SJHovey

Time to call it a season and award the championship according to the PairWise.

I have to believe that if you are a Warroad high school hockey player, TJ Oshie and Brock Nelson are a couple of players whose names you are familiar with, so I assume that helps as well.

I was bored last night so I was just messing around with CHN's pairwise tool that lets you modify game outcomes. If Canisius had swept us again this year, we'd still be #3 in the pairwise. Of course, none of us would still be around to see it.

The only time I worry about what a UMD fan is saying is when they are reading my order back to me at McDonald's.

St. Cloud swept Duluth in St. Cloud a couple of weeks ago. Tough at home.

I don’t think they swap 1/16 out west with host school there, but maybe.

I was looking at Jim Dahl's site. The St. Cloud situation is pretty crazy. They are at #27 in the PWR right now, and are a below .500 team fighting just to get home ice in the playoffs. If they finish the regular season 6-0, they could be as high as #6 in the PWR when the regular season ends. 21 spots in six games is crazy, especially this late in the year. Games against UND, Denver and UMD will do that, though, I guess.

I personally don't think it will be that many. Atlantic Hockey, obviously. The ECAC and WCHA are the most vulnerable because they only have two at large qualifiers right now, which means that if any other team wins the tournament, that's another spot. Right now the B1G really only has PSU and Ohio St. as qualifiers with Minnesota on the bubble, but I think that if Minnesota, Michigan or maybe even Michigan St played their way into a conference title, they'd also probably be in the top 15. Same for WMU in the NCHC.

Actually the games tonight are very interesting for the teams in the 15-18 spots of the Pairwise. Just playing around with the calculator at CHN shows these results: CC and Mich St win 15 MN 16 WMU 17 Mass-Lowell CC and Michigan win 15 WMU 16 Mass-Lowell 17 MN AF and Mich St win 15 Mass-Lowell 16 MN 17 Quinnipiac 18 WMU AF and Michigan win 15 Mass-Lowell 16 MN 17 WMU 18 Quinnipiac

I agree 100% about Jake. He has improved so much. He clearly understands the game and is pretty good about making a comment about what a team is doing or needs to do that makes complete sense.

What really strikes me from that table is how locked in the current #1 seeds are. Even if BC won 8 or more of its final 11, they still would need a lot of things to fall right to sneak into one of the top 4 positions. Everyone else who has a chance at a #1 seed outside the top 4 need to basically run the table and hope everything else goes perfectly for them.

I think she writes about women's college hockey on USCHO and perhaps at other sites. I haven't seen a lot of what she has written, but I think she's a pretty vocal advocate for women's hockey. That's great, more power to her. For women's hockey to survive it will need a lot of vocal advocates for it. But I have no time for the vilification of UND for choosing to drop its program, especially as they are spending money that supports, in some small way, women's hockey in general by paying to advertise during a women's college hockey game.

I think it’s funny that college hockey tweeters Chris Dilks, Nicole Haase, and Nate Wells got their panties in a bunch over the temerity of UND to purchase advertising during the tv broadcast of a women’s college hockey game during hockey day Minnesota. I guess it’s good to see the women’s college game healthy enough to be picky about who pays for advertising during their games.

Our two first rounders in 2016 were a freshman and a sophomore.

Two of them were first rounders, hardly the first time we've seen that with this program. All the rest were fourth rounders or later, or even undrafted. A lot of things have to come together just right to win a title.

I'm not so certain this entirely true. I heard him reference something about UND traveling and all living in the Twin Cities area, but the way I heard it he was more trying to throw a dig at us because they understand we have fans who get upset when people say the reason we have great attendance in the Twin Cities and Denver is due to all of our alumni in the area. Motzko and others acknowledge that UND fans are going to show up and that they travel well.

It's gotta be a bit of a vacation destination. Seattle is borderline for me. Tampa during the winter would be fine. But there needs to be an attraction other than just the game or you probably wouldn't draw more than 7-8000 tops. I think going back to Vegas would be fine, against say a Michigan. Another option would be New Orleans. The Smoothie King arena was designed as a multi-purpose arena and supposedly seats nearly 17,000 for hockey. Their ECHL team bailed from the arena due to a dispute with the Pelicans over reconfiguring the arena between basketball and hockey, but on a one time basis I'm sure it could be done. Maybe a Mardi Gras destination game?

Down to fewer than 400 tickets still available on Ticketmaster.

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.