The answer is very simple: the #1 seed in the conference playoffs,
i.e., the team that wins the tie-breaker, is the regular season
champion as far as the NCAA auto-bid and (if that team also wins the
conference tournament) auto-bye are concerned.  Regardless of whether
a given conference considers teams that finish tied for first to be
co-champions of the regular season, for the NCAA's purposes only one
is the RS champion.
 
As for the ECAC tie-breakers, SLU currently has the edge over
Clarkson; the two split their head-to-head series, and are both 4-2
against the current top five and have 20 points in 13 games against
the top ten in the league (SLU is 9-2-2, Clarkson 10-3), but
St. Lawrence wins the next tie-breaker, head-to-head goals, since they
won 3-1 and lost 5-4 in the two games with Clarkson.
 
The full description of ECAC tiebreakers can be found at
http://hockey.ecac.com/playoffs/m1
and a detailed set of statistical tools is on The Big Red What? at
http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?ecac.nutshell
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
"We've got a whole mess of penalties"  -- Cornell PA Announcer
   Arthur Mintz, after the Cornell-Union brawl 1998 December 4
 
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