Can anyone in the Big Ten, or anywhere else, stop Penn State?

From basically the start of the season, the Big Ten was a two-horse race.

There was Michigan State, a preseason darling projected to win the conference and compete heavily for the national title. Then came Minnesota, behind the Spartans in both regional and national polls but still a formidable foe.

You could also make arguments for Michigan, even Wisconsin, as credible threats—perhaps not to win many trophies, but to put together respectable seasons.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten coaches, who vote in the conference’s preseason poll, had Penn State only sixth. National poll voters had them 27th. The Nittany Lions had other plans.

It's been a strange year in college hockey, with several teams climbing from around .500 at the break to at least push their way into the NCAA bubble. But none have done so more impressively, from a bleaker position, than Penn State. It took them until Jan. 5 to win their first conference game, and they didn’t even reach .500 until Jan. 18. Since that latter date, they are 10-2-2; their only losses are to current No. 4 Minnesota and No. 14 Michigan. And they just swept Michigan out of the first round of the Big Ten playoffs, putting the Wolverines’ NCAA qualification chances in serious jeopardy.

However, as all this winning has continued in the second half—almost all of it against highly ranked teams—Penn State's own NCAA hopes have improved markedly. As of the holiday break, they sat 34th in the Pairwise, with national tournament participation odds in the low single digits, and in terms of the vibes around the team, that felt generous. Less than three months later, they’re up to 12th and considered a virtual lock to get in, whether through an at-large bid or by winning the Big Ten championship. Both were borderline unthinkable.

When you're thinking about what could start going right for a team that had a decent amount going wrong, the obvious place to start is in goal. Penn State came into the year relying on transfer Arsenii Sergeev, a 2021 Calgary Flames seventh rounder who joined the team from UConn, and he was only okay early. He went .905 in his first nine appearances (the team went 4-5-0) before suffering an injury that held him out of the lineup until the start of the second half. In his stead, backups John Seifarth (.918) and Noah Grannan (.761) produced mixed results, as you might imagine based on those numbers.

Seifarth, in particular, is an amazing story because he was on Penn State's club team last season, and Grannan was supposed to be the backup before getting benched. The fact that he even got into any games, let alone six, is remarkable. That he also posted a .918 save percentage despite having to play three games against either Ohio State or Michigan is outrageous.

You can point to individual games and highlight issues—Minnesota held them to one goal in a weekend, they gave up 16 in two games to Michigan, etc.—but taken as a whole, it's fair to say the team played well enough that it didn’t deserve to be below .500 and winless in conference play at the halfway mark. They had been a bit unlucky at both ends of the ice, especially against a slate of mostly elite Big Ten opponents. But they certainly weren’t punching so far below their weight that this turnaround would have been easy to predict.

Since returning, however, Sergeev has been quite good, posting a .918 save percentage across 20 appearances, only three of which Penn State lost. There were a couple of clunkers mixed in there, too, but when everyone has been pulling in the right direction, he has basically been guaranteed to win or tie since the start of January. The fact that all but two of those games were also in conference play? Well, that buoyed the near-unprecedented NCAA tournament push. The hole was a little too deep for them in the conference standings, where they still finished sub-.500 by points percentage, but the late push at least got them into a series against the most beatable-on-paper team above them.

If you want to say the difference between winning and losing this many games is a team save percentage jumping from .880 in the first half to .916 in the second, that would be tough to argue—but of course, there are other factors involved.

Chief among them: The current national leading scorer Aiden Fink, a Nashville seventh-round selection in 2023, who is up to 23-28—51 in 36 games. He shoots the puck a ton, skates well, sees the entire ice, and has scored a lot more consistently in the second half of the season. Early on, it was feast or famine; 16 of his 25 points came in just six games. Lately, it's more like one or two points a game, almost every game, with the odd three- or four-point night — including four assists on Friday against Michigan — mixed in. In all, 43 of his points are either goals or primary assists, highlighting just how much of Penn State's offense runs directly through him. The 20-year-old has a primary point on more than a third of all Penn State goals this season.

But of course, Fink doesn't do it alone. Freshmen JJ Wiebusch and Charlie Cerrato have formed a powerful trio with sophomore Matt DiMarsico, with all three north of 11 goals and 27 points for the year despite not getting a ton of power-play time until more recently, and under 17 total minutes per night each. When all three have been on the ice, Penn State has outscored and outshot opponents by a roughly 2-to-1 margin. But as you might expect with younger players, the scoring took a while to come for them; Cerrato had just five points in Big Ten play before the break, and Wiebusch four. Wiebusch exceeded that total just last weekend, racking up four goals and an assist against Michigan, while Cerrato went 1-4—5.

Normally, a team on a winning run like this is getting outsized percentages, but that’s just not the case with Penn State. They’ve scored 68 goals in conference play since coming back from the break, on 60.7 expected—less than one goal above expected per game. That might make sense in and of itself because of how good Fink is, and has been since even before this year. And, again, the fact that they went from allowing about 15.5 goals above expected in the first eight conference games to saving about the same amount—we’re talking about a 30-goal swing in that regard—tells the entire story.

At this point, they are a virtual lock for the NCAA tournament, facing a single-elimination game at Ohio State on Saturday. The Nittany Lions could absolutely lose that game because, even in this hot run, the Buckeyes took them to overtime twice, one of which was a 6-6 tie. Ohio State is one of just two teams in their conference to never lose in regulation to Penn State (Minnesota is the other), so you might say that even makes the Buckeyes the favourite. All but the first of their games were close, but the end result was Ohio State going 2-1-1, with the lone loss coming in OT and on the road. Nonetheless, even a loss would require a huge number of events to break against Penn State over the next two weekends to even slightly imperil their NCAA bona fides.

The circumstances that have come together to keep their season going strong are more than just their own doing—Notre Dame beat Minnesota in a best-of-three this past weekend, allowing Penn State to avoid Michigan State until the conference final, if that’s how it works out—but when you start out 6-9-0 overall and 0-8-1 in conference play, every game is effectively an elimination game.

All you can do is keep winning. And they have.