Big A HG

Thank you, sir!

The kid became a fan in the Hak era, not the Berry era. Did Berry even try recruiting him or did Carson just state he was playing for UND and Berry said "oh, what? a kid WANTS to play for us? We don't have to get only upperclassmen from Lindenwood and Alaska to make a team?"

Hak still getting commits even when no longer here!

Ope, yep....going from all the talk about NIL lately I brain-farted my way through the rest of my message about NLI. Somehow I managed to get the first NLI right. It's only Tuesday and the brain is already dead.

I've never signed an NLI so I don't know the full extent of what they're signing, but generally isn't there an out with an NIL if a coach were to leave since you're really not only signing to play for a program, you're also signing to play for a coach? From a raw athletics point of view, NIL sucks. From a neutral point of view, NIL makes sense. You go to college as a foundation for the start of your career. For some, athletics will become their career, for some it's the academics, and for others it's the opportunity for both. If a kid has an opportunity to improve that foundation, they shouldn't be locked in anywhere and should be able to make the best choice for their future.

Remember, more conferences equals more auto bids. This makes it more challenging for the power conferences to get more schools in the tourney, such as one that UND would likely be in. This is also presuming a tourney would remain at 16 teams versus a 20 team format where 4 and 5 seeds could theoretically do play-in games the day before playing the 1 seed in a regional.

Agree. We no longer owe them anything. We never really did, but they were a constant on our schedule to help them out when they were on shaky ground. The games weren't always easy, but even our bad games usually still resulted in a win. Now, they're plenty stable in their own conference and don't need any help staying afloat. Plus, the style they play can be a PWR killer for us when they do beat us now, and they're plenty capable of doing so.

Ditto! Would be more fun with a few beers bellied up to the bar, but the forum will have to do for now.

Just the relevant ones! And you're right, that Brad Guy is the Bad Guy.

A superhero movie without a bad guy would get boring pretty fast.

The problem with the "old upperclassman" team is that you have to make your runs count every few years when you have 'em. It'd difficult to have an old team every year.

You keep trying to argue with me about "your point" when I've never been discussing "your point". I keep telling you that I the Johannes pickup is fine for what it is while ignoring that it's not my point. We keep going around in circles like dogs chasing our tails. Go back to my first post I made today post-Johannes pickup and it had nothing to do with your point at all, yet you feel compelled to keep quoting me. I'm a big picture guy. Johannes is like a tulip growing on a grim, apocalyptic landscape...you keep wanting me to approve of your tulip while I'm looking at massive issue at hand with why our program has fallen so low on the roster management side of things.

I'm not talking specifically about Caulfield's replacement, UND did what they had to do based on the situation...I'm tired of repeating myself here. Generally speaking, it's already been working out poorly, it can hardly get any worse at this point (scary if it does!). Justifying this type of roster management is shameful for a program of our stature. I put our program on a pedestal and wish others did as well. Berry needs to be a roster accountant as part of his recruiting. You need to have a gauge for how long players are going to stay and how many you're going to need. You can just throw s**t at a wall and hope something sticks. It will never be exact, but most guys you should be able to get a general sense of how long they'll be at campus and our situation this year is horrendous for a program of our stature losing all six D-men at once, our top two goalies, half our forwards. Now we'll have SO many freshmen that if they don't pan out, you have to keep many of them for four years.

You're missing the point. No one is arguing that Johannes is a bad pickup under the circumstances. We're arguing that UND shouldn't be in these circumstances to need a Johannes.

AGAIN, I've said that we can't ignore the portal, multiple times now. I may not have clarified that with my direct reply to your comment, but I've said it multiple times already so didn't feel the need to say it again. We should have an abundant and rich recruiting pipeline and use the portal to flesh out a final piece or two when needed with additional high end talent that slipped through the cracks and ended up at smaller hockey programs. It should not be relied upon to merely flesh out a roster if we want to compete at an elite level each year. AGAIN, I'm not saying you can't bring in guys from the portal, but this is more than just bringing in a final piece to a loaded roster...this is key part of how Berry has needed to create a roster, which is what we shouldn't rely on. You mention Jandric but fail to mention Farmer or Sidorski. Jandric has a history of multiple years of being a capable player and it shows. Sidorski didn't do much before he got here and didn't do a lot while he was here. Farmer was up and down prior to being here and was up-and-down while here. These players are what they are and guys like Johannes aren't going to do much based on their overall career arc going back to juniors.

Croal is already scoring at a decent clip for Muskegon, leading their team in overall scoring (though not on a PPG clip) and would be 20 years old by fall. I don't see a lot of reason to leave him in the USHL another year personally. I would rather bring in a kid like that than another portal kid.

We all still love each other. These arguments remind of being a Packer fan living in Wisconsin back in 2008 when the Favre>>Rodgers transition happened...fights at Christmas, fights at the bar, fights among friends and neighbors. Brian doesn't like it when I say mean things about Berry though, so I have to be careful, even though I still like him too!

You brought up the Caulfield/Johannes comparison and I even went so far as to give you the benefit of the doubt in terms of potential performance for Johannes, so...

Portal talent on top of elite recruiting led us to another Frozen Four this year, didn't it? Shoot, totally forgot. I'm just wondering how big of a stick Berry will need to keep portal kids away with the influx of elite talent already wanting to play here. Or do we use the stick to keep the elite talent away so we can have more Jandrics, Pykes, and Johannes'? Decisions, decisions....

Even if we get an improvement from Johannes over Caulfield, I doubt it'd be anything more than a 15-15 type year (which would be phenomenal), but isn't going to put us over the hump of missing tourney to contending at Frozen Four. It's another mediocre body at best and only gives us one year. You can't discount his last six seasons of poor production and claim he's a great addition. Kids mature and change, but he didn't even get much opportunity for AIC. Lindenwood needed a body and somebody has to do a little scoring at some point, so he managed to do well last year. But, again, this kind of pickup shouldn't be what UND relies on in the future or the program is going to be doomed to mediocrity.

Tucker Poolman was a fifth round pick, drafted while still in the USHL. He was a late bloomer in the sense that he became a regular in the NHL versus a kid that was more likely to end up on a two-way AHL deal. I'd take a kid like Tucker 100/100 unless we had a roster full of kids who projected higher than he did already. Fifth year seniors from Lindenwood and Alaska do not equal Tucker Poolman. Oh, and Hak was still head coach when Poolman was recruited...ya know, the age where we could bring in elite levels of talent nearly every year, not just one or two good pieces some years.

Waiting for the top scoring defenseman from UW-Stout to hit the portal....if he's top scoring at a s*** school, the sensible facts are that he's still amazing!

I know 56 pages is a lot to go through, so not going to fault you for not seeing me reference that before, but I am on the side of picking up the kids in the portal. What I'm not on the side of is using it as an act of desperation to fill out a roster when we're NORTH DAKOTA. We should have our own pipeline of talented recruits and use the portal to fill an unexpected gap or to pick up a kid who was a diamond in the rough who wants to play for a winner. A kid who did nothing in the USHL, very little after in the NAHL after getting demoted there, nothing at AIC, and then has one decent season at Lindenwood, is not the type of player we should be acquiring. In this case, we have to do it out of necessity, but that necessity is why this whole thing is a problem. We shouldn't be in a position to have to make this Lindenwood kid a necessity.

20 years is such an arbitrary number and is completely pointless. I can't even process your question because there is nothing remotely thought-provoking about it. UND could have three new coaches and a new conference by then for all we know. Elite college programs are about "what have you done for me lately" and "what does our near-term future look like". That's it. Kids coming in now are only there for four years max (five with a redshirt), so you're asking about the state of a program over the course five complete roster turnovers. Brad's playoff success is no longer recent and based on how he's handled roster turnover, he hasn't managed his team well. Throw in other things like lack of identity in our playing style lately, poor recruiting by UND standards, kids leaving, culture problems in the locker room this year, and the whole Nodak trademark fiasco that conveniently was swept under the rug, and there's a lot of issues with the program. Fans are turning out less and less since conference titles are not exciting when everyone else starts ramping their playing level up in late winter and spring.