SJHovey

Yeah, I'm not sure. I thought I saw that Brad posted that we lost a record number of people during that period, but I don't have the numbers. I get why people are frustrated. We've basically been the best program in college hockey for 40 years. That covers the college hockey lifespan of a great many of our fans. When you look back and see how many Frozen Fours, how many tournaments, how many championship game appearances, how many championships we've all had the privilege of witnessing these past 40 years (no other program comes close to us in all of those categories), you start to view it as a right instead of an extremely fortunate experience.

I don't think it's this so much as our fan base is simply spoiled. I say that in a nice way, but it's absolutely true and the sooner people realize it, the sooner they'll get back to enjoying UND hockey. We had a 20 year run that candidly won't be repeated again. As I was finishing up school in the early 80's, the WCHA was coming off a stretch where the NCAA champion came out of our league something like 29 of 36 years. That won't be repeated again either. From '97 to '00, we had the best team, hands down, in college hockey. It wasn't even close. We won two titles, then were an overtime goal away from sneaking out a third in '01. We then went to what, seven Frozen Fours in eleven years. Nobody is going to do that again. Back in one of the old "fire Hak" threads I posted something to the effect that even though we weren't winning titles, people needed to sit back and enjoy the success we were having because it was really outside of the ordinary. 10 Frozen Fours in a twenty year span. You're not going to see that again people, I don't care how many coaches you want to fire.

I don't know. We went 2-2 against UMD, and I wouldn't bet against them winning the championship again this year. We were also pretty evenly matched against DU, and I wouldn't bet against them winning the championship again this year either. And this in a year in which we admittedly couldn't put the puck in the net and had one of the worst power plays in recent memory.

I guess I wasn't suggesting that the cupboard would be bare for SCSU. But Schuldt and Lizotte ate up a lot of playing time, and there is the potential loss of Kuster and Ahcan. To a defenseman looking at his chances for playing time, it might appear easier if you're competing against 3 other incoming freshmen plus a redshirt in Tyler Anderson, as opposed to the North Dakota roster where you'll have two seniors (not counting Johnson), three juniors and two sophomores (who were very high draft picks). Again, all speculation on my part, but I could certainly see where if I wanted to come in this year an play a lot of minutes right away SCSU would be a better spot.

Assuming it's him, and all but one of us apparently have no real idea who it is, he might see SCSU as a place where he can step right in and get quality minutes. They're going to lose some bodies on defense after this year. It looks to me, according to the CHN site, that they have four seniors on D, along with Ahcan who might be a flight risk. Now, not all of those seniors are getting playing time, but that's still a lot of roster holes.

My personal theory is this. That starting around 2010 or 2011 you really started seeing some of the "bluebloods" in college hockey (including us) taking commitments from kids who were 15 or 16 years old. Honestly, most of the time you miss on those guys. Yeah there are the Schmaltz's and Boeser's of the world out there, but they are few and far between. Go back and look at Chris Heisenberg's recruits lists for those years. The guys who ended up here and who ended up playing often committed at age 17-19. The lists are littered with people who committed to us at 15 or 16 and never crossed the Red River. Cakebread, Evers, Rowe, Pelnik, Mitch Mattson, etc... We're not alone in that, which is why I think you've seen teams like Michigan, Minnesota, BC, (and now us) struggle a bit recently. I predict we'll see a lot fewer 16 year old recruits.

Yeah, but at least BU has those three national championships produced by the nine first round draft picks since 2015. No substitute for those blue chippers.

I don't know how many of you here were at the Frozen Faceoff this past weekend, but I thought it was a fun event. I've attended the playoff tournament every year since the WCHA started it after the 1987-88 season, and it's always been one of my favorite weekends of the year, even on those rare occasions where UND did not make it. I thought there was a nice crowd this year, contrary to everyone's fears. The crowd was into it, and it was fun hockey to watch. That championship game was as good a college hockey game as you could hope to attend. I've been a little fearful these past five years about the future of our college hockey playoff tournament, especially when the trend seems to be moving away from them. But we may be onto something here. If SCSU, UMD and UND can keep their programs going at a very high, competitive level, this tournament is going to flourish, even in the absence of Minnesota. Now, I'd love it if we could trade WMU, Miami and a bag of used sticks for BSU and Mankato, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

Good to hear from Puck Swami again. Always a true gentleman and a fan of the game, with usually quite accurate observations about the state of things. The quality of USCHO dropped immensely the day he felt he had to stop posting there. With respect to his current post, I agree with pretty much everything he wrote, with one addition. When the postscript to this year's UND team is written, we'll realize that the team fell short for one reason, and one reason only. It performed very poorly on special teams. If you plug in the special teams numbers of say a team like UMD, we would have had an additional 14 goals scored on the power play and given up 9 fewer goals on the penalty kill. A 23 goal differential over the course of 37 games, most of which seemed like one goal affairs, would have been huge.

I actually thought about that, and I might do it. I don't think Vickar and Tyler Rice played much that year, but I would have loved to have had Henderson's and Kevin Hoogsteen's signatures on the jersey. What I'm really interested in is the province of the jersey. How was it that they came to sign it, and for whom.

I don’t think I ever posted a picture of that Jersey I bought at the Bradley Center auction last summer. Autographed by Blais and the 1996-97 championship team. The signatures are: Curtis Murphy 2, Mark Pivetz 3, Dane Litke 4, Jason Blake 5, Tim O’Connell 6, Mitch Vig 7, Jason Ulmer 9, Ian Kallay 10, Peter Armbrust 11, Jesse Bull 15, Jay Panzer 16, David Hoogsteen 18, Jeff Ulmer 19, Brad DeFauw 20, Brad Williamson 21, Adam Calder 25, Tom Philion 26, Joe Blake 28, Aaron Schweitzer 30 and Toby Kvalevog 35. Dean Blais also signed. There some omissions, one quite notable. It was not signed by Aaron Vickar 1, Kevin Hoogsteen 8, Tyler Rice 27 or (most significantly) Matt Henderson 22, who was the Most Outstanding Player. But that said, I’m still pleased with it.

10,000 to 1? Put me down for a $1 on UND.

Somewhere I saw an article in which the kid talked about his decision not to come here but go to Wisconsin, and as I recall a huge part of it was that Granato had some prior coaching involvement with him. In a lot of ways recruiting is a people business and if a kid and a coach connect, that can sway a decision.

Or, you could just enjoy the remainder of the season. Every game with this team is a nail biter, and no matter how far we advance, before long it’ll be the middle of April and six long months until college hockey.

Four, actually. As I said, ‘59, ‘63, ‘82 and ‘87.

I get that fans can become frustrated when they have higher expectations for the program than are being achieved. But Michigan once went something like 26 years and only made the tournament once. Minnesota went 16 years and made the tournament once. We went ten years without making it, then a decade later we started a streak in which we only made it once out of nine years. And that doesn't even address the streaks where the tournament was made but no title was achieved. We are not even 3 years since our last title, and we've missed the tournament exactly one year in a row. To say that it's early to even start searching for the panic button, let alone pushing it, is an understatement.

Do you have to meet all of those criteria, or are you elite if you meet just one? As an FYI, I think there are only five teams with a "few" (I defined that as more than two, since two would be "a couple") guys in the top 50 in scoring, and I wouldn't define any of those programs as elite (Mich. St., PSU, Lake State, Quinnipiac, U Mass). Probably only two even make the tournament this year. By my count, 9 of Canisius' 10 conference opponents in the AHA have put up more than two goals against Canisius this year. Do you think those programs, right now, are all more elite than ours?

The CHN modification tool moves them from 55 (tie for 54th) down to 58 if we beat them twice. Here is a link to that tool. Just hit "customize" and follow the links. https://www.collegehockeynews.com/ratings/ncaapwcr.php

Yeah, my snark comment was attached to your quote but was more of a general observation of comments I've seen around here regarding Brad's work. I don't know, but I think he writes those columns or blog posts or tweets or whatever not because he thinks most people don't basically understand that the more games you win, the more likely it is you're in the tournament. I think he writes it in part because he finds it interesting, and also thinks the rest of us may find it interesting, that there is such an extremely small margin between being in the tournament and being on the outside.

I guess I don't really get all the snark about Brad. First, will he be wrong if he writes that? Probably not, the way things are going. Second, not everyone is as closely tuned into the pairwise as those who post here. We're just a tiny fraction of UND hockey fans, and for a lot of them Brad's articles in the Herald or his blog posts might be their only source of information. I've always assumed he doesn't really pass along those observations for just those who follow the game more closely. He has a lot broader audience than that.

Yeah I don’t know that I’d bet they go 6-2. I just think 6-2, plus two wins in the first round is what they probably need to get in.

22 wins and we’re in, 21 and I’ll take my chances. That’s always been the number for teams from the top conferences. 6-2 over the regular season, win the first round, and we’re at 21.

The only thing I would say about the program that I would like the staff to look at is this. Since the early 1980's until Eades left a few years ago, we always had a Minnesota high school hockey connection on the coaching staff. Blais, Eades, Frank Serratore, Jim Scanlan, Sandelin, Osiecki. We always had someone who was from Minnesota or who played high school hockey in Minnesota or coached high school hockey in Minnesota or something. Recruiting is very relationship driven and I've always thought that a lot of Dean Blais' success was due to the relationships he had with other Minnesota high school coaches, either through his days at the U or through his high school coaching days. Eades and Sandelin also had a lot of that. I don't think we have the connections with the state hockey programs the way we used to, and that perhaps makes recruiting in the state more difficult. It's harder to find those hidden diamonds without some inside information.

I've often thought that what this Board really needs is a thread addressing that precisely. A prediction thread where posters can come in, before a player starts his college career, and declare, "this guy is going to be a great college hockey player." Not just limited to our team, but all around college hockey. What you'd see is this. You'd see some hits, because yeah you can pretty much figure out that a player like Hughes (if he makes it to college) is going to be great. You're going to see some misses. And you're going to realize that many guys who are great college players were never even mentioned in our thread.

We certainly have a much nicer facility than Duluth, and we have a much deeper tradition. But everyone I ever talked to who went to school at UMD loved the school. Duluth is a fun town. It also has the advantage of location in terms of recruiting. The Duluth high schools and surrounding areas have turned out a lot of good recruits. Yeah, I agree we have an advantage, but I'm not certain it's as large or distinct as we might like to think.