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Huge opportunity to put a rival in our rear view mirror for the most part, as a sweep would put us up 11 points. Really, winning the series would be huge in any capacity.

Yeah, if you review for a major Ben, you can’t give a minor.

So let me get this straight, Minnesota’s penalty killing is 62nd in college hockey, yet Motzko chose to use members of that unit to represent the United States in the same capacity? You were able to pick the team so every aspect of your team would have people who could do that specific job. Mindblowing

If there are that many, it would be because Minnesota doesn’t want them around, or they haven’t been playing much. Don’t think they lose very many that have big upside.

Yeah, if you’re not engaging your defense in the rush in today’s game, you could struggle to get to the magic 3 goals. Goaltending is so good, and defensive systems make it hard to score much without activating the defense. Probably one of the reasons we are one of the top scoring teams in the country without having a bonafide star.

That’s been college hockey forever. That is why the sweep at home, split on the road was always a standard to try win the league title. There isn’t a team like the Miami teams of the past 4-5 years this year. So many good hockey players that aren’t separated by much from night to night. We don’t have a stud like Oshie, Parise or Toews on this team, and they lost to questionable teams. We have guys that will be elite players, but they need a little more experience and consistency in their game.

So you’re saying Denver hasn’t been a good team?

Mercyhurst might just win tonight. Their goalie must be following up his performance against us last week.

Exactly. If guys have chances to move up the team has most likely been successful. And if the team is successful, it makes it much easier to replace a coach that moves on with an attractive candidate.

Yeah, I don’t want to hear any more NCAA commercials with the phrase “student athlete” in them. Pretty soon college athletics will be another call up league for the pro teams that hold the players rights, and they will be taking them mid season or whenever they need them.

Any idea why the Vancouver Giants would trade the leading scorer in the WHL, Cameron Schmidt, to Seattle? Would assume he isn’t a college candidate, but Seattle does have 2009 Brock England who some have mentioned here who is doing quite nicely for a team not doing well.

Need to come up with a 4th down package that can mimic the success we had with Quincy.

Was it the one at center ice? Looked similar to Mackenzie’s turnover vs. Czechia that he was ripped for. I do think Mackenzie’s was more due to how late it was in the period, but nobody covered for him when he rushed. His pass get’s through and people are praising him. Kleven’s had more to do with nobody else was there to back him up, so dumping it would have been the play, unless it was another play altogether.

Yes, I know there have been plenty of times when Denver has been very lackluster in their championship years, but they played the complete opposite during their run. Remember how many goals their one team was giving up, but then they didn’t give up more than one in any tourney game in winning the championship. The problem with many of Berry’s teams is that they didn’t play well enough to make the tournament, or that when they did they weren’t dialed in when they made the tournament and were ousted right away many times.

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.

Maturity isn’t a given with years of experience. Case in point all the people that call for a coach to be fired after losing a big game, or simply go to the Clarkson thread from earlier this year for overreaction, which doesn’t scream maturity.

I worry that some NHL team that needs help in the AHL will try to sign him after the year. Was Belfour the only one and done goalie at UND, as far as signing a pro contract?

Did they stick with changing Reschny’s first goal to Parekh? It sure look like it bounced off Reschny.

You know if Mike Johnson didn’t argue the call, that Reschny could have backed off some. Really it was a no win to not hold up because it was too late in the game to send a message, any goal off the pileup would have been overturned, and taking a chance that the refs wouldn’t call it because of the game situation was a huge risk.

They didn’t show his mom after that. I swear they showed her more than they used to show Doug Flutie when BC was in the National tournament years ago.

He has a reputation of showing up in big games. Wonder what his faceoff numbers are at to this point in the tourney. He was at about 75% at one point.

Hagens led the forwards in playing time, followed by Ziemer and Mooney. No surprise that Kleber and Osburn led ice time for the defense, although I’m sure Hutson would have challenged if he didn’t get hurt.

No, just saying everyone seems to want to play the blue bloods in the regular season, but would say we got screwed if we had to go through a gauntlet in the National Tournament. In other words they want to play cupcakes in the tournament but not in the regular season.

Or maybe he, Chyzyk and Simpson want to party together if Team Canada wins the gold!

…and like I said, when we get to the National tournament will we be hoping to face Michigan State, Denver, Wisconsin and Michigan to win #9?