Folks, here at FlamesNation we try to have our pulse on what Calgary Flames fans are excited about.

As the spring begins and the end of 2024-25 regular season approaches, two things have become abundantly clear to us:

So as the NCAA’s many confusing conferences begin their playoff tournaments, we thought we’d delve into the NCAA playoffs… and a pair of Flames prospects that are trending towards appearing in the national championship tournament later this month.

The NCAA’s division I men’s hockey national championship tournament features 16 teams. Six automatic berths are given to the playoff tournament winners from each of the six conferences: Hockey East, ECAC, Atlantic Hockey, Big 10, the NCHC and the CCHA. The other 10 spots are “at-large” berths given to the 11 best remaining teams, as selected by the NCAA’s Selection Committee.

The Selection Committee uses a method that weighs every team’s head-to-head record, and so college hockey analysts have used the Pairwise Method (and Pairwise Rankings) to replicate it. Our friends at USCHO.com note that the method “compares all teams by these criteria: record against common opponents, head-to-head competition, and the RPI.” (RPI seems to be a proxy for your opponents’ strength of schedule; if you beat a team that’s beaten a lot of good teams, you’re rewarded.)

As of Monday, here are the top 16 teams in college hockey via the Pairwise Method (courtesy of USCHO.com):

Since there’s no Atlantic Hockey team in the pairwise top 16, only the top 15 could potentially make it. And if a team that’s outside of the pairwise top 16 wins their conference tournament, they qualify for the tournament and essentially bump out the lowest-ranked at-large team. Generally-speaking, the top 14 pairwise teams end up making the national tournament.

So far, Atlantic Hockey and Big 10 have gone through the first weekend of their playoff tournaments, while everybody else gets going this weekend. Of the teams in the top 16, only Michigan has been eliminated so far. But upsets can – and usually do – happen in the conference tournaments.

The Flames have five players in the NCAA this season, listed here with team and pairwise ranking:

Niagara’s already been eliminated from their conference tournament and they’re ranked well outside of the at-large berth range, so Hoskin’s season is likely done.

Massachusetts and Penn State are both ranked highly enough that they have strong chances to making the national tournament even if they both get eliminated from their conference tournaments. (And they’re both still alive in their conference tournaments, so we’ll see which route they end up using to make the big dance). Either way, Suniev and Sergeev seem like they’re good bets to be playing late into March (if not later).

Suniev has taken a big step offensively in his second year of college hockey, while Sergeev was recruited to be Penn State’s top netminder and has been lights-out since returning from an injury in January. Both players are huge parts of why their teams are doing so well, and they’ll need to keep playing well if their teams are going to go play well into the spring.

The NCAA national championship tournament begins with the regionals over the final weekend in March, with the regional bracket winners advancing to the Frozen Four in St. Louis on Apr. 10 & 12.