This afternoon, the future of the WCHA playoffs came to light thanks to reporting by Shane Frederick of the Mankato Free Press and Jack Hittinger of the Bemidji Pioneer. In it, we also may have gotten our first public glimpse into one of the reasons why the NCHC happened.

In two years, after the monumental shift in conferences in Western college hockey, the WCHA will have a nine-team tournament. The top seed will receive a bye to the WCHA Final Five.

The big news, though, is that Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Fairbanks will play in the first round every year unless one is a top seed.

The league obviously is worried about paying for two Alaska flights (either a team traveling up to Alaska or sending an Alaskan team to the lower 48) on a week’s notice.  The postseason tournament is supposed to be the big money-maker for the league and it could end up losing money.

However, the league is throwing the integrity of the tournament out the window in order to save money.

When the NCHC split happened, I wrote this in a Herald piece:

A source told the Herald that when business was conducted in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, there were often times two blocks of voting.

The schools with larger budgets typically wanted to spend money, invest and try new things. Schools with smaller budgets often resisted.

With Minnesota and Wisconsin departing for the Big Ten Hockey Conference, the smaller-budget schools take over control of the voting block. This caused athletic directors with larger budgets to worry about the future of the conference.

-July 10, 2011

The decision to save money with the Alaska schools while potentially creating strange matchups in the first round (UAA or UAF could be on the road as a three seed and if they are both in the bottom half, the five seed will have to travel instead of host) may be the first public look at this scenario. There’s no way athletic directors at UND, Omaha, Denver, etc., would have gone for this.

Was it this specific scenario that the NCHC schools were worried about? No. They didn’t even know Fairbanks would be in the league at the time the left. But it’s scenarios like this that they were worried about.

The National Collegiate Hockey Conference will announce Monday that its postseason tournament will be held at the Target Center — at least for starters.

A press conference, which will feature UND athletic director Brian Faison, Minnesota-Duluth athletic director Bob Nielsen, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak and Target Center general manager Steve Mattson is planned for 1:30 p.m. Monday.

The sides had previously discussed a six-year contract, but I’m not sure what was signed. It’s also likely that the NCHC has some type of an opt-out in the contract if it wishes.

The Target Center previously hosted the WCHA postseason championship prior to the Xcel Energy Center.

An NCAA rule states that a new league needs to exist for two years before being eligible to get an automatic bid into the NCAA tournament, but NCHC commish Jim Scherr is optimistic that the new league could have an auto bid immediately.

Scherr had conversations with NCAA representatives at both the NCAA Frozen Four and at the national convention in Naples, Fla., last month on the topic.

Because the NCHC has six teams coming from an established league, it may be able to get an auto bid when the conference begins in 2013-14. The league still has to apply and be approved, but there is time for that to happen.

How important is the auto bid?

Well, that can be up for debate. Since I’ve been following the WCHA, the winner of the auto bid has been a team that would have received an at-large bid anyway every year.

However, the new league figures to be much deeper, which means the last-place team probably has a legit shot at pulling it off.

USCHO reported last week that the NCHC is close to announcing its hockey operations director and details on the postseason tournament. Word seems to be that the Target Center in Minneapolis is the front-runner for the postseason tournament, but nothing has been inked yet.