Big A HG

Culture over talent....and whoever thinks he's a nice guy.

Literally smack dab in the middle of Oshie/Toews and Schmaltz/Boeser was Nelson/Forbort with rosters fleshed out by other highly touted picks and undervalued talents impressively recruited, such as Frattin, Kristo, Knight, Malone, Rowney and many others. They may not have been Oshie/Toews good, but were still very talented and were keenly scouted. We had a minor, allowable dip for a couple of seasons (but still made the tourney and looked competitive) before going on another run of Frozen Fours. Now more than ever do you need high end skill to consistently score. You can't throw a decent top line and three other lines of meat grinders out there anymore and compete as effectively. The officiating doesn't allow it and the skill gap has increased.

If he hasn't figured it out by now, he's never going to. He's had his own recruits for years now. Notice how many blue chip recruits choose not to play here now? Notice how you don't even hear about is in the running for many of them either? A few here and there, but not like it was not that long ago. Either Berry isn't recruiting as many or they don't want to play for him...both reasons are a problem. A college coach's number one priority is recruiting....or at least it should be. Your Alabamas, Georgias, Ohio States, Dukes, North Carolinas, etc of the world all focus their energy on recruiting. Coaching is important, but you need talented players to win. North Dakota hockey has an emberrysment of riches...where are the players? Look at Lincoln Riley and USC football. USC lost the ability to recruit the amount of high end talent it needed to compete nationally, so they did something about it and hired Lincoln Riley. It changed the culture and program immediately for the better and they turned a 3-7 season into an 11-3 season in Lincoln's first year.

Playing a brand of hockey that doesn't lend itself to improving your draft stock among mediocre players and a mediocre head coach. Remember, we want culture kids only here now.

I'll say it.... Berry should be released.

Hopefully it was senior night for Berry.

To get the thread back on track...ah-ahem... BOO BERRY!

Found Brad Berry's burner account.

I'm so happy Berry recruits culture guys. Who needs blue chippers when you can watch this?

That's because most are also Viking fans.

This will probably break the game wide-open by saying this, but.....both teams are so bad neither can score.

He's actually been very consistent in post-season play since the title. 0 wins, 0 wins, 0 wins, 0 wins, 1 win, 0 wins, 0 wins ....consistent at his teams doing virtually nothing in the post-season with the exception of the NHL team he inherited for the 2015-16 season.

What's there to learn from this season that he shouldn't have already learned from the other missed NCAA tourney seasons? People aren't throwing Berry under the bus for having his first bad season. He's had multiple bad seasons already and now we're throwing another one onto the pile. He won a national championship 7 years ago. Assuming we don't win the NCHC tournament, he'll have a 50% NCAA tourney participation rate with only one NCAA win against lowly AIC since then. He should have been learning way before now, instead it's just more of the same. That 2019-20 team was a good team, but wasn't a surefire Frozen Four team and Berry's probably lucky the team didn't get a chance to get bounced early again. None of these performance conversations are even factoring in the shady dealings with the Nodak trademark which got quickly swept under the rug.

Glisten here ya little sh**s...

It looks like a dig, and maybe to some extent it is when I'm trying to dissect the accomplishments of our head coach, but the guy literally drips with sweat. Legitimate question, if you're meeting Brad Berry for the first time as a recruit, what's your impression going to be? We're not exactly raking in blue chippers these days. Our facilities, history, alumni, fanbase, and pedigree all stack up. Grand Forks isn't the most geographically pleasant place to be, but if all other benefits outweigh that, kids will still come, as many have in the past. Why are they not coming now?

I thought I'd keep it simple and easy to understand. Does "heavily-perspired Brad Berry" work better for you?

I didn't say younger was better, I was merely asking a question based on looking through the lens of a mid-teen deciding where to play hockey. Carle may be young to us, but he's still twice as old as the kids being recruited. With that said, he's still significantly younger than Brad and may resonate more with someone who's 16-17 years old. Jerry was old as dirt, yet could still recruit since he was basically the pope of college hockey in the northeast. All eyes were on BC at the time. Who's looking at North Dakota these days?

Of course it is, but we need a more reasonable gauge to measure off of since titles are so rare and hard to come by (unless you're Duluth or Denver recently). I don't blame Hakstol for not winning one as he routinely put his teams in positions to win the natty. Despite not winning a title, the team still felt like it was in a good place and the program was at a peak when looking at everything other than the lack of a title. North Dakota was still the "talk of the town" on a national level along with BC's run at the time. If you made Frozen Fours a "best of" series, we'd probably have multiple under Hak. Sometimes we were outplayed, sometimes we didn't get the bounces, sometimes the other team was just better. But, Berry's title isn't a recent memory anymore. It's fading farther and farther into the distance. The program has been one step forward two steps back with Berry since he took over. Next year may be one step forward again, but is the following season two more steps back? At what point do you stop the train and accept the program is in a worse place than when he started and isn't looking any brighter going forward? If you were a blue chip recruit, do you go play for sweaty Brad Berry whose team is on the slide and players tend to underperform, or go to a place like Denver with a young, exciting coach and his own much more recent title; or Scott Sandelin who has his own incredible run of success lately?

What's more exciting to the fanbase...Frozen Fours or Conference Championships? HAKSTOL (11 seasons): 7 Frozen Fours (63.6%) --- 3 Reg. Season Conference Championships (27.2%) --- 4 Conference Tournament Championships (36.4%) BERRY (8th season): 1 Frozen Four (12.5%) --- 4 Reg. Season Conference Championships (50.0%) --- 1 Conference Tournament Championship (currently 7 tries, 14.3%) Hakstol clearly put more precedent on being good late in the year and built toward that. He worked the guys hard, maybe to their detriment in the first half of the season, but as the team built stamina and the workload was adjusted, Hak's teams came to play in the second half. How he never won a title is beyond me, but again, in one-and-done, anything can happen. Berry seems to strive for consistency, start-to-finish, but doesn't build towards that post-season run. Sandy and Carle both seem committed towards post-season play...you can hear it in their talking points. The 2019-20 UND team was very good, but nowhere near 2016 good...and the 2016 team almost didn't even make the title game. To say there was any guarantee of that team was winning multiple NCAA games, much less another title is a stretch. Only two of those athletes are still on an NHL roster as I write this, Pinto and Cole Smith...then compare to the NHL talent on the 2016 team. The 2019-20 team was one of the few under Berry that played above their talent level.

I'm not saying it's unrealistic to accomplish (especially for UND), I said it's unrealistic to expect it....like, expecting Berry's tenure to hinge upon winning two titles over five year spans for the rest of his career. The problem is we can't even win a regional anymore much less an entire NCAA tournament. Heck, unless a miracle happens in postseason NCHC play, we're going to miss our third tournament of our last six. A 50% participation rate.

Brad has been given a lot of leeway thanks to that title. Winning NCHC titles is a good feat, but isn't what we play for. It's also unrealistic to expect National Championships regularly as there is too much puck luck in a one-and-done format. Bad teams don't typically luck their way to a title, but great teams are often eliminated prematurely thanks to a bad bounce or two...as us UND fans are very well aware. However, Frozen Four appearances shouldn't be rare for a team like UND. I don't think it's unreasonable to start applying some public pressure considering where our program is at. There are a number of different factors that play into good and bad seasons, but they all mainly point back to the head coach, especially at a program with small coaching staffs like NCAA hockey. This isn't Brad's first bad year. An off season among many good or great seasons isn't usually something to stress over, but NCAA wins are what excite the fanbase. NCHC titles don't. Just look at the crowds. People can blame covid, or blame start times, or blame whatever, but most sports, pro or otherwise, are back to pre-covid normalcy. The Ralph is not. It's not empty, but it's not hard to find seats and it's fairly obvious the downward trend in attendance is starting to gain steam. Is the program heading in the right direction? I'm not sure there's anything to say that it is. Just ask yourself this question? What season is the anomaly?

Doesn't seem like that nice of a guy to me, it's just what all the Mama Gaber fangirls say on FB.