Men’s Hockey East Tournament Odds

The Hockey East men’s octofinals are over and we have ourselves an updated quarterfinals bracket. Thanks to conference re-seeding, #1 Boston College gets #10 seeded Merrimack in the quarterfinals round, which should help their chances of advancing quite a bit.

The quarterfinals round in Hockey East is a best-of-three series, with the winners advancing to the TD Garden the following weekend for the semifinals and finals. The semifinals round is also re-seeded, which means that the highest remaining team will face the lowest remaining team in the semifinals, with the remaining two getting the other matchup.

The KRACH Rankings are assigned on an odds-based system, such that the odds of Team A beating Team B on a given night are rA/(rA+rB), with rA and rB being each team’s rating. So thanks to KRACH, and a little bit of a crash course Prob-Stat refresher, we can project out every remaining team’s odds of winning the Men’s Hockey East tournament.

Let’s first look at each team’s odds to advance to the semifinals at the Garden:

Not a big surprise that the top seeds have the best chance of advancing, but you’ll notice that even though the Eagles have the third best KRACH rating of the remaining teams, they do have the best chance of advancing to the semifinals of any of the eight teams. Thanks, Merrimack.

Northeastern’s just a hair behind, thanks to their best-in-conference rating, while Boston University gets the third best odds thanks to a relatively weak UConn opponent. Providence College rounds out the four favorites.

Here are the odds of each team to win the whole thing:

Even with the benefit of reseeding, Top seeded BC does find itself with the second best odds of winning the Hockey East tournament. Northeastern’s rating is much stronger than BC’s, but the Eagles do maintain that second place edge over Providence despite the Friars having a better rating thanks to PC getting the tougher road to the finals.

The Eagles have a roughly 11% chance to make the NCAA tournament (up from about 10% before this weekend) as an at-large team if they fail to win the Hockey East tournament, but they’d probably have to advance to the finals to do so. But with a 22% chance to win the league and an 11% chance to get in as an at-large, Boston College at least has a puncher’s chance to get themselves on the right side of the bubble.