SJHovey

As I recall, Hak had been a head coach in the USHL for about four years before coming over to UND. After just a single season at UND, he was named "Associate Head Coach" which I interpret as sort of being second in command. At that point I think Berry had only been at UND for maybe a year or so, and had no head coaching or professional coaching experience, so Hak seems like the natural selection for Blais to name as Associate Head Coach. Blais obviously left under good circumstances, and wasn't fired, so I'm sure any support he gave for Hak being named his successor would be given some weight. Then, after Blais left, and Berry spent a few years as an assistant, he went on to be an assistant at the professional level, before returning. Once he returned, he spent another year as an assistant, and was then named "Associate Head Coach." Thus, when Hak left, again under good terms, I assume his selection of Berry as Associate Head Coach, and any positive comments he made about Berry, carried some weight.

It's sort of funny. In all of the discussions ahead of the NCAA opening up the path for major junior players, you almost never heard anyone talking about how many college players might choose to leave college and go to a junior team, knowing they could possibly return.

You're not going to see it on the scale that you do with say football. Kids aren't going to be getting millions of dollars. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we think it won't have any impact. If a kid is choosing between say us and Minnesota, and if they offer the kid even $25,000 and we offer nothing, I don't like our chances. A school could make a difference with even a fund of say a half million dollars, which is peanuts to the big schools.

It's got to be an interesting problem for someone like Carle to consider. First, with respect to the pay, it's not an automatic that someone like Carle would conclude he has to make the jump. NHL coaches are obviously paid more, but in some cases it's not that much more. He'd probably get offered something like $1.5-2 million/year. It's not like he'd get ten times the salary he is making at the college level. There has to be a desire to know whether you can occupy and perform one of the top 30 hockey coaching jobs in the world. Carle certainly has job security at DU, but even that can change. Everyone thought Lucia could remain the MN coach for life after he came in as a hot coach out of CC and won two championships for the gophers. 10 years later they couldn't wait to be rid of him. To me, the biggest concern for a college coach has to be NIL, and what is going to happen in that regard. If both college and the NHL are going to be about who pays players what to come and play for them, why not take the NHL job?

Fun fact. There isn't a single current college hockey player who was alive when Michigan last won a national championship.

I think the point of my post was missed. I opined that Blais’ most successful four year stretch was significantly better than Hak’s best four year stretch, and Blais did it with zero first round picks vs. Hak’s half dozen.

He wasn’t on any of Hak’s FF teams or the four Blais teams I referenced.

If you just want to look back to the beginning of the Blais tenure (for old timers like me, North Dakota will never have the dominance it had under Gino), I would argue that our most dominant four year stretch was from '96-97 to '99-00, not the four years under Hakstol when we went to the Frozen Four each year ('04-05 through '07-08). And I don't even think it's close. During the first four stretch, we saw all four seasons with at least 30 wins, only one season with double digit losses (10), three regular season titles, two league tourney titles, and two national championships. Meanwhile, under Hakstol's four year stretch, yes we saw four straight Frozen Fours, but none of those teams won 30 games, they had losses of 11, 14, 15 and 16, they had zero regular season titles and one lone tourney title. Furthermore, in the national tournament, the Blais teams were all essentially #1 seeds (one of the four top seeds in the entire tournament). At that time there were 12 teams, and UND was either a #1 or #2 region seed each season. Hakstol's four teams were seeded #8, #7, #9 and #3 overall, respectively. You want to know the other big difference. Not a "chippah" to be seen on the Blais teams. Zero first round draft picks. Hakstol had at least 6 by my count.

Last night I watched the hour long special on this year's Canadian World Juniors team put out by TSN. Near the end they played "this year's video," some song sung by a young lady I've never heard of, sung to a montage of pictures of the Canadian players. At first I was thinking it was odd they had "a video" for each tournament, but then I realized they probably just need a bookend to the gangbang rape video that usually comes out about three months after the tournament.

Yeah, I like the team to do well, but I'll admit that the prospect of a couple of bad losses in round robin play, followed by maybe a 6-3 exit in the quarterfinals has the potential to give me the warm fuzzies. We'd be done with Carle and Larson on the world stage, at that point.

Berenson and York retired. Monty took a job in the NHL. Pearson was canned for off ice shenanigans. Let's not pretend all of these schools are firing their head coach for missing the tournament. You want to know the other thing that all of the teams on your list and mine have in common? Other than DU and UND, not a single one of them has won a title since Brad Berry took over. Their seasons all ended just like ours, by missing the tournament or with an NCAA tournament loss.

I understand what you are saying, but even if we now decide that NCAA tournament is the bar that has to be met, I still don't think it's been that bad. Yes, under Brad, we've missed the tournament 3 times. But consider this. During that same time frame (2015-16 to now), these "bluebloods" of college hockey, that everyone fears we have fallen so far behind, missed the tournament the following number of seasons: Michigan - 2 Minnesota - 3 Michigan State - 7 Wisconsin - 6 Denver - 1 BU - 2 BC - 5 Further consider that we were #1 in the pairwise in 2020, and of the above teams, only DU and BC were likely to make it that year. MN was at 17, and Michigan was hanging on at 14, but everyone else was basically dead. Plus, the three misses in the 16 team era was probably not a standard that can be sustained. None of the above teams have come close to that. I have a theory. I always think the panic around here starts to build when the team struggles, but it goes over the top when one of our chief rivals (MN and DU) are having success at the same time. That's what we are seeing now.

Story and single picture. https://www2.kusports.com/news/2001/dec/23/boschee_hailed_as/

Should be fun. Wish I could go. I remember back in December, 2001, when Roy Williams brought his #2 (I think) ranked Kansas Jayhawks to the new Ralph for a game against UND. It was the same sort of deal as this Alabama game. Williams had promised the Boschee kid out of Valley City that if he committed to Kansas, Roy would try to schedule a game in North Dakota. During the player introductions, as I recall, on the new overhead video board in the Ralph, they ran a video montage that consisted of a few different UND basketball highlights (probably mostly three point buckets) interspersed with very short clips from The Wizard of Oz. The montage ended, of course, with the clip of Dorothy saying, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Pretty decent level trolling, I thought, for a new arena crew. Even Williams seemed to get a chuckle out of it. Then, shortly before the first 4 minute timeout, UND made a bucket to go up by one. During the timeout, the crowd was pretty fired up. The student section started chanting, "We want Duke," who was #1 at the time. In retrospect it was good the trolling was gotten out of the way early, since I seem to recall it was a 30+ point blow out loss, but good times.

I'm going to disagree with the idea that his teams always play bad in the NCAAs, except for year one. In 2017 we absolutely dominated a BU team that was supposed to be unbeatable because of all of the #1 picks on the team. I think we outshot them something like 60-30, and lost only because we got jobbed on a horrible offsides call. In 2021, I thought the team played very well against UMD, given the fact that UND had to play the first round game and UMD got to rest because Michigan did what Michigan hockey does best, quit. Last year's Michigan team was a very good team, and I did not think we were outplayed in that game. Yeah, it sucks to lose it in the third, but the team came ready to play.