GRAND FORKS — There has been a flurry of headlines lately about Bowling Green reeling in the nation’s No. 1 men’s hockey recruiting class for 2025.
Neutral Zone, a scouting service,
has the Falcons atop
its rankings.
It has received coverage from across the country. There was a column in the
Toledo Blade,
a piece on
Barstool Sports
and it has been a hot topic on social media.
To recap: Bowling Green hired Dennis Williams last year as its new head coach. Williams came from the Canadian Hockey League’s Everett Silvertips. Months after his hire, an NCAA rules change allowed CHL players to retain college eligibility for the first time in decades.
Bowling Green has heavily recruited CHL players with Williams’ connections.
But the question remains: Is this really the best recruiting class in college hockey?
Let’s contextualize it first.
Bowling Green is not winning recruiting battles against the traditional powerhouses of college hockey. The Falcons are recruiting a different type of player than the blue bloods. They’re going after older, experienced players instead of younger NHL prospects.
The Falcons just
announced 10 players
expected to be a part of the freshman class.
Only one of the 10 is an NHL Draft pick — Winnipeg Jets seventh-rounder Connor Levis, who will turn 21 in October.
Eight of the 10 players will enter as undrafted, 21-year-old freshmen. The other, defenseman Mazden Leslie, will be 20. Leslie has been passed over in two drafts, but could be a late pick this summer.
Of course, you don’t need to be a top NHL prospect to be a terrific college hockey player. Several recent NCAA powerhouse teams have been built with few top NHL prospects. Quinnipiac, the 2023 NCAA champion, and Minnesota State, the 2022 runner-up, are great examples.
That’s the model Bowling Green is looking to replicate in this class — older, late bloomers who are not on NHL draft boards. A lot of them are coming off of great seasons in one of the three CHL leagues — the Western Hockey League, Ontario Hockey League or Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League.
But again, is this really the best recruiting class in college hockey?
We’ll find out in a few years.
This year, more than any other in recent history, is hard to project. It’s a period of the great unknown in college hockey.
In the past, it’s been easier to project recruiting classes. There are historical precedents for how players translate based on their junior league, point totals, age and draft position.
We have no recent precedents for how CHL players translate.
If Bowling Green ends up with the best class — or even one of the top — it’s not a case of winning recruiting battles against blue bloods. It means Williams projected that 21-year-olds from the CHL will translate to college hockey — and which ones — better than anyone else.
Omaha is another intriguing case.
The Mavericks, who had success in the NCAA transfer portal the last couple of seasons, are expected to bring in more
transfers from Canadian universities
than anyone.
Like Williams, this also has to do with the coach’s familiarity of the landscape. Head coach Mike Gabinet came to Omaha from Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. His grandfather, Hockey Hall of Famer Clare Drake, was the longtime coach at the University of Alberta.
Most Canadian USports players are former CHLers who opted to take their education package rather than pursue a pro hockey career. So, the majority of them have not been eligible in the past.
Again, there’s virtually no precedent to predict how these players will translate. If they hit, Gabinet’s play will be the talk of college hockey.
Others are continuing their traditional model in both historical recruiting grounds like the United States Hockey League and in the CHL.
Michigan is targeting the NHL first-round types. It got a commitment from forward Malcolm Spence, a potential first-rounder, this week.
Denver is picking up commitments from mid-round draft picks — Seattle Kraken fifth-rounder Clarke Caswell and Calgary Flames sixth-rounder Eric Jamieson have committed out of the CHL.
North Dakota has gotten a depth player in winger Josh Zakreski and will now start taking swings at top prospects.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Ohio from Bowling Green, there have been few whispers about Miami’s incoming class. But it is shaping up to be quite good.
Only two schools have multiple recruits in the top 15 of the USHL in scoring — Northeastern and Miami.
Miami’s are forward Artemi Nizameyev from Tri-City and forward David Deputy from Muskegon/Omaha. Both tallied 55-plus points this season. Deputy leads the USHL playoffs in goals.
Miami also is expected to bring in forward Ilya Morozov, a potential first-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft. Morozov is only 16. He turns 17 in August, so it may be a difficult transition as a rookie, but he’s an impressive prospect.
Goaltender Shikhabutdin Gadzhiev, who has Muskegon in the Clark Cup Final with a .935 playoff save percentage, is headed to Oxford, too. So is Tri-City top-pair defenseman Shaun McEwan.
Miami has not had a class like this in years.
Where does it rank? Again, it’s hard to say.
Neutral Zone weighs the number of players in a class. Having bigger classes helps in the rankings.
Bowling Green has that.
Is it really the best? We’ll look back again in four years and analyze.
NCHC talks about naming playoff trophy
The National Collegiate Hockey Conference named its regular-season championship trophy, the Penrose Cup, before its inaugural season.
It still has not named its playoff trophy.
There was talk about it at the league’s annual meetings earlier this month in Florida. The NCHC was far from a consensus on it, but there appears to be interest in giving it a name.
The most obvious suggestion? The Broadmoor Trophy.
That was the name of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association’s old playoff championship trophy. It went away when the WCHA folded.
It has history, name recognition and the league’s offices are based on the Broadmoor’s campus.
The NCAA men’s hockey transfer portal is set to close at the end of Tuesday, May 13, unless a player has an exemption (like a head coaching change or if he has aid reduced or eliminated).
As of Tuesday afternoon, only one player had entered in the last week — Boston University forward Jack Gorton, who has played three games over the past two seasons.
NCAA coaches are pushing to narrow the window from its current 45-day period to 30 days in the future — a change that makes sense considering the lack of entrants over the last 15 days.
There have been 305 total entrants, which ranks No. 2 in the current portal era.
So far, 163 have committed to new schools. Players can continue to commit to schools after the portal closes for entries.
Many of the players left in the portal were cut from their schools. Sixty-two percent of the forwards or defensemen currently available in the portal had one or zero points last season.
- Former UND forward Shane Pinto has joined Team USA at the IIHF Men’s World Championship. Pinto registered two assists against Hungary in his first game.
- Former UND defenseman Troy Stecher made his 2025 Stanley Cup Playoff debut Monday night for the Edmonton Oilers. Edmonton beat Vegas 3-0 to go up 3-1 in the best-of-seven series. Stecher suffered an injury at the end of the regular season and hadn’t played in the playoffs yet.
- Former UND forward Brad Malone, now the head coach of the Oshawa Generals in the Ontario Hockey League, is in the finals. Oshawa trails London 2-1 in a best-of-seven series.
- Waterloo and Muskegon split the first two games of the USHL’s Clark Cup Final. Game 3 is Friday in Muskegon. Waterloo is coached by former UND captain Matt Smaby. Muskegon’s associate head coach is former UND forward Colten St. Clair and director of player development is Evan Trupp. Grand Forks native Bauer Berry is on Muskegon.