Is it time to Fire Hak?

[Rick]

I thought it might be a good time to dust of some comments from a few of our internet coaching experts. There's a reason why Hak, Cary & Dane get paid to lead/coach the team and there's also a reason why 11,500 of us have to pay to sit in The Ralph and watch the team. JK said it very well in another thread....as well as the coaching staff has done since Hak took over, this might be the best job of coaching that Hak, Cary & Dane have done. When you come into the season with only 3 seniors and you're playing 17 freshmen and sophomores, the expectations shouldn't be out in the stratosphere. Then we lose the best defenseman in college hockey and we're down to two seniors. Then we lose VandeVelde and Hextall to injuries for lengthy periods of time but the coaching staff is able to hold the team together even though we were down to one senior.

How this team managed to get to a tie for #4 in the pairwise and win the Final Five is quite amazing. We're actually getting bonus hockey now that we probably had no reason to expect. Even with all the adversity the team faced after Genoway went down, they were very competitive when they went out to Denver and deserved to win one of those games. As the second half rolled around, Hak kept saying they were close and it turns out he was right.

Here are some of the Internet Coaching experts comments.....

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OETKB

Just a weak season. No real fight.

They try to compete, but they don't have nearly the grit they are given credit for.

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Oxbow6

If I hear "We're close" from Hak in post game...

No you are not close, but you are close to being out of time this season!

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Shawn-O

Kiss home ice goodbye.

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fightingsioux4life

Here is the remaining schedule for this team and my predictions for what I think will happen:

2/13 @St. Cloud (L)....this time Lee is the "hero" in net.

2/19-20 UM-Duluth(W)(L)....boys win on Friday, party too much and lose on Saturday.

2/26-27 @Colorado College (L)(L)....the World Arena has been tough on our great teams, this could get ugly.

3/5-6 Michigan Tech (W)(W)....this is Grand Forks, not Hougton and it's not the Winter Carnival. Thus, a home sweep.

3/12-14 WCHA First Round, on the road (L)(W)(L)....doesn't matter where this series is held, I don't see us in St. Paul.

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SIOUXELEVENS

This will be the first year, no home playoffs, no final five.

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ticklethetwine

1 win out of 3 with Minny 0 wins out of 4 Denver.

I say fire his a@@.

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ticklethetwine

Every week we hear oh this team is due and they should really get it going they are just having some bad luck. The funny thing is we keep saying that every weekend but nothing changes. Our leaders don't step up

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gfhockey

scott sandelin???

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BringDeanBack

I feel bad for Genoway, his season is done, and his team doesn't seem to care.

[mikejm]

^that's just not very nice.

[Speez]

I've been waiting for someone to call out the bandwagon jumpers.

Way to go Rick.

[Oxbow6]

"Thank you, sir. May I have another!"

I guess I've learned my lesson, Ricki.

[AZSIOUX]

i would say this happens with most fan bases when you are dealing a team thats expected to compete for a ncaa title every year. good job so far by this team the way they have battled through various issues. this is a TEAM in every way you slice it and sure hope they are rewarded hoisting that title in motown. bandwagon or not, i couldnt care less! the more the better when the sioux win it all all fans have different ways of voicing their frusterations but i wouldnt label them jumpers. lets get to the frozen 4 and do some damage for once!! still 4 more games to win!

[airmail]

Wow... you spent some time on this. While I like to "step away" from the board when my team is not playing their best, I wouldn't call out people who are venting their frustration. I doubt any of them claim to be experts; just a bunch of hockey fans being grumpy because their team is losing - I don't see a problem with that, I guess.

If we were all blowing sunshine up the team's butt all of the time, it wouldn't be half as fun reading the posts.

[The Whistler]

We should know that we're always going to have bumps in the road during the season. We usually seem to come out of it ok.

[MoSiouxFan]

Nice post, Rick. Hopefully, this will help us all to be a little more patient in the future. With the job that Hak & staff done in the past, they deserved our patience this season, especially with all the injuries and the young team that we have.

[The Whistler]

Nice post, Rick. Hopefully, this will help us all to be a little more patient in the future.

Comeon, try to be serious.

[tnt]

I guess the people who post stuff like that when things are going bad, then turn around and trash talk about how great and unbeatable the Sioux will be on the way to number 8 are the posters that bother me the most. To me you can't have it both ways, but then again I guess you can. Everybody gets frustrated at certain points of the year, but I guess from past experience, you would think that there would always remain a thread of hope and trust that the ship can always be righted as it has been continually in the past. Just like I never count out other teams ability to turn things around, I certainly wouldn't count out ours with the track record they have had.

[tho0505]

Thank you for this thread! Not all of us were turning into Kentucky fans/Minnesota fans

[SiouxFanatic]

I really don't see anything wrong with the posts commenting about having no home ice. At the time North Dakota was in 6th and the chances of getting home ice was grim. Luckily, CC and UMD started to tank and as we all know everything started to click for UND.

I'll admit I was quite pessimistic back then. And I'm not ashamed of it either. I continued to watch every Sioux game no matter what.

Does it make me less of a fan?

[Ray77]

Not only should Hak be fired because the team lacks passion, grit, hit a lull during the middle of the season and will not make it to the NCAA tournament, etc., but let's also remember that Eidsness sucks and is just a mediocre goalie. He doesn't have what it takes, Dell will probably take over the starting spot from him at some point in mid-season...and the sky is falling!

[SiouxFanatic]

Not only should Hak be fired because the team lacks passion, grit, hit a lull during the middle of the season and will not make it to the NCAA tournament, etc., but let's also remember that Eidsness sucks and is just a mediocre goalie. He doesn't have what it takes, Dell will probably take over the starting spot from him at some point in mid-season...and the sky is falling!

I still blame Brian Lee for every defensive lapse that leads to an opponent goal.

[The Whistler]

Not only should Hak be fired because the team lacks passion, grit, hit a lull during the middle of the season and will not make it to the NCAA tournament, etc., but let's also remember that Eidsness sucks and is just a mediocre goalie. He doesn't have what it takes, Dell will probably take over the starting spot from him at some point in mid-season...and the sky is falling!

When will that Vande Velde line start contributing to the scoring?

OK I admit to having some thought along those lines myself.

[oldralph]

I think Hak still has one more hurdle to clear....win a National Championship. Getting to the Frozen 4 is nice (4 times), but getting there and being embarrassed is not my idea of a great season. Hopefully we can get there and NOT give up 6 goals in a losing cause. There...some pessimism in this optimistic post :-) Go Sioux!!!!!

[Shawn-O]

Kiss home ice goodbye.

Wow, I really threw Coach Hak and the kids under the bus on that one, didn't I? If whistling zippidy-do-dah out of rear-ends is what you want to read here, there's always the ignore list. Feel free to put me on yours, Rick. The people that matter knew where to find me in the arena last weekend.

[NorthDakotaHockey]

Wow, I really threw Coach Hak and the kids under the bus on that one, didn't I? If whistling zippidy-do-dah out of rear-ends is what you want to read here, there's always the ignore list. Feel free to put me on yours, Rick. The people that matter knew where to find me in the arena last weekend.

Great seeing you around The X there Shawn-o. That tournament is always a might right fun time, but doubly so when the Sioux are the last team on the ice long after the final horn has sounded.

[krangodance]

i didn't have a problem with posters this season who pointed out the fact that we're not having a great season when we, in fact, were not having a great season for a good portion of the season.

the posters that got me going earlier this season were the ones who were calling for hakstol's firing because we were struggling at the time. the post i'm referring to most specifically was this one: http://forum.siouxsports.com/index.php?showtopic=13494

on that thread, the majority of posters were making comments essentially saying that hakstol needed to go because we hadn't won a national championship in his first five years. posters like yzerman19, irish, and especially ticklethetwine left posts on that thread that would make one think hakstol hadn't accomplished a thing since taking over as head coach.

i finally replied on page six with this:

"it's all about results. four frozen four in five years. a couple seconds away from making it again last year, which would have made it five for five. i'd say hakstol is giving the team more than a chance, but anything can happen in a single elimination playoff system and things just haven't worked out for us on the biggest stage lately; hardly worth firing a coach over."

i know i was a bit off since our loss last year was in the first round, not the second, but my point is still valid. now here we are ranked 5th in the nation and playing in our sixth consecutive national tourney in six years under hakstol.

in a later post on that same page i did call ticklethetwine out and pointed out how badly we'd all be making fun of our rivals if they had a coach as top-notch as hakstol and they were saying the sort of things about him that ticklethetwine was saying about hakstol.

i hope we go all the way this year, but anybody criticizing hakstol's performance in his first six seasons as head coach will likely only be happy if we get a coach that wins six national championships in his first six seasons as head coach. good luck finding that guy.

[airmail]

...anybody criticizing hakstol's performance in his first six seasons as head coach will likely only be happy if we get a coach that wins six national championships in his first six seasons as head coach. good luck finding that guy.

But it'd be pretty cool if we did! Right? Right?...

[redwing77]

SOme of those posted by Rick aren't exactly fair.

I don't see Shawn-O's post, for example, to be all that unkind to Hakstol and crew.

It wasn't like ticklethetwine's comment about "fire his @ss"

Many of them were just frustration run amok.

I didn't think we'd see home ice in the playoffs, but again, I didn't question Hakstol over the results.

Sometimes good teams don't get good results.

I understand that this is the college game and not the pros. In the pros, teams can cut/fire/trade/bench players who aren't doing their jobs. In college, all we can do really is bench them. In very rare occasions they're asked to transfer or lose scholarship money.

UND has had two such cases: Chris Fournier and Josh Siembida.

So, it's become the coaches that get the blame. I get frustrated when Hakstol gets blamed for loses when the players go out there and get the looks at the net they want but can't convert.

We could've beaten BC, swept the season series vs. Minnesota, beat Miami, etc. if we had simply converted those plays and recognized their pushes when they happened. But that's a function of the players, not the coaches.

If a coach draws up a bunch of plays and implements them with near perfection only to see the puck hop over the stick, a player fall down, a stick break, an untimely whiff, or a hiccup in timing, how is that the coach's fault?

The fact is, after the Broadmoor Championship game, the team got together and accepted the award AS A TEAM. And that's the key. The Sioux win as a team. They lose as a team. There is no individual to blame. They lost because they, as a team, were outplayed by another team.

Sorry to oversimplify, but that's really, the most basic explanation.

[The Whistler]

The bad thing about the grousing this year was that were competitive in so many of the games that we lost. Most often we'd lose by one goal. During the time the team was generally competing very hard.

How bad was it really?

On the other hand when I look at the Gophers this year I see a team that really wasn't trying (IMO of course). That would upset me. Why would you buy a ticket to go see them?

[BigGame]

Wow... you spent some time on this. While I like to "step away" from the board when my team is not playing their best, I wouldn't call out people who are venting their frustration. I doubt any of them claim to be experts; just a bunch of hockey fans being grumpy because their team is losing - I don't see a problem with that, I guess.

If we were all blowing sunshine up the team's butt all of the time, it wouldn't be half as fun reading the posts.

It's fine to vent but calling for the coach to be fired is way out of line considering what Hak has done at UND. His teams have always finished strong, it's amazing how many fans forget that so quickly.

[brianvf]

His teams have always finished strong, it's amazing how many fans forget that so quickly.

What I always find amusing is the fans that forget about the second half surges that seem to happen every year under Hakstol.

I know we as fans (and the players) shouldn't take those 2nd half runs for granted, but to count out a UND team in Jan/Feb just seems silly to me with their recent history.

[gfhockey]

i dont think most people remember getting beat in the frozen four and in the regionals cuz unlinke otherf schools, we dont hang participation banners.