The Minnesota Golden Gophers men’s hockey team kicks off the 2025-26 season on Friday against Michigan Tech. The Gophers enter the season with the least amount of expectations they have had in quite a while. But this team also had the makeup to surprise some people with a different style of play than we have been from the more star-driven Gopher rosters of the last few seasons. With 11 players gone from last season including the top five scorers, something will have to give for this Minnesota team to remain
as competitive as their fan base expects. Minnesota added a couple of pieces from the transfer portal to attempt to mute some of those losses, but the Gophers did not enter the CHL frenzy that many of their conference and national rivals did. Will that hurt them come March? We will all just need to wait and see.
What are the National and B1G expectations for this team?
As stated above, this is the first team in the last few years that doesn’t come in with definitive national title aspirations. However, this team if they can gel quickly may surprise some people. The Gophers were selected to finish in third place in the Big Ten in the preseason Coaches Poll. Two-time defending regular season champion Michigan State was again slated to come out on top, and Frozen Four semifinalist and perhaps the biggest winner of the CHL feeding frenzy Penn State is predicted to come in second place. Michigan is in 4th behind the Gophers with Wisconsin, Ohio State and Notre Dame rounding out the poll rankings.
Nationally the Gophers are ranked #7 in the USA Hockey Poll, and #8 in the USCHO.com Poll to start the season. That lines up with the Big Ten coaches as MSU and PSU are ahead of the Gophers. Defending NCAA Champion Western Michigan starts off the year at #1.
The biggest thing for the Gophers will be breaking in all their freshmen immediately and seeing what they have between the pipes between Nathan Airey and Luca Di Pasquo. The Gophers schedule is BRUTAL to start the season. Minnesota hosts Michigan Tech—their former WCHA foe to kick off the season before hosting #6 Boston College in a Thursday/ Friday series next weekend. Next is a trip to Grand Forks for a massive rivalry series at #10/11 North Dakota. To close out the month the Gophers return home for another big rivalry series as Minnesota Duluth comes into 3M Arena at Mariucci. Oh yeah, then Minnesota opens up Big Ten play Halloween Weekend in Madison for a third straight rivalry series. There will be zero breaks the first five weekends of the season, and Minnesota needs to be ready for it. There is no ramp up time.
What’s up with the CHL and why is it a thing?
As the rules for payment of players continue to change, so have the differences in player eligibility. Beginning this season players who have spend time being paid to play junior hockey in the Canadian Hockey League will now be eligible to play NCAA Hockey. This opens a huge untapped market of hockey talent and has seen many of the top NHL draft picks from the 2025 draft and prospective ones from the 2026 draft to decide to play a season or two of collage hockey rather than stay with their junior teams in the CHL. The most notable of these players is the near unanimous #1 prospect in the Class of 2026 in Gavin McKenna who enrolled and will play for Penn State this season. He automatically made the Nittany Lions a favorite to win the NCAA Championship. The Nittany Lions also added several other top CHL players in a chance to try and buy their way a title. In fact, most Big Ten schools signed multiple high ranked CHL prospects—-except one. That would be Minnesota. The Gophers added a pair of transfers through the portal, and signed all of their freshmen who had played in the USHL, but not the CHL. Bob Motzko has been asked about it repeatedly and he said first and foremost he didn’t want to take away a spot from one of his recruits he already had slated to come in. It’s definitely a risk, but you do avoid not having a potential me first player trying to improve their draft stock at the determent to the team on the roster. But, as we said this is the first time in six seasons the Gophers do not have a NHL First Round Draft Pick on their roster. Would this team be even better with a Canadian star on their roster? You can’t say no there either. But, the proof will be in the pudding. If McKenna and Michigan’s States CHL stars in Porter Martone and Cayden Lindstrom dominate the Gophers roster of USHL players…well its obvious that Bob Motzko is going to need to change his philosophy going forward. But, if the Gophers play like a true team, and can shut down the star heavy rosters of the Spartans and Nittany Lions when it matters most, it could be an inflection point going forward as well.
Goodbye Pairwise We hardly Knew Ye?
The Pairwise rankings which have been used since 2013 to determine the NCAA tournament field are no longer, and just like in college basketball have been replaced by a different metric. This one is called the NCAA Power Index (NPI). According to the NCAA comittee that approved the changes, one of the benefits of the NPI is that the NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Oversight Committee now has the ability to adjust key pieces of the formula (dials) to enhance the selection process. Dials are set prior to the start of the competitive season and can be reevaluated on an annual basis if necessary.
The long and short of the story is according to the committee who approved this new metric, t least for the past four seasons the NCAA field would have remained the same. Some seeding flips may have occurred, but this won’t drastically change how the field of 16 is compiled. The NPI functions in a similar way to the Pairwise, and the hockey committee spent hours comparing different calculations before finally settling on the dials. The dials include winning percentage, strength of schedule, quality win bonus points, a mechanism to deal with games that enter overtime and a minimum number of wins that must be factored into the rankings calculation. The NPI dials for the 2025-26 season are as follows:
Minimum Wins – 12
Win percentage / Strength of Schedule – 25%/75%
Home-Away Win/Loss – 1.2/0.8 (regular season), 1.0/1.0 (postseason)
Quality Win Base – 51
Quality Win Multiplier – 0.5
Overtime – 60/40 (regular season), 100/0 (postseason)
Another change is that the Wisconsin Badger Rule—or the requirement that a team must be .500 or better to earn a NCAA at-large berth is no longer. So you could have a team who has lost more games than it has won made the NCAA field.
As the season progresses and we get closer and closer to the NCAA Tournament, there will be plenty more comparisons of the NPI vs Pairwise likely. But for now, the end game is the same—beat teams from other conferences to win comparisons, and be at least respectable in your own conference and you have a good chance to being in the field when it’s selected in March.
So What’s the Final Breakdown?
Minnesota is flying under the radar a bit this season due to their lack of starpower. But on paper they still have a very good and deep team that should compete well nationally and in the Big Ten. They will get a good litmus test of where they are in October as the schedule ramps up in intensity very quickly, but if thy can make it to the Big Ten portion of the schedule relatively unscathed, they should have as good a chance as any to compete for the top of the conference.
Goaltending will be key, especially as on paper you don’t expect to be averaging 4-5 goal per game again, but if this team can play stout defensively and play well on special teams, I still think it can shock some of the national pundits. But as always, show me what you can do, don’t tell me.
