SJHovey

I get why people here are frustrated. It's always more fun to win championships than to be a middle of the pack team. But there are a few here who think that identifying and landing great college hockey players, then turning them into a championship team is easy, or something that if the coaches just knew what they were doing or at least tried, they would accomplish. It is not that easy. Your question goes to one of the three great myths that I see offered way too frequently on this board. MYTH #1 - The System People complain that the coaching staff's "system" is stifling all of these great scorers coming out of juniors and turning them into grinders. It's the same "system" and core group of coaches and coaching philosophy that's been around UND since at least 2004-05. It's the identical system and group of coaches who were in place in 2015-16. Folks, I don't think it's the system, whatever that is. MYTH #2 - Failure to Develop College hockey fans of some of the major programs like to brag about how their program "develops" NHL players. That is largely a myth. Parise, Boeser, Toews, Oshie, Stecher, et al, were going to be great college hockey players wherever they played, and were going to play in the NHL. What the college programs can do is round out their games. They can teach better decision making. They can teach players to be more responsible in all zones of the ice. But if you think any staff can take a player out of juniors and "develop" him into a 25 goal scorer in college is just wishful thinking. To me, the question is do the players who enter as freshmen play the game better when they leave as seniors, juniors or whenever? That doesn't mean do they score more goals in a season. I think our coaching staffs over the years have done a good job of this. MYTH #3 - Failure to Recruit This touches upon your question. Where are the great 18 year olds who come in and dominate the college game, and why isn't our staff landing all of them? It is extraordinarily difficult to look at a player, especially when you project out 2, 3 or 4 years, and determine whether their great talent at the current level will translate over to the next level. In fact, if you believe you possess that ability, then you are wasting your time and semi-trailers full of cash posting here. You need to contact an NHL front office. Just think about some things we've seen with our own program. Brock Boeser and Chris Wilkie both came to our program the same year, out of the same junior league. They were coached by the same coaches, using the same "system." They had tied for the goal scoring title in the USHL the year before. So, why is one of them a budding star in the NHL and the other playing in what seems like his 14th college season? Think back to 2010-11. Who here would have predicted that Carter Rowney, having been declared a flop after just 4 goals in his first two seasons here, would likely have a better NHL career than Matt Frattin? College hockey is a different game, even more than it was 15 years ago, and light years from the way it was 30 years ago. The days of a Michigan, North Dakota, BC, Minnesota, Wisconsin or other schools loading up on all the talent is long since gone, and even if they happen to have a spectacular year recruiting (seemingly), it doesn't necessarily translate into team success (see BU).

Haha. This is why old people should not post on their cellphones. Damn tough to see.

Man, I’m not a huge fan of poor mouthing recruits who won’t be here for a year. For what it’s worth, Chris Dilks tweeted that Ness has been really good in the USHL this year. Chris, who is no friend of ours, seems to have a decent eye for hockey talent.

17-15-4 over last 10 seasons, including this one. Two years we just played two games.

In the pre-NCHC days I was with you. I don't think I ever cheered for a WCHA team, although I preferred UMD to beat Michigan in 2011 only because I didn't want Michigan to get further ahead of us. However, the NCHC programs took a fair amount of heat and ridicule for forming the so-called "super conference" once the B1G broke up college hockey as we knew it. With the great success of the NCHC in getting teams into the tournament, and then success within the tournament, I kind of feel like it rubs the noses of the detractors in it a little bit, which I don't mind one bit.

If we don’t win it, I’d like to see an NCHC team win it, just because it riles fans in other conferences. It goes without saying that DU and UMD are at the bottom of my list of NCHC teams I’d cheer for though.

Well, I posted I thought we could get a win and a chance to win the other game. I don’t think my hunch was too bad.

I don't know. A guy has to draw a line somewhere.

Ok, I did it but it went in sideways. Haha. Anyway I hung a baseball cap in the upper left corner of the banner for a size perspective.

They are similar to the current banners in that they are rectangular, hanging the long way. I’d estimate 6 feet high by 4 feet wide. I’m a technology idiot. If someone can explain (in very simple terms) how I can post a photo that I’ll take with my phone, I’ll do it.

I know exactly what happened to them. It was following the 1996-97 championship season, which was also the spring of the great flood in Grand Forks. As I recall, the Sioux boosters lost a bunch of their stuff in the flood. The University also needed to order a new banner for the most recent championship. The five banners ('59, '63, '80, '82 and '87) that had been hanging in the arena were donated to the booster club for them to auction off and raise money. The 1980 banner was purchased by the owner of Tim Shea's nursery in Grand Forks, and I believe it used to hang in their facility, although I haven't been in there for years. The 1963 and 1987 banners were purchased by an alumni who used to be a state district court judge in Minnesota. He is a good friend of my father's. My brother has the 1959 banner, and if you were at the CC game when the '59 team was honored, you may have seen the banner. My brother couldn't be at the game, but he had a friend bring it, and a number of people took their pictures with it. The 1982 banner hangs in my office.

SCSU hasn't exactly dominated teams in the opposing team's rink. They're 1-1-2 at UMD and Miami, where UND went 2-2. They won four games at CC and Alaska, but three of them were one goal games excluding eng's. They blew out BC and lost to Northeastern. Yeah, they could come in and do to us what WMU did, but I could very easily see us play them the way we played DU, with a win and a chance to take the second game.

If this team has done anything though it has been to play to its competition. Thus, I expect at least one if not two close games in each of the four series coming up, and there is certainly no reason why they can't steal a game in each instance.

I understand. I was just being a smartazz because those teams I listed were truly awful and we'd probably have needed about a 32 team field minimum for them to get in. I still don't think this year's team faces an insurmountable hurdle. 22 wins by the time the Frozen Faceoff is over and this team will be in, unless there are just crazy upsets in the other playoffs resulting in a lot of autobids going to teams outside the pairwise top 16. 22 teams in a league like the NCHC will pretty much always lock you in. We have 12 now. We might even get in with 21. I still think this team needs to go 7-5 the rest of the regular season, win the first round of the playoffs and win one of two games in St. Paul. That's not impossible, or even that unrealistic for this team.

How many teams would the tournament need before our '91-'92, '92-'93 and '93-'94 teams would have made it, teams that finished 7th, 8th and 8th respectively in the old WCHA?

Maybe someone has done this, or maybe it's pretty much impossible to do, but man it would be great if there were a site or someplace where fans could go to see examples of each version of authentic jersey that North Dakota has worn over the years, by year.

That might be slightly overstating it. I plugged in your results into the CHN customization feature for the Pairwise. Because you didn't state which 6 we would win against UMD, SCSU, WMU and DU, I just went with sweeps at home and splits on the road. With the results as you suggested, we'd be sitting at the #3 overall seed heading into the playoffs. It's actually a kind of fun tool to play around with, in your spare time. Of course it assumes certain results elsewhere. I believe it bases those results on KRACH ratings. While they can be wrong, keep in mind they can be wrong in both directions (that is, to UND's benefit or detriment). If you play around with the customization feature, what you'll see is that in the absence of some absurd outcomes elsewhere in college hockey, what UND really needs is to sweep two remaining series and split the rest. If it does that it's most likely spot in the pairwise will be around #10 heading into the playoffs. Only one sweep and the rest of the series split will put us on the bubble, at around #15.

Home ice for the first round. Get to St. Paul. Win two against two teams without a ton to play for. It’s a formula that has been followed before and is certainly achievable.

Excellent. Good to know. Thanks.

By the way, I'm not certain those NCAA videos are actual videos of the entire game. Personally I've never purchased one from them. I think usually you are much better off just going on line and checking to see who has a copy that they recorded and that they're willing to give/sell/trade to you.

The issue here isn't what we are allowed, or not allowed to do. Everyone is allowed to offer their opinions and criticism. My efforts have been to try to get people to think rationally about what they are writing. Let's not kid ourselves. What we post here is not constructive criticism. Constructive criticism necessarily needs to be an interactive process involving feedback from the criticized. It also needs to have certain specifics that pretty much never show up in any posts around here. Typically you would point out the errors or deficiencies in the performance, using specifics, then give examples of how that performance needs or can be changed to cause improvement. People write here that Berry and the staff are not recruiting well enough. Ok. So where is the constructive criticism? What exactly should they be doing differently? How should their approach differ? Should they change where they recruit? Should they change what they say to the kids? Just complaining that we don't get high end recruits like we used to or like other schools do is not constructive criticism. The same with the complaints that the coaching staff's style of play that is taught to the players turns scoring players at the junior level into non-scoring players at the college level. Well, what precisely are the coaches doing incorrectly, and why? What needs to be taught differently, and how will that change the performance of the team?

I guess I would ask this. In the world of sports fans, how big of a difference is it really between fans who are filling message boards with statements to the effect that the coach can't coach, the coach can't recruit, the coach isn't hard enough on his players, the coach teaches a style that turns good recruits into bad players, etc... (all basic allegations made on this board) and a fan who types "coach must be fired." When someone repeatedly makes the first set of accusations, isn't the demand he be fired kind of implied? I don't come to this board often enough to name names with 100% certainty, but I can tell you that there are a handful of posters here who were the most strident about Hak having to go because he couldn't get us over the hump and win the championship, then were the first ones in here saying, "see, I told you so. I told you we needed someone like Brad Berry to get this program it's next championship" and are now among the most critical of the job Berry is doing.

I think you might find them on Amazon. The NCAA also used to let you order them direct from them, but they were pricey. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_2?rh=n%3A2625373011%2Cn%3A!2644981011%2Cn%3A!2644982011%2Cn%3A!2998369011%2Cn%3A332040011%2Cn%3A341039011%2Cp_n_format_browse-bin%3A2650304011&page=2&ie=UTF8&qid=1547128156 Edit: In looking through the Amazon list, I see '87 and '97, but not '80.

The funny thing is this. My guess is the coaching staff was maybe caught off guard by Jost's departure after one year. It happens and you have to deal with it, but they probably had a reasonable expectation he'd be here at least two years. If he stays, we probably end up a 2-3 seed in the NCAA's last year. Do we make the Frozen Four? Hard to say, but the season probably wouldn't have caused anyone to jump off a bridge, or even give it a second glance. We're .500 this year. We're not 2-16, coming off a 3-31 season from the year before. The team has shown that on any given night they can beat the best teams in the country and on any given night they can lose to the worst teams in the country? What does that say about this team? Not sure, but things could be a heck of a lot worse. I love sports fans. We're sitting here evaluating the performance of a person who holds an elite level coaching position in the sport of hockey. It's a position where if you do it very well, you get a chance to get hired to fill one of the 31 most important coaching positions on the planet in that particular sport. That's what's being done by our fan base that posts here, a group that is likely qualified to coach a mites team, or maybe a high school JV team. It's like we're discussing the ability of someone to be the head of cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins just because we had an ekg done once. No one here should take this criticism personally. It's done by every fan base in every sport. But we really do need to think about the rationality of our behavior.