The NCHC announced Monday morning, Feb. 8, that the conference tournament will be an eight-team, single elimination tournament that will be played March 12-16 at Ralph Engelstad Arena in Grand Forks.
In a typical season, the first round of the tournament is a best-of-three series with the winners advancing to Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul for the semifinals, a championship and third-place game. There will also be no third-place game this year.
The quarterfinals will be held March 12-13 with the No. 1 seed playing the No. 8, No. 2 playing No. 7, No. 3 playing No. 6 and No. 4 playing No. 5. The semifinals will be held on March 15. The championship game will be played on March 16.
The four quarterfinal winners will be re-seeded after that round, which has been done in past seasons.
This year's NCHC quarterfinals were scheduled to be played March 12-14 and the Frozen Faceoff March 19-20. The conference plans to return to Xcel Energy Center and its traditional playoff format in 2022.
"Due to continued challenges with COVID-19, we are forced to alter the structure and location of the 2021 NCHC Tournament," NCHC commissioner Josh Fenton said in a news release. "Circumstances surrounding travel, testing and fan attendance made the tradition format difficult to complete. We are disappointed that we will not be able to culminate the season at Xcel Energy Center, but look forward to bringing one of college hockey's best tournament experiences back to St. Paul in 2022.
"We are very grateful to the University of North Dakota and Ralph Engelstad Arena for their willingness to host this unique tournament structure."
The location for the playoffs was a bit of a moving target and the discussion within the conference started a few months ago.
"We talked about a lot of different possibilities," Fenton said in a Zoom call with reporters Monday afternoon. "This conversation has been going on since the early to middle December. Once we got to Omaha and the Pod, we felt like things were running fairly smoothly at that point. We shifted our attention to the end of the year and for the postseason tournament.
"We had a format that we hoped we could accomplish, which was four campus sites (for the quarterfinals) and a championship weekend with the Frozen Faceoff at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. As time passed by, that just didn't seem like a format and location in St. Paul that we could reasonably and feasibly accomplish.
"We started to think about different models and the membership and I had many conversations over the past couple months about numerous structures, game formats and locations of games. It was quite an exhaustive process and we're excited to where it got us to late last week with our Board of Directors approving an alternative format."
One of the reasons why North Dakota was selected was from a financial standpoint. The conference typically gets the majority of its operating revenue from games played during their postseason tournament. In Minnesota for indoor events, there is currently a maximum of 150 people allowed.
In North Dakota, events can be held with a maximum of 50% capacity. In Nebraska, where the NCHC Pod was held, indoor events can be held at up to 75% capacity.
"We had to be mindful of what the tournament structure was going to look like both from the expense side, plus with opportunities to generate revenue with limited amounts of tickets that could be sold, plus sponsorships and other revenue opportunities," Fenton said.
All four quarterfinals games will be available on NCHC.tv. CBS Sports Network will broadcast the semifinals and championship games.
Fan attendance will be allowed on a limited basis. Ticket information, including pricing and availability will be announced later.
Seedings for the tournament will be based on final NCHC regular season standings. The winner of the NCHC tournament will get an automatic bid to the NCAA Division I tournament.
The NCHC was the lone conference to play the first three weeks of its season in one location. Teams played 9-10 games at Baxter Arena in Omaha, Neb.
Like the NCHC Pod, players and team officials will be subjected to COVID-19 testing during the playoffs.
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