SJHovey

With respect to Penn St., their season gives me a sense of deja vu. Their season, and all the discussion fans and writers are having about it, remind me so much of the 2010-11 Yale season. Up to that time the ECAC had been pretty terrible. Yale did have a couple of appearances in the tournament including some upsets that we remember, but generally speaking they received no respect in the hockey world, nor did the ECAC. At about this point in that season, Yale was something like 17-1 or 18-2. They were elevated to #1 in the polls, much to the outrage of everyone who pointed out they literally had beaten no one of any consequence to that point. Generally, people who claimed to be "in the know" just said "wait and see what happens." Yale did start to lose a few games, but because of their hot start maintained a pretty high ranking going into the tournament. In the NCAA's, they escaped a scrappy Air Force team before getting rolled by eventual champion Duluth. But I remember coming away from the tournament thinking, "Ok, they were a little better than I thought." I didn't think they were the best team in the country, nor did I even think they were a top 4 or 5 team after watching the two NCAA appearances, but I concluded they were certainly a top 10 team. That's kind of what I think I'll see with Penn St. as the year progresses.

So, basically, three out of four NCHC series every single week?

USCHO has them 1-6, 8 and 12 as of this morning. That's pretty cool, I think. It also means that there probably won't be a major pwr hit with the occasional loss or tie, which is nice.

I think Jayson made an error. Too many of us have looked at the schedules and come up with a different number.

I think it's his 52nd, assuming no exhibition games counted. The last one he didn't start was Saturday vs. St. Cloud last year.

Yeah, Red Berenson is pretty much the only person associated with Michigan who is old enough to remember them.

I suppose we're all different, but two that I'll always feel that got away were 1982-83 and 1998-99. In 1982-83 we had a good core of the previous year's championship team coming back, plus we had the Frozen Four at the old Ralph. We were basically a triple overtime goal against Wisconsin away from playing 4 NCAA tournament games at home for the championship. That 1998-99 team was one of the most dominant I've seen. 29-3-2 in the regular season. 11-1-2 on the road in the WCHA that year. Just a crazy good team that come the playoffs started to doubt itself. It started when Mankato took us to three games in the first round, followed up by a loss to Denver in our favorite place to play, Target Center, and then a lethargic performance against BC. Just a huge, slow letdown for me that year.

You'd think with all the non-com games the B1G has had to fill that they would be interested. It might just be that we haven't discussed it with them lately. It's really too bad, considering they are certainly two of the most storied programs in NCAA hockey history. A little bit of trivia. The last time Michigan played against UND in Grand Forks? February 23, 1980, the day after the "Miracle on Ice" game. Yeah, I should edit my post. The last time we played Michigan in the regular season was in 1980. As some others pointed out, we did play them here in the NCAA's in the "Holy Cross" regional.

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that we've tried but Michigan has been unwilling to do home and homes. This was back in their old CCHA days when they only had about 6 non-con games available each year. They were playing Wisconsin and Minnesota is some b.s. series each November, and then they had the GLI. Claimed they couldn't give up the money by playing any other away games.

At least in the short term Miami will be better off in terms of prepping itself for an NCAA tournament bid by playing more Hockey East teams, or higher level ECAC teams. I understand Michigan's position. It's just Michigan being Michigan, and even with their crappy team this year people will line up to play them. Only programs like DU or North Dakota are in a position to basically turn down a "play at Michigan or play nowhere" demand from Michigan. But OSU? Jeez, I'd think that anyone who is willing to play in their empty barn in exchange for a home game of their own would be a welcome sight in Columbus. Apparently the lack of oxygen in the Pairwise top 16 is starting to get to them.

If we get in we know where we play.

You only get trolled if people care about what you are doing. No one cares about DU, the Avs, hockey in Denver in general or Mike Chambers, for that matter. That's why I love it that Lambert and Meloni go out of their way to insult the UND hockey program and us, the UND fans, every single week in their podcast. The day they stop trolling us is the day we'll know we've become irrelevant in the college hockey world.

And, it worked.

I think there are two reasons why this team does not have a better record at this point in the season, even though they've played a pretty decent strength of schedule and aren't in terrible shape. The first reason is the primary cause, in my opinion. It is poor special teams play. The second reason is that while Cam Johnson has played decent, and at times has made spectacular saves when hung out to dry by a young defense, we realistically need him to be slightly better. I'm not a huge "fancy stats" guy, but I think they are useful for determining where some strengths or weaknesses lie. The most common, of course, is the Corsi %. By all accounts we are an elite team (usually defined as 55%+) under this metric. We are near the top in total, even strength and when games are "close". But on the power play our Corsi sucks. Good teams are running at about 92% on the power play, we're around 87%, way down in the lower half of all the teams in the country. Similarly, our penalty kill sucks. Right now I think we sit at about 47th. The only teams whose penalty killing is worse than ours are, Bentley, Dartmouth, Colorado College, Bowling Green, Northern Michigan, AIC, Holy Cross, Niagara, ASU, OSU, Brown, Mercyhurst and Michigan State. These are not college hockey programs that we want to keep company with. With respect to Cam, last year he was around .935, which is spectacular. I'm not sure he even has to be that good again, or that we can expect him to be that good again. But he's at .910 right now, and we need him to be better. The better teams are getting closer to .920, which is where I think the good teams need to be, at least. It doesn't sound like much, but those small percentage points make a big difference. For Cam, if he were .920 instead of .910, that's four goals already this season. That means the difference in the Friday Minnesota game, the Denver games, the MSU games, etc... Cam played better in the latter part of the first half, and we need that trend to continue. If we can get Cam to play at .920 or better in the second half, and if we can fix the putrid special teams play, this has the potential to be a very good team.

I wouldn't be surprised if 3 or 4 of them are basically unpaid grad assistant type "coaches", unpaid former players who need to get a start somewhere into what they hope will be a coaching position.

Yeah, you put your finger on the primary problem with their podcast. At their best the feel unscripted, two friends who just really love college hockey, sitting around and talking about the current status of the game and the teams that play. But at their worst, they (and by "they" I mean usually Lambert) get sidetracked talking for four minutes about their high school soccer days or something.

One of the college hockey podcasts I listen to is Hockey Goes to College with Ryan Lambert of Puck Daddy, everyone's favorite around here, and Joe Meloni of College Hockey News. I listen to them primarily because of the intense hatred they have for all things North Dakota, we fans most of all. But they also watch a lot of east coast hockey in person and they certainly pay attention to the game. Yesterday's episode was kind of amusing. I came away from it thinking these guys feel the same way as Brad S., although they didn't summarize it as nicely. They basically said Duluth and UMD seem to be the two best teams, by a decent margin. After that we'll put Penn St., simply out of default, because of their record, but don't come to us surprised if they start losing a bunch of games. The intent of that episode was to discuss teams that might be in the 4-10 ranking. But what was funny was as they went through and talked about a bunch of teams, most of the time they would say something like, "yeah, I just don't see them as a top 5 type of team. I might believe they are the 10th or 12th best team in the country." Then the other guy would agree and they'd move on to the next team. By the time the podcast was over a listener would be convinced there were two really good teams, an unknown and untested team at #3, and then about eight teams that really can't be ranked any higher than 10. The strange thing is, I don't know that I necessarily disagree with them. I really feel like this UND team might be able to come in under the radar, so to speak, given our start. Make the tourney, win the Fargo regional and it suddenly becomes a two game event.

I think you're still good. I have tickets myself. I just don't think this team missing the tournament would be considered a gross failure. As I pointed out, we simply haven't seen a roster like this were we have 19 freshmen and sophomores and only a handful of upperclassmen. I've always thought in the college game you can't overstate the difference that the physical strength and experience of a senior, or even junior, can make. We've all seen the differences in players like a Caggiula right on down to a Pattyn from their first season or two to the end of their college career. I think this team is going to be tough to beat come February and March. I think Poganski is playing much better. I love what I see from Wolanin. Cam Johnson seems to have put the early season games behind him and is playing big. We've played virtually the entire season without a healthy Boeser. Shaw has been in and out. It'd be nice to get off to a good start at Union, then put together a nice little conference run including some payback to Duluth and see where we go from there.

Really? 19 Freshmen and Sophomores on this roster. The last time we had a team that had at least 19 Freshmen and Sophomores on the team was......2001-02. Plus, that 2001-02 team (the last to not make the tournament) had 32 people on the roster, so they had 13 upperclassmen. This year we have 19 underclassmen out of a total of 26 on the roster.

For an at large bid from one of the top conferences, a team typically needs about 22 wins by selection Sunday. Since we can't count on any wins at Target Center, that means the team needs to win about 11 of their final 17 regular season games plus the two first round playoff games. Certainly possible. I feel like if we can get in, we're going to be a tough at-large team playing in Fargo.

Ohio St. played Denver this year. It was the first game of the year. Ohio St. returned 9 of their top 10 scorers from last year, of whom 4 are now seniors, 2 juniors and 3 sophomores. Denver lost 6 of their top 10 scorers from last year, including two of the top 3, and of the four returning, two are just sophomores. Given those facts, I'm not sure I'd judge the strengths of the two teams on a meeting the first day of the season. Although candidly, it would be nice to see the B1G schools turn their $15-20 million/school in B1G Network dividends into something other than AHA hockey played in big arenas.

Watching on an ipad the feed kept stopping.

North Dakota has had a long history of doing this. For instance, if I'm not mistaken at one point the first five championship banners all had the geometric logo on them even though that logo wasn't used by the University until 1976, and didn't show up on the jerseys until sometime in the 1990's. I think the University, and we as fans, have more important issues to deal with than that.

I bet the 2006 game had nothing to do with it. HC and BC were huge traditional rivals, both in football and basketball. You can get a flavor of this if you watch the ESPN 30 For 30 movie on the BC basketball point shaving scheme. As I understand it, in the last 20-25 years that dropped off quite a bit, as BC elected to exclude HC from it's schedule. But I recall reading somewhere that there has been a big push by BC alumni in the last 5 years or so to renew the HC rivalry in both basketball and football. If BC has any pull in Hockey East, I suspect their vote would be HC.

I wonder if the Herald wouldn't have lost a lot of their stuff in '97.