There are going to be times in every game where the other team sets you back on your feet a bit. I think Reschny and Verhoeff see how hard it is for an ultra talented team like the Canadian World Juniors to always be on top of the other team.
Like Hennessey always says, “the other team has good players too”, and even when they don’t have a lot, like Mercyhurst, sometime just the variation in age and maturity can level things out here and there.
With the bigger pool of players to choose from in the CHL, it will get even harder to dominate for long lengths of a game. There are so many players I’ve seen watching some of these games that have the “it” factor.
If we are nitpicking a weekend where UND was missing key players, with others being exhausted, and another under the weather, yet still held a team to, was it 18 shots on the weekend, while we had 85+ shots on net with another 35 or so blocked, we are doing exactly that — nitpicking.
It is Jackson’s job to get his team on edge as much of the game as possible, and love that he calls out bad patches of the game, but as others have said no game is going to be perfect, and the other team, no matter the disparity in talent will have stretches of zone time and chances from that.