAC Hockey regular season champions, it was no surprise Quinnipiac found itself looking up in the preseason coaches’ poll to a veteran Cornell squad.
But six months later, the Bobcats are again entering the conference tournament as the top seed. How did they get here? The answer lies both within themselves and with others.
A slow start
Quinnipiac’s non-conference slate was not kind to the Bobcats, despite their strength of schedule of barely cracking the top 50% in the nation.
A season-opening win against Penn State was the highlight — and then things went south from there.
Quinnipiac was swept by Maine on the road, then split the other side of the Border Battle against New Hampshire with a puzzling 3-2 loss on home ice after trouncing the Wildcats 8-2 the night before.
A shutout of Holy Cross put the Bobcats back on track, only to be swept by Dartmouth and Harvard to open conference play.
“It’s a great group of guys,” head coach Rand Pecknold said following the Dartmouth loss, the Big Green’s first in Hamden since 2018. “We will buy in at some point.”
A midseason surge
After that sweep, the Bobcats stepped on the gas into the new year, putting together a 7-1-1 stretch and averaged 3.75 goals per game, nearly a goal per game more than they produced through the first month of the season.
Sophomore Mason Marcellus — a preseason All-League honoree — turned it on during this period, putting together a nine-game point streak that carried into January.
Quinnipiac was not blowing teams out; it had just one win in that stretch with a margin of victory above three, but the Bobcats were winning games they were supposed to win. Then the wheels fell off again.
A 5-1 loss to Northeastern on Jan. 4 goes down as the team’s worst of the regular season. It outshot the Huskies 36-32, but Quinnipiac struggled to generate quality chances, gave up the puck incessantly, and failed to protect the net front. It did not score until the final two minutes of the contest.
“We just struggled,” Pecknold said after the game. “[Northeastern] found a way to be really good on the road, and kind of sucked us in a little bit.”
But the Bobcats put things back together for the next two months, going 12-3-1 from early January to March, a record only blemished by a last-second loss to UConn in the Connecticut Ice Tournament and consecutive overtime losses to Clarkson — the ECAC’s No. 2 seed — before ultimately winning the Cleary Cup on the final day of the regular season.
Newcomers such as forwards Jeremy Wilmer and Jack Ricketts have found their rhythms. Wilmer has recorded at least a point, three goals, and nine assists in the last six games, while Ricketts is tied for the most goals in the country since December with 15 in his last 18 games.
“You always expect an adjustment period coming to a new place,” Ricketts said. “For some, it’s a little longer, and that’s the way it goes. I think just sort of the mentality in the second half [has been] to just keep pushing and focus on the little things.”
A bit of help
Even with a strong end to the regular season. Quinnipiac’s ECAC-winning 50-point total was the lowest it’s recorded in its five-year reign of dominance over the conference. In order to claim the regular season title again, the Bobcats needed a bit of help from Cornell, their most bitter on-ice rival.
On paper, the Big Red were poised for an explosive season, losing just one player from a team that came up one goal short of the Frozen Four the previous spring.
In reality, injuries hit Cornell hard, losing 32 man games through the first eight games of the season and digging itself into a rut it struggled to overcome. The Big Red never won more than two consecutive games the entire season and likewise entered the ECAC Tournament the No. 6 seed, a far cry from their preseason billing.
Familiar places, new faces
It’s no secret that Quinnipiac’s regular season success has not translated to the conference tournament. No team has more regular season titles (nine), yet the Bobcats have just one Whitelaw Cup as ECAC Tournament champions to their name.
Lake Placid, the host site of the conference championship weekend, has been a particular house of horrors for Quinnipiac in recent years, seeing a title game loss to No. 3 Harvard in 2022 as well as semi-finals losses to No. 7 St. Lawrence in 2024 and No. 5 Colgate in 2023.
But this season, the team sits perilously on the Pairwise bubble entering the ECAC Tournament. Their No. 13 position will be the final at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. An early exit could boot Quinnipiac down the ranking and cost it a fifth-consecutive bid to the big dance.
“We’re fighting for our lives for the NCAA Tournament,” Pecknold said after a win over Brown on Feb. 22.
So winning their first Whitelaw Cup since 2016 is more of a priority than ever for the Bobcats, who view their situation through the lens of win-and-you ’re-in. And while they’re acutely aware of the team’s struggles at Herb Brooks Arena, Czerneckianair is the only rostered player to have played more than one game there.
In other words, it’s familiar territory with new faces. Maybe that’s just what Quinnipiac needs.
“We’re an entirely new team,” senior goaltender Noah Altman said. “We know we’re going to have a home weekend after the bye week to recoup ourselves.”
The Bobcats begin their conference tournament run with a best-of-three series against Brown in Hamden. Game One is set for Friday at 7 p.m.