Western Michigan’s Bump Wins 2025 NCHC Play of the Year Tournament

Over the last two weeks, fans have voted in the 2024-25 NCHC Play of the Year Tournament, and for the second straight year, the winning play comes from Western Michigan. Sophomore forward Alex Bump’s goal to win the 2025 Frozen Faceoff, the tournament’s No. 6 seed, was crowned the NCHC Play of the Year for the 2024-25 season by fans on Wednesday. This marks WMU’s third NCHC Play of the Year champion overall, with former Broncos forward Justin Kovacs winning the 2014-2015 title in the NCHC’s second season and goaltender Cameron Rowe claiming Play of the Year last season (2023-24).

In this season’s NCHC Play of the Year, Bump makes a strong defensive play along the wall and snipes an unassisted goal 22 seconds into double overtime to win the 2025 Frozen Faceoff for the Broncos over Denver, 4-3, at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn. The goal came on March 22, 2025 in the final Frozen Faceoff championship in the Twin Cities. It was also Western Michigan’s first Frozen Faceoff championship crown.

Bump narrowly won the final match-up in the Play of the Year Tournament over Omaha’s Cameron Mitchell, earning 52 percent of the more than 4,400 votes cast. Bump topped Mitchell in the championship by a slim margin of 192 votes, with Bump earning 2,323 and Mitchell receiving 2,131.

Previous winners for NCHC Play of the Year include (the year links to story/video):

2014 – Drake Caggiula, F, UND

2015 – Justin Kovacs, F, WMU

2016 – Nick Schmaltz, F, UND

2017 – Tyson Jost, F, UND

2018 – Ryan Poehling, F, SCSU

2019 – Sam Hentges, F, SCSU

2020 – Jordan Kawaguchi, F, UND

2021 – Adam Scheel, G, UND

2022 – Matt Vernon, G, CC

2023 – Hunter McKown, F, CC

2024 – Cameron Rowe, G, WMU

Video of Bump’s championship-winning goal is below, while the entire bracket can be seen at the bottom of the page.

–#NCHChockey–