2016 NCAA Hockey Frozen Four Preview
After one week of the tournament the Frozen Four is set with very few surprises. Based on the pre-tournament Elo ranking of the teams, three of the top five have made it into the tournament.
The biggest surprise in the Frozen Four is
Boston College, who was 5th in PairWise and 7th by Elo. But even they were given a 28.6% chance of making it this far. In reality there no true underdogs left, with every team
already having a higher Elo ranking than
last year's champion.
St. Cloud State losing in the first round was the most unexpected outcome of the first weekend of the tournament. Even after the loss, St. Cloud is still ranked fourth by Elo and they had been given a 72% chance of winning their opening game.
They were ranked even higher than Minnesota State was last year when they also lost in the first round.
WIth all the teams so close to each other (and North Dakota and Quinnipiac seperated by less than a single point by Elo), there is not much that can be said about the odds of each team winning. Still the stats are in the table below...
| Semifinals | Finals |
Quinnipiac | 57.29 | 29.49 |
North Dakota | 53.16 | 28.24 |
Boston College | 42.71 | 18.87 |
Denver | 46.84 | 23.40 |
Overall Quinnipiac has the best odds of winning the tournament at 29.5%, but the odds of all four remaning teams are within eleven percentage points of each other so this could easily go to any team.