Big A HG

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.

UND is like the hot girl everyone's talked about for 15 years, played hard to get despite having her pick of town, only for everyone to find out she's super crazy and so they all moved on to bigger and better things. Now she put in 50 pounds, uses her Instagram filter for all her Facebook posts trying to relive the glory days of being hot, and married the town's leftover bachelor...but hey, it was the best she could get so it was a great match!

Qdoba is also originally from Denver, only a few miles up the road from DU. Do those 3-4 miles make it any better? For lack of eliminating both of the areas most convenient burrito stops, we'll go with a tentative 'yes' for now.

I had an earlier edit before you quoted me that clarified I was not berating the program. Not sure why you didn't include it. The program encompasses more than just one person, and as a whole, I don't think UND is failing to live up to expectations. I just think the head coach is. I'm not sitting here saying that Brad Berry doesn't want to win. They all want to win. Not sure what you mean by people living and dying more with the wins and losses that everyone else. No one has died, figuratively or literally, in the Brad Berry era except Matt Shaw (which was a good departure). Coaches get hired and fired all the time. Dane preceded Berry and I think Karl fits his role well, but our head coach has been caught flat-footed during the new era of transfer portal and NIL and has failed to have a steady pipeline of good recruits coming in. That's why we're in this predicament.

Quinnipiac had something like three total transfers. One was a sophomore this year and he was the only player in the top 11 in scoring that was a transfer portal kid. They also had one fourth year senior and your LSSU guy was a third line defensemen. Nordqvist, the kid from LSSU, was arguably LSSU's best defenseman, LSSU being a better program than Lindenwood, and was only a third line defenseman for Quinnipiac. I'm not saying you can't have transfer portal kids, totally wrong. You need to use the portal to your advantage, but it should be a means of the rich getting richer instead of band-aiding a roster where 3/4 of the team up and left or graduated.

I agree, but you have to play the odds with your roster. Literally anyone could be a great player by that metric, they just need a chance. Well, sure I guess. But, how many great players were found with blind luck and how many were clearly destined to be great because they were recruited by a number of elite programs, NHL teams are interested in them, etc. When you have a number of great options that are willing to come to UND, you can then be a bit selective when it comes to style and culture or whatever cliche or buzzword you want to use. But, our elite talent options seem very limited lately and now many of the kids we do have don't even want to stay. Where there's smoke there's usually fire.

We're on a forum, I take nothing personal. If I did, I'd have left a long time ago! If someone isn't berating the program, then our program becomes stale and stagnant and doesn't live up to its assumed potential. I'm tired of sunshine and roses only because of Berry won a title 7 years ago. That was epic. But, elite programs typically don't put up with what our beloved UND hockey program is going through at the moment without a change in leadership. Our rivals have far surpassed us in a short amount of time and our future is pretty grim at the moment. It is what it is....I still LOVE my Sioux, but I want what's best for the program. Edit: For the record, I'm not berating the program. UND as a whole should be an amazing hockey school and more often than not, it is. I'm berating head coach Brad Berry.

I don't disagree that it might be a smart add right now...it most certainly is. My problem with it, especially when you go back and read my initial comment that you quoted, is that Berry's management of the roster via recruiting and the portal has led to a fifth year season from Lindenwood being a "good pickup". Name another program at our [theoretical] level pulling similar kids from similar schools and competing in Frozen Fours. Is Michigan or Minnesota or Denver using Lindenwood band aids for their programs? Maybe they are and I'm unaware.

I "no" nothing...sure. Let's roll with that. We have such a strong track record of NCAA success under Berry the last seven seasons and am painfully unaware of how well Berry has managed his roster over the past 24 months. I am stoopid.

Of course small schools can have good players, but his one season with Lindenwood was a statistical anomaly compared to the rest of the kid's career so far. I certainly hope he does well and can carry over his success from Lindenwood, but we're UND...trying to compete with the likes of Duluth, Denver, Minnesota, Michigan, etc on a national stage. There's a reason this kid was at AIC and Lindenwood and there's no reason we have such a poor roster accounting problem from those in charge that we have to bring in talent from low-end schools to band-aid some major recruiting problems. Why are so few top talent kids suddenly refusing to come here? Are they even recruited? Why are so many others that do commit transferring away from a program like UND? What's going on here? Why am I the bad guy for pointing out some obvious issues? College athletics are almost entirely about recruiting no matter what sport, and UND is in major decline in that department, especially considering the resources UND offers.

When we're excited about this acquisition as fans of the University of North Dakota hockey program, that tells you all you need to know about the state of our program right now.

Now Pecknold can take the next seven years off! The Brad Berry Way! ™