jk

Hammy, I try to let it go, but it show a little class on the Sioux board the day after the Sioux season ended. Parise won't become the rule, and nearly all of us know it. You don't have to come here and rub it in. I wouldn't dare do it on POI, no matter what someone said about the Sioux there. Your hindsight is so wonderful I just can't believe you only use it for hockey predictions. Can you tell me where the stock market is going to be in two years, from three years ago? Potulny has turned into a wonderful player, one whose particular talent the Sioux would have dearly loved on their team. But he was definitely a late add-on to a very strong class and was not expected by Gopher nation to contribute much. Even after his 20-goal freshman year, many Gopher fans (and I'm about 80% sure you were one of them (at the risk of putting words in your mouth)) thought he would not continue to be one of the team's main players, as Donny started to roll in the recruiting classes. I think many thought his #1 PP spot would be taken by big Tallackson last year. Anyway, he's a clutch player, and Blais made a mistake to not recruit him. But that wasn't very clear three years ago. And if Grant doesn't come, then Ryan doesn't and probably Irmen doesn't either. Display the joy you take in UND's failures somewhere else.

I went to the game and I had a pretty different impression than a lot of you. I thought the team played plenty well enough to win, but just didn't. This game fit right into the second part of the season. This is the best offensive team that can't score goals in the history of NCAA hockey. First period had about five grade A scoring chances by the Sioux, and no goals. Bochenski partial breakaway, Bochenski PP tip just wide, Lundbohm clean breakaway, Prpich in close, McMahon ? in close. Second period: pipe, quick whistle as the puck goes in, Parise on the doorstep, McMahon on the doorstep. Third period: two pipes and about ten great chances. When teams are going good, it seems like they score on accident, but when they're going bad (and I've never seen it go this bad before) it seems like there's nothing they can do to score. This team just couldn't put the puck in the net, despite having many, many chances. UND fumbled the puck around in their own end a few times, and each time Ferris was good enough to generate a good chance. But it's not like Ferris was able to cycle the puck at all. What they did do was counterattack very well. And when they had a shot at an odd-man rush, it always developed because of their speed. I didn't think FSU was very good, but they were definitely fast. It's the first time this year I've thought the Sioux looked slow; I never thought that against CC or Minnie. The last five minutes of the second (you know, when FSU had one odd-man rush after another) was terrible, but other than that, I didn't think FSU controlled play at any time for an extended period of time. Ferris hadn't even been down in the Sioux zone in the third until they scored. I think it may have been David Hale who had some problems down there with the puck, which is understandable given his two-month layoff. The Sioux fans around me also thought the Sioux were playing pretty well. The reason we had faith at each period break is that we felt the team was playing well enough to come back. I think one is dreaming if they think Ferris will beat MN. If the Sioux can outshoot Ferris 45-25, so can MN. Except this MN team will bury their chances, which the Sioux just lost the ability to do. I'll just engage in a little coaching second-guessing. I don't think Blais should have pulled Brandt, who had made some big saves. Josh looked shaky the whole third period. I thought Ryan Hale should have been at forward all game, not just for the third period. It's not fair to expect him to play defense very well when he has hardly ever played the position. "Moral victory" talk isn't appropriate for NCAA games, especially for a UND team. But I can't agree that the team played terribly or didn't show up or didn't try because that's not what I saw. Stepping back, I think we've owed the hockey gods and they're making us pay right now. The 1997 title was a year early and completely unexpected. We had to pay for that with two first-round exits the next two years for powerhouse Sioux teams that deserved better. Then 2000 and 2001 were likewise unexpected - 2000 was the year after the Blake class left and things were supposed to be tough. Then the next year was the depth-free year. And they went a lot farther than I thought they possibly could. Well, the great hockey scale is evening out right now, as the goal the Sioux shoot at shrinks and the pipes grow. I hope we've just about paid our debt so we can go back to having a shot.

Sockeye, Nice to see you here. Good luck this afternoon. We'll be cheering the boys on.

I like Woog as an announcer. He offers praise to MN's opponents. He also was a good coach. He was so good I think (wish) he would have stayed at MN for another decade.

Blais knows best, but assuming Connelly is unavailable, this dummy would go with the following: Parise, Bochenski, Notermann Lundbohm, Spiewak, Massen McMahon, Prpich, Hale Genoway, Canady, Fylling Schneider Greene Jones Fuher Hale Marvin The fourth line as reported seems like one destined to sit on the bench for much of the game. By contrast, the fourth line listed above is one I would be comfortable rolling out there any time. Everything else being equal, I would rather have Marvin at D than Ryan Hale. I also would choose Ryan Hale at forward over Marvin. So to me that is an easy one. Ryan Hale scares me on defense; I've seen too many odd-man rushes the other way when he's on D. It's not a rip on him, just a result of his not having played the position much.

I would go for Marvin as he has played relatively well down the stretch. A pleasant surprise for me.

Duh! I was even there (at the X) and I still wrote Mariucci. Sorry. Good to hear he had fun.

Greyeagle, I think I knew of your age for some reason, but, if I had not, I wouldn't have guessed student-age based on your references to your kids. Unless you were conceiving them at about age 14, you wouldn't be the typical student. Did your mite enjoy the big frozen ocean at Mariucci?

I'm way up in a corner, either section 22/row 23 or the other way around (I don't remember which). But I'm in the building, which is the important thing.

Present.

It's an interesting rumor. Moving from the Lincoln head coach to a UND assistant would probably entail a noticeable pay cut, but it might be the right career move anyway. A resume that includes an NCAA championship, NCAA scoring leader, very successful USHL coach and UND assistant coach would be pretty impressive. Anyway, it's probably just a little rumor.

dagies, same pic includes future Sioux Matt Smaby.

Nice, dagies. Wins over all those middle/lower CCHA teams don't seem so impressive at first, but I guess they beat them all by pretty good margins, which is impressive. Plus, UND didn't exactly pound on the middle of the WCHA down the stretch. While the WCHA may be superior to the CCHA, I'm guessing the margin may not be as large as I'd like to think. Apparently FSU's forwards are smallish and had trouble even with Michigan's undersized defense last week. That may be the key to the game, playing that 20-shot-per-game defense that UND did so often this year. That, and finishing around the net. I'd like to see a big kid like James Massen plant himself in front and reach a few loose pucks.

Salmon Arm's season ended last night with a 7-6 2OT loss to Trail in the deciding game of their five-game series. (Yes, in the BCHL, the first round is seven games, followed by a five-gamer in the second round. ?!?) Trail's goalie had 50 saves. SA's two goalies combined for 25. It's all about goaltending. On that note, GO JAKE BRANDT.

Yes, I count that easy a win for the Gophers as a "rest." Maybe you are right; the Gophers' arms might be pretty tired from taking all those shots on goal.

I think it was the wrong move, but the committee had no choice. They should have been given the flexibility to move a team a few spots from their final PWR ranking, even if it meant moving them from a 3 seed to a 4. In this case, OSU or Harvard could have been flipped with SCSU or MSUM. It would have meant playing a team that was a few PWR spots different from the ideal matchup, but nothing as bad as Cornell getting #14 instead of #28. The biggest winner is MN. Next is Cornell's second-round opponent, which gets a wearier Cornell team than if they had received the "bye." The loser is Cornell, which gets the #3 team in the WCHA instead of a "bye." Also suffering is the winner of the Ferris/UND game, which will have to play a rested MN team instead of one that endured the pounding of a Division 1 game the night before. --------------------------------------- This post isn't just a whine. We can speak the truth without it being a considered a whine.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I couldn't find even single seats available at the gophersports site.

Ben Eaves is a junior. KBG, Before last year, MN had not been better than UND for years. You had the good fortune of playing UND 7 times in the first year that MN had a better team. Before that, UND won the season series every year since Blais got the team going. This year you split the series. Trust me, if the season series had contained seven meetings in any of the preceding four seasons, it would have been just as ugly as last year.

KBG, Do you have nothing better to do than come over here and incite a riot? I post at POI from time to time, but I refrain most of the time when I have a chance to defend UND, because it's a Gopher board. I was aware of the non-conference schedules. I was aware in December that things would be tougher in the second half. I wasn't aware that David Hale would miss the last 20 games of the year. (I know MN had injury problems in the first half, but how would all those close games down the stretch have gone without Paul Martin? I attended the UND series in Mariucci in January and Hale was the best defenseman on the ice ... for either team.) As for the seven-game winless streak, you know the last three MN-MSUM games? All in front of a home crowd, all with long stretches of domination by MN, and all went to OT. That's how it was for UND. Except they lost or tied all those close games. They outshot MSUM 52-22 in Mankato and lost. MN's playing great right now, no doubt. Why don't you enjoy that instead of reminding us of UND's recent troubles? As for Vanek or Parise, both are great players deserving of accolades. Vanek's a worthy ROY. So would Parise have been. Parise's a worthy Hobey candidate, as well. He does a lot more than score, but he also scores - even more than Vanek (more PPG in your all-important conference games). I love this idea that somehow because UND faltered down the stretch, Parise is all of a sudden not an absolutely amazing freshman, who is one of the best players in the country.

Somewhere in here it's been answered that from an RPI and PWR perspective, it would have been better to beat UMD, going 1-2 in the tourney, than to go 0-1. However, now that there have been no upsets in the conference tourneys and UND's chances of getting an NCAA bid have gone up a lot, it may work to their advantage to rest their legs a bit. Six games in nine days may have been a killer. Flop, pretty safe assumption that CC was going to kill UMD today, too.

This was one of UND's best nights of hockey in the second half. Every game (I believe) went UND's way tonight. The WCHA is down to CC and MN, so no upset winner there. The ECAC is Harvard and Cornell, which is fine. The CCHA is Ferris and Michigan, also fine. So I now view it as a 14-team field, after the MAAC and CHA bids. Here's what I think about tomorrow's games: We want: NMU over OSU Michigan over Ferris Brown over Dartmouth Cornell over Harvard UMD over MSUM The two crucial games are Cornell/Harvard and UMD/MSUM. If all five games go against us, I think UND sits at PWR 13, good enough to get in. If the only one that goes our way is Cornell, UND is PWR 12. If the only one that goes our way is UMD, UND is PWR 12. If Cornell wins, UND's PWR range is 10-12. If UMD wins, UND's PWR range is 10-12. If Cornell loses, UND's PWR range is 12-13. If UMD loses, UND's PWR range is 11-13. The only way I think UND could get left out of the tourney is if, assuming everything went wrong for UND tomorrow, they somehow included UND (PWR 13) in a bubble comparison with SCSU and Providence (tied for PWR 14) and chose those two instead of UND. UND loses the comparison with Providence but wins it with SCSU. SCSU wins the Providence comparison. It seems that the field (not the seeding) is nearly set, with either SCSU or Providence being the odd-man out. I did bump into one scenario where MSUM ended up at PWR 14, which would be a precarious position for them. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I assume it would involve a loss to UMD plus a few other things. So I think the Sioux get to dance. As dagies said, UND can beat any team in the nation, and can lose to any team in the nation. They haven't strung together four wins in a while, but why not now?

Woog and the writers were wrong from a PWR perspective, as kiork notes above. UND would definitely have been better off from a tournament qualification perpsective going 1-2 than 0-1. But, now they're 0-1, so they can rest and hope that things break their way over the next two days.

Kiork, you appear to be the resident expert here, so I'll defer to your analysis. Until then, I've been playing with the "you are the committee" page at USCHO to check on the Sioux's tournament status. I'm a pessimist, but UND's inclusion in the tourney doesn't seem to be a certainty to me. To start with, UND obviously needs the favorites to win the conference tournaments. Duluth, Northern Michigan or Dartmouth winning their respective tournaments would be a disaster. In most of the realistic scenarios I run, UND ends up either 12 or 13 in the PWR. In a 14-team field, that's the bubble. To choose the final teams, I'm guessing they would take 13 through 16 or 17 and run a mini-PWR. That's scary. If it ends up being a 13-team field (or less) due to upsets, it's even scarier. Despite my pessimism, I would guess right now that UND will make the field. Considering that some teams (especially SCSU) hold out hope to make the tournament from a worse position than UND, the chances look pretty good. If UND does get in, I have a few thoughts: - UND would be a beneficiary of the expanded tounament, as they probably would not make a 12-team tournament. - UND would also benefit from the removal this year of the "last 16" PWR component, which UND would lose against most teams. - UND would probably be better off having lost to UMD and resting than going into the NCAA tourney exhausted. I'm guessing their legs would have been shot after playing six games in nine days. Losing to UMD is a dicey thing though, as it may cost them a spot in the tourney at all. kiork, sagard: any thoughts?

I guess they're probably in the tourney now, but I won't feel comfortable about it until the field is announced on Sunday. I think they're now in a 3-way tie for 10th in the PWR, which is they same as saying they're in 12th place. In, at most, a 14-team field, that's not a lot of leeway. The only good news tonight is that Michigan State also lost, and they were one of the pursuers. We'll have to see how the rest of the weekend goes.

Brady Murray was recognized with some BCHL Interior Conference awards (from mytelus.com): "Murray posted 101 points and was runner-up for the Sandman Inn Trophy as Most Valuable Player, won by Vernon goaltender Matt Zaba and gained similar status for the Bruce Allison Memorial Trophy for Rookie of the Year won by 16-year-old Quesnel forward Gilbert Brule. Forwards for the 1st All Star Team were 53-goal scorer Curtis Fraser of Vernon, Trail