SJHovey

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.

Assuming it's him, and all but one of us apparently have no real idea who it is, he might see SCSU as a place where he can step right in and get quality minutes. They're going to lose some bodies on defense after this year. It looks to me, according to the CHN site, that they have four seniors on D, along with Ahcan who might be a flight risk. Now, not all of those seniors are getting playing time, but that's still a lot of roster holes.

My personal theory is this. That starting around 2010 or 2011 you really started seeing some of the "bluebloods" in college hockey (including us) taking commitments from kids who were 15 or 16 years old. Honestly, most of the time you miss on those guys. Yeah there are the Schmaltz's and Boeser's of the world out there, but they are few and far between. Go back and look at Chris Heisenberg's recruits lists for those years. The guys who ended up here and who ended up playing often committed at age 17-19. The lists are littered with people who committed to us at 15 or 16 and never crossed the Red River. Cakebread, Evers, Rowe, Pelnik, Mitch Mattson, etc... We're not alone in that, which is why I think you've seen teams like Michigan, Minnesota, BC, (and now us) struggle a bit recently. I predict we'll see a lot fewer 16 year old recruits.

Yeah, but at least BU has those three national championships produced by the nine first round draft picks since 2015. No substitute for those blue chippers.

I don't know how many of you here were at the Frozen Faceoff this past weekend, but I thought it was a fun event. I've attended the playoff tournament every year since the WCHA started it after the 1987-88 season, and it's always been one of my favorite weekends of the year, even on those rare occasions where UND did not make it. I thought there was a nice crowd this year, contrary to everyone's fears. The crowd was into it, and it was fun hockey to watch. That championship game was as good a college hockey game as you could hope to attend. I've been a little fearful these past five years about the future of our college hockey playoff tournament, especially when the trend seems to be moving away from them. But we may be onto something here. If SCSU, UMD and UND can keep their programs going at a very high, competitive level, this tournament is going to flourish, even in the absence of Minnesota. Now, I'd love it if we could trade WMU, Miami and a bag of used sticks for BSU and Mankato, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

Good to hear from Puck Swami again. Always a true gentleman and a fan of the game, with usually quite accurate observations about the state of things. The quality of USCHO dropped immensely the day he felt he had to stop posting there. With respect to his current post, I agree with pretty much everything he wrote, with one addition. When the postscript to this year's UND team is written, we'll realize that the team fell short for one reason, and one reason only. It performed very poorly on special teams. If you plug in the special teams numbers of say a team like UMD, we would have had an additional 14 goals scored on the power play and given up 9 fewer goals on the penalty kill. A 23 goal differential over the course of 37 games, most of which seemed like one goal affairs, would have been huge.

I actually thought about that, and I might do it. I don't think Vickar and Tyler Rice played much that year, but I would have loved to have had Henderson's and Kevin Hoogsteen's signatures on the jersey. What I'm really interested in is the province of the jersey. How was it that they came to sign it, and for whom.

I don’t think I ever posted a picture of that Jersey I bought at the Bradley Center auction last summer. Autographed by Blais and the 1996-97 championship team. The signatures are: Curtis Murphy 2, Mark Pivetz 3, Dane Litke 4, Jason Blake 5, Tim O’Connell 6, Mitch Vig 7, Jason Ulmer 9, Ian Kallay 10, Peter Armbrust 11, Jesse Bull 15, Jay Panzer 16, David Hoogsteen 18, Jeff Ulmer 19, Brad DeFauw 20, Brad Williamson 21, Adam Calder 25, Tom Philion 26, Joe Blake 28, Aaron Schweitzer 30 and Toby Kvalevog 35. Dean Blais also signed. There some omissions, one quite notable. It was not signed by Aaron Vickar 1, Kevin Hoogsteen 8, Tyler Rice 27 or (most significantly) Matt Henderson 22, who was the Most Outstanding Player. But that said, I’m still pleased with it.