INTERSTATE 35 — Greetings from the road. We are en route to Nebraska and this weekend’s series.
No, I am not driving. Pretty sure writing a full-fledged column while driving would violate multiple laws at one time.
Anyway, UMD and Omaha this weekend, the Bulldogs’ final series before what will be a welcome bye week ahead of the final eight games of the regular season, four home and four away.
Let’s get at it.
8 THOUGHTS
1. Despite playing shorthanded and not necessarily playing their best hockey, UMD took care of business last weekend. Coach Scott Sandelin wasn’t in a mood to turn down the five points after Saturday’s game, an imperfect performance by the Bulldogs won by Anthony Menghini’s overtime winner.
Yeah, UMD didn’t play a great 63ish minutes on Saturday. Yeah, Miami was missing its preferred starting goalie and two-thirds of its top line all weekend long, then had to play Saturday without a guy who’s easily a top-nine center on that team in William Hallen, who was injured on Friday.
But you don’t apologize for wins. Especially in this league. They’re too hard to come by.
“I thought Miami was a much better hockey team Saturday,” Sandelin said this week. “I thought they gave us problems.”
The RedHawks outshot UMD Saturday, held the puck more, and gave the Bulldogs a host of problems, especially when it came to exiting the defensive zone. Some of that was UMD’s doing, and it’s been an issue that’s popped up on occasion this season, but give Miami credit for applying the right pressure at the right times as well.
2. Sandelin is again imploring his team to be smarter with the puck. It’s the Bernie Sanders “I am once again asking” meme come to life.
“I think our puck management and our turnovers and just losing pucks and throwing pucks away, it shouldn’t be happening this time of year,” he said. “It’s got to be a lot more plays being made, smarter plays.”
I asked Sandelin if it had been improving — it kind of felt like UMD had things going in the right direction coming out of the tournament in Milwaukee — but he said it’s been an issue off and on.
“At times when we’re on, we’re fine, and at times we just are careless with the puck,” said Sandelin. “For me, it’s all about battles. The game is about battles, it’s about winning those battles, staying in those battles. That’s hockey.
“Like, getting in an offensive corner and keeping a puck there is a good play if you don’t have a play. Trying to make something out of nothing, that’s kind of where I think we go sometimes. We’re trying to make things, exits out of our zone. We’re trying to make that one little cute lateral pass versus just chipping it out of the zone. It’s the same thing coming into the zone. You’re getting pressure off a neutral zone transition and you’re trying to force a pass to a drive guy instead of just chipping it down the wall and getting it in behind there. Like those are hockey plays. Those are plays that the game or teams give you.
“I know everybody wants to make this tape to tape pass or an extra play, but that’s a really important factor because anytime you get the puck out of your D zone, they got to restart. If you get pucks in below, they’ve got to travel 200 feet instead of shortening the ice for teams.”
Saturday was a prime example. Numerous times, UMD had opportunities for simple zone exits and couldn’t advance the puck because whoever had it didn’t make a simple play. Sandelin said “We’ve shown them video,” and we’ve seen it in action a lot.
Like, the third period on Friday. Sandelin has repeatedly said he liked the Bulldogs’ third period against Miami on Friday night. So Alexis Bass of Northern News Now asked him why.
“We looked connected, we were skating, we possessed the puck,” he said. “They didn’t have the puck much in the third period. Our guys were on our toes, I thought. We just looked more — I don’t want to say organized — but just I thought we were better. I thought the first two periods we weren’t doing that.
“A lot of it started just having the puck. We weren’t defending a lot. We were playing in the offensive zone more. We were getting up the rink better. I told them after the second, if you play the game the right way, you’ll get more goals. And we did. So if you play the game the right way, you’ll get rewarded. If you don’t want to play the game the right way, sometimes you don’t get rewarded. So I liked it compared to the first two.”
3. For the second straight week, Sandelin made clear how pleased he is with the work ethic and effort he’s getting out of his players.
“I’m proud of our team right now,” said Sandelin. “We’ve gone through a lot and you know what? We’re hanging in there. Hopefully that we get a healthy group. But it just seems like every week, it’s take one step forward and two steps back. But that’s what you deal with sometimes during the year. It’s not easy because sometimes when you have weeks like we’ve had, sometimes you don’t feel like you’re as prepared as you should be. But I’ll give our guys credit. I told you this last week, I think for the last couple months we’ve played better. The results aren’t always showing that, but I think we’ve been able to get points every weekend in our league. We’re in that hunt for home ice. This is obviously another pivotal weekend.”
The results are starting to pop up a little more consistently. UMD is 7-4-1 in its last 12 games going back to the series opener against Omaha Dec. 1 in Duluth. The only regulation loss it’s suffered in that stretch was the Saturday game at Western Michigan on Jan. 20. Otherwise, UMD has either won, tied, or lost in overtime. Being able to stack points like this has helped the Bulldogs recover from an 0-4 start to league play that threatened to torpedo the season before it had really even started.
And as a reward, UMD is slowly getting healthier. While Sandelin wasn’t about to commit to a lineup for this weekend, he did say 23 players were going to travel, and the Bulldogs have gotten freshman forward Matthew Perkins back on the ice, at the least. Junior Carter Loney will be on the trip as well after missing the last two weekends.
“Whoever’s in, we need the whole group,” said senior forward Blake Biondi. “And we need all four lines to score.”
4. Omaha had a rough weekend its last time out at home, swept by a 12-5 aggregate against Denver and falling to seventh in the NCHC. But the nature of this league is this: Omaha is right in the home-ice mix if it has a good weekend against the Bulldogs.
And the Mavericks are well positioned to make a move after taking four points in St. Cloud last weekend.
“St. Cloud got off to a decent start in the first period on Friday,” Omaha coach Mike Gabinet said. “The response was fantastic. Down two goals, just got to work and stayed calm and got back into the hockey game. And then I thought we played an excellent second and third period and ultimately come away with it.”
That probably understates the crazy nature of Friday’s 7-6 overtime win for Omaha, but Gabinet really likes the way his team has responded to adversity this season.
“It speaks to the group’s character and mindset and just to stick with it,” he said. “You’ve got two choices. You can kind of feel sorry for yourself and stop playing, or you can just keep working. We’ve got a group that just continues to work and work.”
UMD got four points out of the series in Duluth, winning 4-2 Friday and losing 1-0 in overtime Saturday.
“Big, heavy team,” said Biondi of Omaha. Sandelin noted their strength on the wall, as well.
In other words, just another weekend in the NCHC.
5. It’s another busy weekend in the NCHC. Red-hot North Dakota takes its 14-game NCHC points streak to Miami. The Fighting Hawks haven’t lost in regulation in three months. Congratulations to the awesome UND beat writer from the Grand Forks Herald, Brad Schlossman, as our good friend gets his beloved Skyline Chili this weekend. Lots. Based on Miami coach Chris Bergeron’s comments last week, it sounds like the RedHawks will be shorthanded again this weekend.
St. Cloud State heads to Colorado Springs to try to slow Colorado College’s roll a little bit. The Tigers swept Western Michigan last weekend — both games requiring overtime — and Kaidan Mbereko won Goaltender of the Month again from the league (Noah Laba won Player of the Month). That’s five straight wins for the Tigers, with three of them going overtime. We’ll see if the Huskies can respond after a two-point weekend at home with Omaha last week.
Western Michigan plays at Denver, and I’m sure the Pioneers will be in a great mood after getting swept by North Dakota last week. The series these teams played in Kalamazoo got a little out of hand, especially on Saturday. We’ll see if there’s any carryover this weekend in Colorado.
6. After losing a three-goal lead Saturday at home against Wisconsin, the UMD women get Minnesota State-Mankato at home this weekend. Friday is Cram The Am, with $1 tickets available, or you can donate some non-perishable food items and get in free.
Minnesota State is no slouch, despite just four league wins and a sixth-place spot in the standings, with less than half the league points (13) as UMD has (29) in fifth. The Mavericks have lost five straight, all to St. Cloud State, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but the losing streak started the day after MSU beat St. Cloud, and one of the UW losses and both Minny losses came by one goal (the Saturday game against the Gophers was decided in overtime).
“I think Mankato always gives us their best hockey,” said forward Mary Kate O’Brien. “They’re physical. It’s never going to be easy along the boards or in the corners against them.”
“I expect it to be physical,” head coach Maura Crowell said. “And I expect it to be no different than any other matchup between us and them. Everybody’s scratching and clawing for points wherever they can get it. And they don’t like us. We don’t like them.”
7. I asked Crowell and O’Brien about Saturday’s loss to Wisconsin. Specifically, when a game goes sideways like that one did, and there are mistakes to learn from, how do you balance learning from those mistakes and not dwelling on what went wrong?
“I think our messaging. starting on Sunday and preparing for this week has been ‘Let’s show our character, let’s show what we are truly made of, and one period is not gonna define us,'” Crowell said. “So we’ve moved on, we showed them a lot of what we did well in that game. I think dwelling on something like that doesn’t really get you anywhere. So we’re focusing on what we do well, how we can stick to that game plan when the pressure goes up. and just digging into our habits. That’s always in our DNA: Playing good structured hockey, doing the little things right, stopping on pucks, playing good defense, getting the lines, getting pucks deep, winning face-offs. Those simple things add up to a lot for us, and that’s how you win hockey games. So that’s what we’re focusing on, and as my buddy Bill Belichick would say, we’re on to Mankato, and we were on to Mankato on Sunday.”
“Taking the good from it is awesome,” said O’Brien. “We played an awesome 40 minutes and we were really on the attack mode there against Wisconsin, (and) you gotta give them a little bit of credit there too. They’re a great team. We reflected on it and learned from it how we can get better and never let that happen again. That’s something that should never happen. We wanna defend our home barn and we should be able to close out those games for sure. So holding each other accountable, yes, but also like taking the good from the bad and then moving on. Dwelling on it doesn’t really lead anywhere good. Just making sure that we stay focused for this weekend.”
8. Before we go, our sympathies go out to the family and friends of former UMD men’s hockey coach Gus Hendrickson, who passed away late last week at the age of 83. I didn’t know him well, but many who I’ve been lucky enough to get to know did.
By all accounts, a good man who also happened to be a pretty damn good hockey coach. He led UMD to just its second 20-win season in history in 1978-79, led by future Olympians John Harrington and Mark Pavelich, who combined for 152 points that season as the Bulldogs won 22 games.
Hendrickson was succeeded at UMD by assistant coach Mike Sertich, who got the Bulldogs to the Frozen Four for the first time in 1984. And, of course, Sandelin followed Sertie, and the rest is history. But Hendrickson’s role in helping elevate the Bulldog program should not ever be dismissed or forgotten.
______
CBS Sports Network has the Friday game, which means a later than usual start of 7pm for our pregame. We are back at 6:30pm Saturday.
Looking forward to it, as always. Back pregame with lines.
Comments