To start the year, there was a bit of a question as to whether Minnesota-Duluth would be especially good this season. Their offseason losses were as significant as just about anyone’s in the country.

Losing Tony Cameranesi, Austin Farley, and Andy Welinski alone would be tough to swallow, but they were all seniors, so you knew it was coming. You might have also known that Kasimir Kaskisuo was going to jump ship as a sophomore. But the latter loss was particularly troubling for the club, as Kaskisuo played almost 96 percent of the Bulldogs’ minutes last season, and 87 percent the year before that.

Basically, Scott Sandelin’s crew has had one goalie for two seasons. Coming into this year, they had three freshmen. That’s not usually a recipe for success, no matter how good those freshmen happen to be. Typically a coach would prefer some experience in his crease, but Hunters Miska and Shepard, along with Nick Deery didn’t afford him any. To this point, it really hasn’t mattered.

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All three have played at least one game, with Deery and Shepherd serving largely as backups, but quite capable ones at .934 and .921, respectively. Miska, the starter, is stopping .914 in 11 appearances. The current national average save percentage is .904, pretty low in comparison with recent national norms, so when you’re stopping .918 as a team you’re in pretty damn good shape to begin with. And in NCHC play, Miska has carried all the water, with a .923 save percentage that is likewise going to win you plenty in one of the nation’s two true power conferences.

All this, by the way, goes without mentioning the fact that UMD’s offense is scoring at an impressive clip as well, racking up 3.7 goals per game against one of the toughest schedules in the country. They have three players at least playing point-a-game hockey, and several more in the neighborhood. No one is truly outstanding — at least not in terms of getting up among the national scoring leaderboards — but it seems like their top six forwards and top two defensemen are scoring plenty.

When you have a plus-21 goal differential through 14 games, you’re generally going to be in good shape. That number puts them fifth in the country and leaves plenty of room for error. Should they be a little concerned about that 11.8 team shooting percentage? Sure. They only shot 7.7 percent in 2015-16 (unlucky) but I’m not sure they’re more talented than they were last year, so something in the 9 percent range feels about right for this group.

Their entire schedule is teams that have been or still are nationally ranked: then-No. 17 Michigan Tech (now merely receiving votes), current No. 9 UMass Lowell (then-No. 8), current No. 14 Notre Dame (No. 5 at the time), No. 8 North Dakota (then-No. 1), and most recently current Nos. 18 and 20 Western Michigan and Omaha, respectively.

So to have just two losses from that set of games, well, you can go ahead and pencil them into the NCAA tournament right now. They’re all set barring an absolute catastrophe. Their schedule is the strongest in the country, so while you’ve got to say they’ve been a little lucky — but not much — their strength-of-schedule rating is basically going to ensure if they get anywhere close to, say, eight or nine more wins in their remaining 20ish regular-season games, they’re punching their ticket.

Last season their results were putrid for the first half of the season or so — again, bad luck — then turned it around to make the NCAA tournament after going 11-4-0 down the stretch. They’re always at least a decent corsi team (currently just 50.4 percent, but look who they’ve played and add in score effects) so these are results we should, to some extent, expect.

But with all that having been said, their strong schedule was but a prelude to this weekend’s upcoming games: The No. 1 Bulldogs are heading to Denver for a weekend pair with No. 2 Denver.

The Pioneers, with just two losses and three ties from 16 games, are a dominant team (56.2% CF, plus-14 goal differential, etc.) and a lot of the things said about UMD apply here as well. Lots of talent throughout the lineup, including point-a-game performances from senior defenseman Will Butcher and forwards Henrik Borgström and Dylan Gambrell, a freshman and sophomore, respectively. They’re also getting one of the better goaltending performances of the season from starter Tanner Jaillet (.923) and backup Evan Cowley (.942). This seems to be about the level at which both have played their entire careers, so nothing’s too out of the ordinary there, percentage-wise.

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