SJHovey

Reminds me a lot of Stecher as a freshman.

Yeah, but we're spoiled here. Midco has an outstanding production for UND hockey. It's NHL quality, honestly.

Whenever I see one of these lists, I'm reminded of Chris Dilks who used to have some pretty good write ups on prospects, but usually butted heads with North Dakota fans on a variety of issues. Whatever happened to that guy? I haven't seen anything from him in ages, and his old Twitter account seems relatively dormant.

The other nice thing about the OOC results thus far is that the NCHC losses have largely been the doing of SCSU alone. However, a lot of OOC games yet to be played, including some important series these next few weeks (UMD-Cornell, UND-Mankato, UNO-OSU, UMD-MN, Mich-SCSU and UND-BU).

It always sucks when UND fails to sweep the gophers, especially in Grand Forks. But splits are generally the norm for this matchup, so whatever. I will say this, however. If you had asked me before the games which team was likely the better or stronger team, I probably would have told you Minnesota. They brought back a ton of talent from last year's title game team, and added some outstanding freshmen. UND had/has a lot of unknowns. I'm not so sure, after watching this past weekend. A lot of the talk on social media, here and on gpl, has been about how good Close was this weekend, and he definitely played great. But he had to play great. I thought that even though the games were sort of mirror images of each other, with one team controlling play for two periods one game and one period the other, North Dakota overall had a higher number of really quality scoring chances. North Dakota gave up probably too many breakaways. But I thought that North Dakota had more chances in close, in the slot, and with some odd man rushes. I also thought that even though neither team scored with the man advantage, North Dakota had much better looks than did Minnesota, especially in game two. Just my two cents.

A little bit of potential for a "trap" series here. Coming off the emotion of two games against Minnesota, and right ahead of a weekend playing BU, everyone's preseason darling. Hopefully Brad has the boys going hard and they come away with two wins.

Obviously, most of the memories already mentioned are at or near the top of all of our collective recollections. There is another series that is a personal favorite of mine, however. In 1995-96, Dean Blais was still trying to lead the program back to the top. That February, on the 2nd and 3rd, the #1 ranked gophers visited the old arena. I traveled back to Grand Forks with three friends from Minnesota, two of whom were U of M alum and were diehard gopher fans. The other friend was just a casual sports fan with no rooting interest. Minnesota was on a twenty game unbeaten streak (19-0-1) and twelve game winning streak. Furthermore, they were on a three game shutout streak. That weekend was also one of record cold in Minnesota, with Tower, Minnesota setting the record at -60 on 2/2. During the entire five hour drive to Grand Forks, I had to endure an endless barrage of questions like, "will ND even score this weekend," "will you generally be happy with one goal losses, if ND can manage them," etc... Candidly, I didn't say a lot in response because I wasn't too sure what to expect. We had planned to get in the car and drive back to the Twin Cities after the Saturday game. Friday, UND won 8-2, and it wasn't that close. So much for the shutout streak. Saturday, MN put up a better fight, but UND completed the sweep, 7-5. We got in the car and started the drive. The fourth member of our group tried to engage our MN friends who were sitting in the back seat, but nothing. Five hours of complete silence until we arrived home, which ended with "thanks for the ride." It's hard to imagine five hours of complete silence in a car with someone until you've done it, but it's something to behold. Classic. Every time someone mentions the Tower, MN record temperature around those guys, I still get to rib them about that weekend.

Someone needs to get Bucci a change of underwear. I think he’s spooged himself three times in the last half hour thinking college hockey in Boston will become relevant again.

I don't necessarily fault the LD. QU's right defenseman got the puck following the faceoff win, and drifted right to the boards under pressure from MN's left wing. The QU right wing, by design of the play, went to the right boards, drawing a pinch up by MN's LD. But that was the play for the MN LD. He's there to pinch off a pass up the boards to the QU right wing. The problem for MN was Nelson, in the center position. Not only did he lose the draw, but he then lost his man the (QU center) who proceeded up the left wing and was there for the two on one pass. If Nelson had stuck with him after losing the draw, there is no open player for QU to pass it to on the two on one.

That was a fun game to watch when you don’t have a real rooting interest.

I'm going to disagree with this, at least with respect to St. Cloud. Motzko got St. Cloud into the tournament, but their tournament fortunes under him were getting worse. He took them to the semis, then to the quarters a couple of times. But the last couple of years they had some bad first round defeats. Larson has done a good job of maintaining or even building the program, including a trip to the championship game a couple of years ago.

One thing I'm taking away from this final is this. There isn't a lot that separates the top 25-30 college hockey teams in any given year. QU and MN were clearly the two best teams during the tournament. They were the top two seeds, and they played like it. North Dakota played those two teams on back to back weekends last October. Three of the four games went to overtime. In every single game North Dakota lead. In fact, you can argue that we probably should have won three of those four games. Yet we weren't really that close to either qualifying for the tournament or this championship game. It doesn't take much to change your fortunes in this sport.

He says, as he then ....... cherry picks numbers. I just pointed out what the two different players did during their first two seasons at school. Since one of the kids decided to stay only two seasons, I'm not sure how more complete my numbers could have been. But speaking of cherry picking, yeah, Hain had a high of 11 points through four years, the latter two of which he spent substantial time off the ice due to injuries. When the kid finally stayed healthy, he had a nice final year with us. Hain wasn't seeing a bunch of time on the power play. He was killing penalties and playing a checking role. I'd take his season over MC's in a heartbeat.

MC played 60 games his first two years. JC played 55. Their scoring was 10-14-24 and 8-15-23, respectively. JC could have whined about playing time or entered the portal, or whatever. But he paid his dues, got more playing time and special teams time. That's what you do. Unless you come in and put up Blake numbers, you pay your dues.

MC played every single weekend of the year, except the Minnesota series, until the final weekend against UNO. Yeah, he sat the back half of some series, but he was in the lineup for pretty much all of the year until the last weekend and the playoffs. It wasn't like he was producing and they were still sitting him.

Constantini got his chance to play. He basically played about the same number of games that Collin Adams and Cole Smith, and guys like that, played during their first two seasons. If he thinks his chances are better elsewhere, I wish him the best.

I'm not in the meetings, so I don't know. It seems like an odd move, if they did, so therefore I'll assume they didn't until I hear otherwise from either the players or the coaches.

Yeah, the situation with the D for this coming year sucks, but I'm not ready to throw the coaching staff under the bus for it yet. Bast and Johnson leaving puzzles me. If you are a junior and you are looking around and there are only three of you with any returning experience, and the other two really don't have a ton more than you, especially on the special teams units, and you are at a premier program, this is as good an opportunity as you will ever have presented to you in your college career. If you can't make this go, then you better be working on that degree. And with that, you enter the portal?

I thought there was another D-man in that same class, but his name escapes me. Big, tall, rangy kid.

Yeah, I guess my preferences would go as follows: QU Category 5 hurricane BU Global pandemic “Planet killer” meteor … … … … (still thinking)

It's about 1600 miles each way. Four guys, one car. Each guy drives four shifts of 100 miles each. 130 to 160 gallons of gas. Maybe costs each guy $150 bucks tops, round trip. You're there in 24 hours. I've done it. Don't complain to me about flight costs.

I looked on the AXS ticket site this morning. There were 2023 tickets available through T-Mobile for seats that hadn't yet been sold, and another 1104 tickets already sold but available for resale through the site. That would be about 17% of the capacity of the arena, for hockey. Maybe 500 of those 3000+ tickets are in the lower bowl.

Spicer will be fine. He was legitimately probably a year a way from when he should have started his college career, but he's going to get a lot of time with Duluth, and they've got a good coaching staff. As for the past weekend, I personally thought UND deserved the win Friday, and MN Saturday, but so be it. I was really pleased with the way the guys played on Friday, especially after last weekend, and given the competition. Minnesota is going to be a good team this year, everyone knows that. They will be especially good at home, on the huge ice sheet. If you're playing on Olympic sized ice and you have talented defensemen who can move the puck, it's literally impossible to put sustained pressure on them. There is simply too much ice. But I thought the guys played very solid positional hockey all night Friday. Other than Jandric losing Knies on the OT goal, I couldn't find anything to criticize. I thought the shot disparity was overblown a bit, especially on Friday. A lot of long shots, with wide open lanes for DeRidder to stop. I thought Minnesota played better Saturday, but they also showed their immaturity, and UND took advantage of that. I really liked Jandric's game Saturday, and I like the look of our power play with Blake on the wing opposite Gaber. Teams were catching onto the Gaber shot last year, but this will make it a lot harder for them to cheat that way. Can't wait to get to Vegas Wednesday.

Yep

It's certainly possible, but no particular game comes to mind. Just skimming the CHN site, it looks like we've had 12 games during that 4+ year span in question where we've scored 3 or more goals and lost or tied. I don't see any where we had a 3-0 lead, but it's possible.