SJHovey

So, back when the game was announced and UND sent out the email with the list of hotels for which blocks of rooms were reserved, we went ahead and booked our three rooms for Thursday through Sunday. Because the charter flights look like they might be going out on Wednesday, we've been trying to extend the stay to include Wednesday night too, even though UND hadn't reserved the rooms for that night. I called the hotel directly today because they don't list any rooms as available. The very nice lady that I spoke to said they were working on the problem and anticipated that they would be able to grant our request. It was obvious I wasn't their first call. "We didn't know y'all was going to be coming down here for so many days."

As of a few minutes ago on Ticketmaster, my count of available seats was as follows: Lower level - 18 Club - 4 Upper level (UND attack twice) - 25 Upper (sides) - 32 Upper (PSU attack twice) - 630 Total - 709

I'm not sure on the number sold. I've heard Bridgestone holds about 17,000, but I'm not certain that they opened up all areas for sale for this game. Luxury boxes, for instance, or the SRO areas. I just don't know. I think that if they can sell some tickets today before it opens up to the public tomorrow, then we get a decent public sale this weekend, it certainly has to be considered a big success. Also, a fair number of the tickets unsold are wheelchair accessible tickets, including many of those in the lower bowl. Not sure what the normal sales pattern would be for those.

I spent the last 15 minutes or so looking through the ticketmaster seatchart to see what seats are still available. My unofficial count is this: Lower bowl --99 Club -- 17 Upper (UND attack zone) -- 777 Upper (both sides, sections 308-312 and 323-328) -- 977 Upper (PSU attack zone, sections 301-307 and 329-333) --3832 Total available -- 5702

I'm not sure, but I think there are quite a few more in the upper level than the lower bowl and club levels. My uneducated guess is that there have been maybe 8000 sold thus far. If you look at some of the upper level sections, there are a ton of seats in them. I think the big section down on the end where PSU will attack twice (301 maybe?) has something like 500 seats, and pretty much none of them sold.

Just scrolling over the sections at the Ticketmaster site, it looks like there are 162 lower bowl tickets still available, many of which look to be wheelchair seating, and 23 club level seats available. Thousands left in the upper deck. At least 20-25 sections with 100+ tickets available in each section.

Maybe, maybe not. Even though we went ahead and bought our champions club allotment, I really wasn't worried about getting a ticket for this event like I was for Las Vegas. 17,000, or whatever the arena holds, is a lot of people that far away from North Dakota. I think because people figure there will probably be tickets available due to the size of the arena, a lot of people will wait until closer to the event to decide whether to go. A lot can happen in a year.

So Brad S. reports that the 2015-16 team with 11 players having played an NHL game is second only to the 1981-82 team with 12. Whether Cam Johnson would ever get a shot to see actual game action is questionable in my opinion. But I do have an outside candidate from the '15-16 team who could be the 12th. Chris Wilkie.

We have 8 in section 114

I like to listen in to various hockey podcasts just to hear what people around the country are saying about college hockey. I happened to catch Motzko's interview with Wally Shaver following the UND series. I like Motzko, and I think he'll do well for Minnesota, but he gave me a chuckle. After Wally said something about Minnesota coming off a tough weekend against North Dakota, Motzko said that he always goes home and watches recordings of the game. He said he went home after the Thursday game expecting to see that his team was dominated. "I didn't see that. Not at all. We were right there. 2-1 game. Pretty even in shots. Anyone's game. We get called for another penalty late in the period. We do a great job killing it off and then basically at the end of the penalty a shot goes in and it's 3-1. We give one up to start the 2nd and it's 4-1. It wasn't anything that North Dakota did to us. We did it to ourselves. We fumble the puck, there isn't anyone within 20 feet, but it gets turned over and then a goal. But it had nothing to do with them pressuring us." Then Wally makes some inane comment. I don't know. Sometimes I think you just gotta call a turd sandwich a turd sandwich and move on. But is description didn't match up to closely with my recollection of that game.

Let's assume he doesn't win his appeal. What are Blake's likely options for this season?

My view on announcers is this. I have no problem if the regular announcers of a team are "homers." The vast majority of them are, and I really wouldn't expect anything else. But it is refreshing, and enjoyable, when they are not. Denver's tv guys were great. They called the game as they saw it, even though you know and could tell that they would prefer a Denver victory rather than a North Dakota victory. I think our tv guys are pretty good too, in that regard. Tim is a homer. Anyone who doesn't recognize that needs to take out the green-shaded earbuds. But Tim is an excellent pxp guy because, a) he knows the players on both teams by name, and uses those names, rather than a steady stream of "a long pass up the wing and North Dakota is in on a breakaway" and, b) he has regular phrases that he uses to let you know where on the ice the puck is at so you can paint a mental picture when you are listening to the radio. As for the "keyboard warriors" comment, I have no problem with announcers or media calling out internet board posts, if they think they are wrong. Why do we get to call them out if they don't get to call us out?

As of the time of this post, there are still about 525 tickets available for Friday and just under 400 available for Saturday. Should be fun. I'll be there both nights.

This game should give us some hope. A team with 5-6 great defensemen can do great things.

I would really like a black one and a green one, but how do I go about paying you Mafiia?

I know fans here are unhappy with our season. But we were one of three teams to win two games from UMD. One was in the frozen four. The other was the #1 overall seed . The NCHC was a damn good conference this year.

What I posted was that I think you'll see a trend away from seeking the younger recruits, the 14 and 15 year olds. The question that i have is this. Did the UND staff really recruit an eighth grader, make an offer and try to obtain a commit, or did a legacy who has grown up hearing UND stories simply announce as an eighth grader that he's going to UND to play hockey?

If you think teams like DU and UMD are going to do 10 Frozen Fours in 20 years in the new college hockey landscape, put the prediction out there. I say no.

Did they do 10 in 20 years as I originally posted?

My statement "nobody is going to do that again" referred to the entire paragraph that preceded it, but whatever. Could someone do it? Of course. We did it. Do I think it's likely? No. Yeah, DU is going to their third in the last four years. They've been to six in the last what, 45 years?

The defenseman, Jon Lizotte, was the senior.

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.