Friends, over the weekend, Calgary Flames prospect Ethan Wyttenbach posted five points in two games with the Quinnipiac University Bobcats.

In the process, he leap-frogged Minnesota Duluth forward Max Plante in the scoring race and landed somewhere a Flames prospect hasn’t been in a long time: on top of the NCAA’s scoring leaderboard. And while there’s a month left in the NCAA’s “regular” schedule before conference tournaments begin and things get serious, there are big reasons to be excited about Wyttenbach’s development in his freshman year.

Case in point: he leads the NCAA in scoring right now, and he does not turn 19 until next week.

A fifth-round pick by the Flames in last June’s draft, Wyttenbach has 15 goals and 26 assists for 41 points through 28 games. He’s seven points clear of Porter Martone for the freshman scoring lead. His strong play to this point has led several fans to ask me: hey, do I think he could win the Hobey Baker Award?

Yes, he could win it. I don’t think he will this season, though, and the main reasoning from my perspective is entirely out of his hands: Quinnipiac’s schedule.

The Hobey Baker is given to “NCAA player who best exhibits strength of character both on and off the ice and contributes to the integrity of the team and displays outstanding skills in all phases of the game.” We can quibble about Wyttenbach’s 200-foot game on another occasion, and instead look at the various tiers of NCAA teams and how he’s performed against them offensively.

The NCAA is using the National Collegiate Performance Index (NPI) starting this season to populate the national tournament this season, using a combination of performance and strength of schedule to rank teams. 63 teams are currently ranked, so we’ll break them into thirds based on the rankings as of Sunday evening:

(Cornell, Dartmouth, Boston College, Connecticut and Harvard)

(Boston University, Maine, Merrimack, Union, Sacred Heart, New Hampshire and Clarkson)

(Holy Cross, Colgate, Alaska Fairbanks, Yale, Notre Dame, Rensselaer, Brown, Stonehill and St. Lawrence)

Still left to come before the conference playoff tournament for Quinnipiac are three games against top 21 teams, two games against middle 21 teams, and three games against bottom 21 teams.

Now, Wyttenbach does not control his team’s schedule. While the top 21 of the NPI rankings is pretty cleanly split by conference – four teams apiece from the Big 10, CCHA, ECAC and Hockey East, and five from the NCHC – Quinnipac’s non-conference games have largely skewed away from the other conference’s big guns this season. And so the schedule is skewed away from the current top teams rather than towards them.

All Wyttenbach can do is play the teams he’s asked to play, and to do his best against them.

And yeah, he’s “only” a point-per-game as a freshman against the top 21 teams in the country. Feasting against the NCAA’s middle class is better than the alternative, and while his relatively muted performances against the big guns may keep the Hobey Baker Award from his grasp, at least this season, it’s wild that we’re even having this discussion.

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