More than once this week, your humble correspondent has offered up the joke that UMD players should have dyed their facial hair gray for any media appearances they were requested to do the day before the Fargo Regional begins at Scheel Arena.
As usual, why would we let the facts get in the way of a good story, right?
UMD matches up with perennial college hockey blue-blood Michigan Friday (3pm on KDAL) in Fargo to kick off the tournament. On paper, one can be fooled into thinking there is some kind of major age difference between the teams, one that would be accentuated by the aforementioned gray hair dye stunt.
While the raw number doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story, the Wolverines are the third-youngest team in the country, with an average age of 21 years, two months. UMD? The Bulldogs are ninth-youngest, at five months older on average than their Friday adversary.
(In case you’re curious, our friends at College Hockey News track this particular stat, and their numbers show that the five youngest teams in the country — Boston University, Boston College, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — all made the tournament, with three of them serving as No. 1 regional seeds. UMD and North Dakota make it five of the nine youngest teams in men’s college hockey that made the tournament. They’re joined in the field by four of the eight oldest teams: American International, Minnesota State, Lake Superior State, and Bemidji State.)
Where there is still a contrast is in the level of experience among each team’s top players. Yes, Michigan has four players at 100+ career games, compared to six for UMD, and that’s not a huge difference. But there’s a massive gulf in experience with the teams’ top point producers.
Of Michigan’s top nine scorers, all of whom have ten or more points, the average number of games played is 41. Junior Nick Blankenburg, who is seventh on the team with 13 points, has played in the most career games (95).
“We’ve had some young teams, we won it in ’98 with ten freshmen,” Michigan head coach Mel Pearson said this week (he was an assistant under the legendary Red Berenson in that 1997-98 season). “It’s a young group, we’re built on our freshmen and sophomores, sprinkle in some underclassmen. It’s been an interesting year, a fun group to be around.”
Pearson noted that this is absolutely the youngest team he’s ever coached in college hockey, with three freshmen — defenseman Owen Power and forwards Matty Beniers and Kent Johnson — who turned 18 during the season and will have a chance to be top picks in this summer’s NHL Draft.
UMD has eight players in double digits in points, with an average of 90.6 games played between them. Seniors Nick Swaney and Kobe Roth lead that pack at 132 total games each.
“We’ve got some guys who know what it takes, but that doesn’t guarantee anything,” UMD head coach Scott Sandelin said. “We’ve played some pretty good hockey.”
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This isn’t the only significant contrast in this first-round game. There’s also the styles the teams employ.
UMD is, as Sandelin likes to say, a “north team.” The Bulldogs are at their greatest effectiveness when getting pucks deep in the offensive zone, working to hold possession, and grinding down opponents. It’s something we’ve seen with less consistency than Sandelin would like.
“We’re a team that has to skate,” he said. “We’ve got some guys who can really move. I still think we need to do a better job of getting pucks through from the top.”
(That last point, getting pucks through from the top, is sort of a nod to the fact that UMD hasn’t gotten much production from its blue line this season. The Bulldogs’ top seven scorers are forwards, and defensemen have combined for four goals this season, three of them from freshman Connor Kelley.)
“Probably the last team I’d want to play in the first game of the tournament,” Pearson said. “They’ve got the experience. They know what it takes. They have a style that they that has been successful, and they play it well.
“It is a contrast in styles. I think we’re more of an offensive skill, speed type team. Not that Duluth doesn’t have skill and doesn’t have speed, because they do. But they’re more north/south, grind it out, get to the net, defend hard, play physical, make it tough on you.”
“He’s got a lot of high end talent,” Sandelin said of Pearson’s team. “They play the game with a lot of pace, they play free. They’re good offensively, they move around a lot. I keep reminding our guys that we’ve seen a lot of the teams in our league that are pretty good. We’ve seen speed, we’ve seen different styles. Nothing should shock us. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but nothing should shock us.
“We’ve got to understand that we’re a north team. We’ve got to get pucks behind their ‘D.’ We’ve got to stay out of the penalty box. We’re going to have to defend. They make a lot of little plays. Offensively, they’ll get pucks to the net, but they’ll move a lot. Defensive zone coverage will be challenging. Offensively, if we can get pucks in and get to the ground game, defensively we can exploit them a little bit.”
Statistically, special teams are an advantage for Michigan, but it isn’t a huge edge. The Wolverines’ power play hits at over 23 percent, and their kill is at 82-plus percent. Michigan has a special teams net (PPG/SHG for minus PPG/SHG against) of plus-four on the season. UMD’s power play is a hair over 20 percent, the kill at 75 percent, and the Bulldogs’ special teams net is minus-five.
UMD has outscored opponents 58-35 at even strength this season. Michigan is at 73-37, showing more firepower in all phases, really.
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The exact date was April 9, 2011, but with the tenth anniversary of the UMD-Michigan championship game in St. Paul coming, I asked both head coaches about their memories of that night.
“I’m a coach who always likes to watch the warmup,” Sandelin said. “Going out there and feeling the energy in the building, it was amazing, and I’ll never forget that. We obviously had a strong contingent of our fans, and you could just feel the energy before the game, even during warmup.
“As a coach, you get to that point, it was probably the least nervous I’d been.”
Pearson was an assistant at the time for Michigan. In fact, the 2011 national championship game was his last game as an assistant for the Wolverines. He took the Michigan Tech job that offseason, then moved back to Ann Arbor when Berenson retired.
“Growing up in Minnesota, playing high school hockey there, knowing Duluth was a short drive down, just the electricity (in the crowd),” Pearson said. “You felt like everybody was against you, except a few hundred people up in the corner.
“The thing I really remember, obviously in overtime we lost. We were standing around, and I noticed the puck, the game puck, sort of sitting by the bench. I picked that puck up and wondered what I was going to do with it. When we were going through the line, I gave it to Scott Sandelin. Great win for UMD in the home state, tough loss for us.”
(Sandelin, by the way, did confirm via text that Pearson gave him the game puck in the handshake line. It was a piece of that night’s story that I had never heard about before.)
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Expecting a great game on Friday. Hope you can join us on the radio at 2:30pm. Hear the free audio stream here if you live outside the Twin Ports.
Winner plays either North Dakota or American International for the regional title Saturday at 6:30pm.
Back pregame with lines.
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