The Huskies will play in-state rival Quinnipiac in their first-ever NCAA Tournament game.
UConn men’s hockey is officially in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in program history. The Huskies were selected as a 2-seed for the Allentown Regional, where they’ll play the 3-seed Quinnipiac Bobcats on Friday at 5 p.m. ET.
Quinnipiac went 24-11-2 and won the ECAC regular season title this year. The 2023 national champions will make their 11th NCAA Tournament appearance.
The two schools already squared off once this season. Back on Jan. 24, a last-second goal from Ryan Tattle lifted the Huskies over the Bobcats in the first round of CT Ice, 2-1 — their first win in the series since the 2014-15 campaign.
The other side of the Allentown Regional features 1-seed Maine — who just beat UConn in the Hockey East Championship — and 4-seed Penn State, the hosts.
In the rest of the bracket, Hockey East got six teams in — No. 1 overall seed Boston College and fellow 1-seed Maine; 2-seeds BU, Providence and UConn; 3-seed UMass — while New England schools account for half the field with the six from Hockey East, Quinnipiac and Bentley.
Despite the program’s first season coming in 1960, UConn had never made the NCAA Tournament field. The Huskies failed to get there during their Division III days (1960-98) but have come close since moving up to Division I in 1998.
In 2000, UConn won the MAAC Tournament title but the league didn’t have an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. In 2020-21, the Huskies believed they deserved an at-large selection but the committee disagreed. The next season, they reached the Hockey East championship but fell to UMass in overtime.
Before today, UConn was one of nine schools never to make the NCAA Tournament. Now only Army, Augustana, Lindenwood, LIU, Sacred Heart, St. Thomas and Stonehill remain after both the Huskies and Bentley earning their place.
There are five former UConn players elsewhere in the tournament: Matthew Wood (2-seed Minnesota), Samu Salminen (3-seed Denver), Logan Terness (3-seed Ohio State), Arsenii Sergeev (4-seed Penn State) and Jake Black (4-seed Bentley).
The Huskies finished sixth in Pairwise and enter the NCAA Tournament having tied a program record with 22 wins during a historic campaign.
Coming into this season, they had only had one 40-point scorer since joining Hockey East. This year alone, they have three with Joey Muldowney (27-18—45), Jake Richard (15-27—42) and Hudson Schandor (10-30—40). Muldowney has the second-most goals in the country and set UConn’s single season Division I record by lighting the lamp 27 times while Schandor’s 30 assists are also a Division I program record.
The 16-team NCAA Tournament is entirely decided by the Pairwise metric. Once the six automatic bids are distributed, the top 12 teams still remaining fill out the field. The committee’s only job is to make sure the bracket adheres to all the necessary rules.