At the holiday break, who has the best chance to make the NCAA tournament?

To understand what the field may look like a few months from now, we need to first have a look at what is usually the most important aspect of determining how many teams from a given conference will qualify for it: inter-conference records.

While most teams still have a couple of non-conference games still to play, we're at the point where we have a pretty good idea of which have dominated out-of-conference play:
 

Currently, the top 15 has seven Hockey East teams, a runaway success for the conference in the first half. After that, there are four Big Ten teams, three NCHC teams, and one CCHA team.

This is the top 20 at the b