Minnesota Duluth men’s hockey players give a traditional stick salute after a weekend sweep.
History will be made Tuesday in Omaha, Neb.
The NCHC opens a seventh season of competition at Baxter Arena, with all eight teams participating in a series of conference games to open the 2020-21 season after 269 days of thumb-twiddling, Netflix browsing, and toilet paper hording.
The pandemic continues to rage on, unfortunately, but the majority of men’s college hockey leagues have decided to press on with a season (the Ivy League schools shut the door on a potential campaign, leaving the ECAC with little to work with, and that league has yet to start up, at least on the men’s side).
We have no earthly idea what the endgame is. Will there be an NCAA Tournament? Will that tournament happen in a bubble somewhere, maybe over a few days instead of multiple weekends? Will the teams that have opted to play get a majority of their games in?
No clue on any of that. Coaches, for years, have preached taking things one day/one game at a time. This year, they will get their wish. Every game is a gift, an opportunity to compete (or, in our cases, be entertained) that we should never have taken for granted and hopefully never will again.
On March 12, the sports world — and the way we view it — was altered forever. It was the day the music died.
On December 1, the NCHC will finally fire up again. I am grateful and appreciative of people like Josh Fenton and the league’s board of directors for the massive amount of work that has gone into creating this environment in Omaha, and for the massive amount of work that will go into creating the safest possible home environments for these teams to continue their seasons around the New Year.
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March 12 was also the day that UMD’s dream of a national championship three-peat — an unprecedented feat in college hockey — was forever squashed. Not by Cornell or North Dakota or Minnesota State or Boston College.
Not by a visible opponent of any kind.
By a virus.
COVID-19 was a growing concern in the week to ten days preceding that fateful Thursday. But when NBA standout Rudy Gobert tested positive, two days after making a mockery of new NBA safety protocols during a media scrum, it set in motion events that would reverberate throughout the world of sports.
In a span of roughly 15 hours, the NCHC went from having a normal conference tournament starting that weekend to having no fans — instead just families of players and staff — at the first-round series in Duluth, Grand Forks, Denver, and Kalamazoo, to having no conference tournament at all. A few hours after the NCHC canceled its tourney, the NCAA did the same for all winter sports tournaments.
No three-peat.
263 days after that announcement, UMD is ready to start up a second defense of its back-to-back national championships. We can have the “Would this be a three-peat?” discussion at a much later time. At this point, it’s exciting to have games to talk about.
“It’s kind of fun to get on a load up the gear and get out of Boston gets to get somewhere besides Duluth,” said head coach Scott Sandelin, who starts his 21st season at UMD Tuesday. “So that was, that was step one. Now. Now we’re, we’re here and going through all the testing and, you know, hopefully, everything goes good. And like I said, it’s hard to believe it’s, we got a game tomorrow”
UMD opens its season Tuesday against Omaha (3:30pm on KDAL) at Baxter Arena, the site of 38 (we hope) NCHC games over the next 20 days. The Bulldogs — who practiced Monday evening after being cleared of quarantine requirements — will play nine games. One of the scheduled games against Colorado College has been bumped to Duluth and will be played in 2021.
(The pod schedule remains in flux a bit, as we can’t be certain CC will be good to go next week. Again, nothing is really guaranteed.)
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So what should we expect?
Great question.
No, seriously. That’s good. And there’s no easy answer.
This team has a chance to be exciting, entertaining, and very good yet again. The Bulldogs return gobs of goal-scoring with guys like Noah Cates, Cole Koepke (both All-Americans last season), Kobe Roth, and Nick Swaney, along with emerging standouts like Quinn Olson and Tanner Laderoute, who combined for 15 goals and will be counted on for more — relatively speaking, since they’re playing fewer games — this season.
“If you look at our top two lines,” said Sandelin, “we’re gonna keep Noah in the middle of the rink, Jackson (Cates) in the middle of the rink. So when you look at that, you know, you’ve got Swanes (Swaney) and you’ve got Cole and you’ve got Quinn (Olson), you got Tanner (Laderoute), and you’ve got some different guys who have played together to some degree before.”
Sandelin said he will use junior Jesse Jacques and freshman Blake Biondi, both from Hermantown, as his other two centers in Tuesday’s opener.
“We’ve tinkered with a lot of stuff, we’ve tried different people in the middle,” the head coach said. “We’ve kind of settled on this right now. We’ve got those guys. We’re going to try and get everybody in, depending on the situation.”
When it comes to constructing a lineup, Sandelin knows the experience he brings back up front offers him a lot of potential flexibility. Especially when it comes to players like Laderoute and senior Kobe Roth, who can be deployed just about anywhere in a lineup and be very effective. Roth has played on all four lines at various points during his UMD career and has become a trusted power play asset along the way.
“Everybody brings a value to our team, wherever they’re at in their lineup,” Sandelin said. “Those two guys (Roth and Laderoute) certainly have played up and down our lineup in different areas. They’ve become good special team guys.
“We’re going to continue with those guys, whether it be power play or penalty kill, and try and build some different players in in both situations, because this is a whole situation where you just don’t know. We can go into the second half and who knows with this COVID you might be missing some guys, right? It’s just such a fluid thing that you got to make sure everybody’s involved and knows what’s going on in pretty much every situation, especially on the special teams. I think that’s something we’ve tried to do with our guys through these two months.”
Of course, that uncertainty hangs over everything like a cloud. Last weekend, numerous Division I games were postponed or canceled because of the ongoing pandemic. A handful of games set for this week have already gone by the wayside, including Minnesota State and Bemidji State in women’s hockey, as Bemidji won’t be clear of COVID protocols in time to play Friday. The NCHC was forced to change its pod schedule because Colorado College won’t be able to start playing until at least Dec. 8, and that isn’t locked in at the moment, either.
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Defensively, the losses are significant. The Bulldogs are without two top-tier defensemen who turned pro a year early: Hobey Baker winner Scott Perunovich (St. Louis Blues), and Dylan Samberg (Winnipeg). In addition, Jarod Hilderman and co-captain Nick Wolff exhausted their eligibility.
There is experience back. Seniors Louie Roehl and Matt Anderson have both played in over 100 games at UMD, and they’re joined by graduate transfer Matt Cairns, who played in 61 games over three years at Cornell.
“He’s been outstanding with our young players,” said Sandelin of Cairns. “We’ve had him paired with some of the freshmen and he’s a great communicator on the rink, he’s a great communicator on the bench. He’s probably the most vocal guy we have on our team, which is kind of nice, because we’re always asking these guys to talk, but he’s been great. And he’s fit in really well.”
Juniors Hunter Lellig — who missed most of last season with an injury — and Jake Rosenbaum both return, but there is a youth infusion on the blue line that carries some high expectations.
Andover star Wyatt Kaiser joins UMD after being selected by Chicago in the third round of the 2020 NHL Draft. Kaiser, a Mr. Hockey finalist as a senior, will be asked to play a lot of minutes right away for the Bulldogs. Also joining are U.S. National Team Development Program product Connor Kelley and Hermantown graduate Darian Gotz.
Do younger freshmen like Kaiser, Biondi, and Kelley have an advantage because of the elongated preseason practice time?
“Yeah, to some degree, but again, it goes back to just being weird,” Sandelin says. “For most of the two months, we were in three different locker rooms. The guys weren’t around each other very much. We didn’t have a ton of meetings, as far as just things that are relevant to the team, but also, the team bonding part of it.”
(In case you’re wondering, UMD was working out of one locker room at Amsoil Arena for a little while before departing for Omaha.)
And as Sandelin always says, you never really know with freshmen until you can get them in games. Of course the head coach likes his six-man freshman class, but expectations are higher for guys like Biondi and Kaiser. Kelley and Gotz should see plenty of opportunity with the heavy blue line losses. Zack Stejskal is very much in the mix at goalie, and Luke Mylymok will get an opportunity up front.
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So, about the goalie position.
Hunter Shepard basically re-wrote the record book. He’s gone.
He also played every minute last season and most every minute the previous two seasons.
Whoever ends up winning this job — and I don’t know who is starting Tuesday, much less winning the job at some point down the road — will be learning as he goes. UMD brings back Ben Patt and Ryan Fanti, who backed up Shepard last season. Sandelin has indicated multiple times now that he thinks both players have a leg up on Stejskal because of their experience working behind Shepard and with goaltending coach Brant Nicklin. If you wanted to read between tea leaves, it’s reasonable to suggest that either Fanti or Patt will start Tuesday against Omaha, but Sandelin has also suggested all three goalies could play in the pod.
So your guess is as good as mine.
“I hope someone can go in there and whoever it is plays well,” Sandelin said. “If they do, they might get another start right after that.”
(On a personal note, Sandelin hasn’t been able to play coy about his goaltending since the first month of the 2017-18 season. I kinda missed this, even if only a little.)
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The broadcasts you hear this month will be different than anything we’ve ever produced before.
Simply put, I am not in Omaha, and will not be traveling with the team at any point this season. Instead, all the games UMD plays away from Duluth will be produced in our Duluth studios, meaning I will be calling games off the television feeds available. It was, if I’m being completely honest, as much my choice as anyone’s. From a safety standpoint, it made too much sense because of the available technology. If NFL broadcasters can work road games in their home stadiums and make them sound as if nothing is different, there’s no reason I can’t hunker down in Duluth and do road games.
The NCHC is going to feed us natural sound from Baxter Arena, so the hope is at least the pod games will sound as normal as humanly possible. But we’re not going to hide the reality. It’ll be different, and hopefully it’ll be fun. I know I’m going to do everything I can to produce the same quality broadcast as we normally would from the game site (insert jokes here).
Join us for the show starting at 3pm on KDAL. The other 25 games aren’t guaranteed, so let’s enjoy this game by game, and hopefully everyone stays healthy and everyone can play.
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