Before we get to the regularly scheduled column, the NCHC and North Dakota lost a dear friend Wednesday, when UND alumni and radio analyst Travis Dunn passed away. Dunn was in his first year calling UND home games alongside the legendary Tim Hennessy, he did television way back in the day with the great Pat Sweeney, and he was also a fixture on Fargo radio, where he hosted “Game On Hockey” every Thursday night on KFGO, along with “Around The Rink” Saturday mornings on sister station KNFL, or 740 The Fan. He won a national championship at UND in 1980, his second of two years playing for the then-Fighting Sioux varsity team. He was on their JV for the two previous years, and yes this was a time where college programs had tryouts and JV/varsity rosters.
I got to know Travis a bit in recent years, becoming a somewhat frequent guest on his Saturday show. It was always a joy to talk hockey with him. Travis’ passion for UND was always obvious, but he was — like, frankly, many of us — a fan of the game. During UMD’s visit to Grand Forks a couple weeks ago, Travis and I talked about ideas for his Thursday show, as those Fargo stations are owned by Midwest Communications, which is the parent company of KDAL as well.
We send love and prayers to Travis’ wife, Rose, his two children, and everyone who knew him well, including his former UND teammates, the entire North Dakota hockey family, and his radio family in Fargo.
8 THOUGHTS
1. As Kraig Karakas said on Saturday’s postgame show, congratulations on sweeping St. Cloud State. Now here’s Western Michigan.
Lots to like about what UMD did last weekend, but there’s little time to pedestalize yourself in this league.
“It was great to see them excited,” said head coach Scott Sandelin. “To have a weekend like that, we haven’t had a lot of it. Good confidence booster for our group. Gotta turn the page and get back to work. But it was fun to see the locker room like that afterward, hope we can have that feeling again.”
Now, the “turn the page” mentality goes beyond Bob Seger. It’s a mantra all over the place. In sports, there’s usually very little time to enjoy what’s just happened, because there’s always a challenge in front of you.
It feels especially true in the NCHC, where a team can conquer a huge challenge over weekend series, and there’s a very good chance a larger one awaits the following Friday and Saturday.
“Obviously, we’ve been working really, really hard,” said junior defenseman Wyatt Kaiser. “So it feels good, but I think after Sunday, we just kind of left it in the past and now it’s the next week.”
Before conference play resumed in January, Sandelin knew what his team had in front of it. Four straight league weekends, two tough road trips followed by a pair of home series, and then the final bye week of the regular season. Play eight hard games, breathe, play six more to wrap things up.
Western Michigan represents the last of those four straight weekends before the Bulldogs get a weekend off.
2. There were a few cool moments last weekend, but one that may have flown under the radar was Derek Daschke’s 100th career point. The new trend in the NHL is for the entire team to hop the boards and celebrate a major individual milestone with the player (we saw this with, among other things, Steven Stamkos’ 1000th point and 500th goal, Alex Ovechkin’s 802nd goal, etc.). While that didn’t happen here, it was still noticeable what happened.
It came on UMD’s fifth goal in Friday’s 5-3 win over St. Cloud State. Kyle Bettens scored it by tipping a puck thrown towards the goal by Jesse Jacques. Daschke got the second assist, and when the bench realized that was happening, players mobbed Daschke as he came over.
“It was a really cool moment,” said Daschke. “The boys, especially Kyle Bettens, have really been talking about it all season, like when it’s going to come. He (Bettens) told me my 100th point would be his first goal and we’d split the puck in half. It was pretty funny that he ended up scoring that goal. It’s even better that we won and it was such a great weekend.”
It’s a neat thing to see teammates recognize a milestone like this on the fly. Daschke said it’s literally been a topic all year.
“My corner in the locker room was always talking about it,” he noted. “Jack Smith said before the game, ‘I feel like we’ve been jinxing you, we’ve been talking about it so much.’ Aiden Dubinsky and Kyle Bettens have been talking about it for quite a while. They were actually fighting over who was going to go out there and get the puck.”
“It’s important,” said Sandelin on Saturday. “Means they’re paying attention for what’s going on. Everyone should be genuinely excited for everybody, no matter who scores. It’s great recognition by our team. I’ve started to see a little more of that the past few games, and I think that’s important.”
3. Before this current three-game winning streak started, UMD players and coaches held a meeting in Grand Forks, the day of the series finale against North Dakota.
It’s clear a lot of frank conversation happened in that meeting, even if most of the details are going to be kept internal.
“We had a heart to heart at North Dakota,” Daschke said. “We lost three in a row, and we weren’t happy. I think the bench has gotten more positive. It’s a contagious environment right now, with the positivity.”
“We had got down on ourselves,” said Kaiser of the meeting. “Just like ‘we’re a team, we don’t point fingers.'”
Daschke pointed out that no one can expect UMD to win every game the rest of the way, but the hope is that keeping the vibes on the bench and in the room more consistently positive will help lead to better results on the ice. Last weekend was certainly a good start towards that.
4. It appears Isaac Howard is heating up. The freshman has three goals and four points over the last five games, and Saturday was his first multi-point game of the campaign. The improved production has brought on an increased swagger from the Tampa Bay Lightning first-round pick.
“He scores a couple goals, and I’ve seen a different player in practice,” said Sandelin. “I’ve seen a different player in games. I see more confidence. I see more jump in his step. He starts to skate like he did on that goal Gally (Owen Gallatin) got (Saturday). That confidence, we’ve seen bits and pieces of it, I think we’re seeing more of him with that. It’s a great sign.”
Assistant coach Cody Chupp said they never were down on Howard or worried about him.
“Maybe there were times that Isaac worried about himself a bit,” said Chupp. “I think as a staff, it was ‘he’s young, it’s going to take time.’ When it comes to a player like Isaac, and what he is, goal-scoring solves a lot of problems. A player who’s used to scoring, once it starts to come, the confidence snaps back and oozes out of him.
“It’s a credit to all the other stuff he’s done every single week. What people may not know is he’s in there doing video every week, he’s working on the details of his game that will put him in a better spot offensively, and defensively. We hope that the confidence continues to build in him.”
Howard and Cole Spicer have shown great chemistry as of late. Sandelin noted on Wednesday that they used Jack Smith on that line in Saturday’s game after Luke Johnson took a major penalty for high sticking that could have hurt the team dearly (it was 3-2 at the time, SCSU had just scored two quick power play goals, and UMD killed the major with only two shots on goal allowed). Sandelin said he wasn’t happy with the penalty, and Johnson “had to pay the price.”
But don’t expect that price to keep being paid. Sandelin hinted that the 13 forward/6 defensemen alignment we saw last weekend is a good possibility to continue.
5. Sandelin wasn’t thrilled with the Bulldogs’ second period play in that Saturday win at North Dakota. He thought that UND was able to get to its game a bit, and may have been the better team that frame, tying it on a late goal by Mark Senden.
Last weekend, UMD outscored St. Cloud State 4-0 over the first periods (1-0 Friday, 3-0 Saturday). This time around, Sandelin liked what followed.
“I thought our second periods were as good as they’ve been in a long time,” he said. “Where we’ve had some big, big lulls in the second period, where we’ve come out and just been (bad). Where we might have had a good first period. I thought we were more consistently good than bad, which is a good thing.”
Yes, SCSU scored four of its six weekend goals over those second periods, but Friday saw UMD get a key penalty kill while down 2-1 and then go on the offensive. Then on Saturday, UMD got the huge five-minute kill and, again, went back on the offensive.
6. After going scoreless over eight power plays with just six shots on goal in four games since returning to NCHC play, the UMD power play exploded for six on 11 chances last weekend. Ben Steeves was responsible for four of them, including all three goals in his natural hat trick Friday.
“We made a couple little tweaks in our formations, our options,” Chupp said. “With a guy like Benny, who’s generally played in the same spot all year, it’s really just adding little options or tweaks to his attack to create different looks, ways to get the puck into his hands more frequently. Allow him to shoot from more internal parts of the ice, catching pucks with your toes facing in the right direction. The great thing with a guy like Ben Steeves, if you give him one or two things to work on, you know he’s going to work on it relentlessly until he gets better at it. We saw the fruits of that labor this weekend.
“We scored a really nice entry goal, something we’ve been working on and talking about. Just skating routes and not going rogue. Huge credit to our guys for buying into it. And confidence is a huge thing, because once it starts going in, the power play especially can really get hot.”
7. As already noted, the mission doesn’t get any easier at all. Western Michigan is tied for the top spot nationally and leads the NCHC at 4.2 goals per game. The Broncos have been filling nets all over the country with the puck basically all season long, to the point that it almost felt like “holding” WMU to nine goals (one ENG) over two November games in Kalamazoo was a good defensive performance.
“This is a team very similar (to SCSU) coming in here,” said Sandelin. “The way they play, transition, speed, the offensive ability.”
“There’s no off weekends,” Chupp said. “Come out of St. Cloud, who plays with a ton of pace and plays a transition game, and now it’s Western, who plays with a ton of pace and plays a transition game. It’s another great test, a team that if you start to fall asleep, can put a few goals in the net really, really quick.”
Western won seven straight out of Christmas, scoring 41 (!) goals in those games, before running into Omaha freshman goalie Simon Latkoczy on Saturday. Latkoczy stopped all 40 shots he faced in a 2-0 Omaha win that followed a 6-1 WMU win in the Friday game.
“Honestly, Saturday, I thought both teams played better,” said second-year Broncos head coach Pat Ferschweiler. “It was two power play goals were the difference in the game, and some real quality goaltending by their goalie.”
We’ve seen Broncos teams start fast before, but fade in the second half of the season. Some of that over the years can be attributed to injuries in key positions, but some it also goes toward those Western teams not being as deep offensively. This one appears to be trending toward the kind of depth you need to win at this level.
Yes, Ryan McAllister (40 points) and Jason Polin (23 goals, 35 points, five hat tricks) have gotten a lot of the headlines, justifiably so. But look at the scoring depth.
Luke Grainger and Zac Galambos each have double digit goals at 10 apiece. Grainger and Max Sasson give the Broncos four players averaging at least a point per game played. 14 players have at least 10 points, including guys like Cole Gallant (19 points), Jamie Rome (nine goals), Tim Washe (six goals, 15 points), and Carter Berger (17 points). Washe has become Western’s most consistent faceoff guy, as well.
8. Off a tough home weekend, the UMD women are on the road to Minnesota State this week. It’s a possible WCHA playoff preview, and a rematch of UMD’s league opening series in October (UMD won 2-1 in overtime Friday and 2-0 Saturday).
Looking back to Saturday’s 4-3 loss to Minnesota, the issues brought up with the officiating that day remain. UMD coach Maura Crowell had indicated after Saturday’s game that she planned to discuss a controversial review in the second period — a UMD challenge for a Minnesota major penalty where the referees decided to stick with the call on the ice of a minor — with the league office this week.
Here is the hit on UMD's Gabbie Hughes that was called an interference minor. UMD challenged for a major penalty and lost the challenge.
"The explanation I got was because Gabby's head was down, the defender had nowhere else to go, basically, then to her head." – Maura Crowell pic.twitter.com/o6T0FeSoT0
— Matt Wellens (@mattwellens) January 29, 2023
I decided to follow up on that, asking Crowell on Wednesday if there was a conversation, knowing that specific details of that conversation would likely be kept internal.
All she would say was that the league “maintained its position” on the play in question. Crowell really isn’t in a position to say anything more than that, but I am.
This is an abject failure of leadership by the WCHA. To make this type of call, which smells like officials who won’t want to make the difficult but correct — and, in this case, blatantly obvious — decisions. But given a chance to acknowledge a clear mistake, which happens, the league instead doubled down. In fact, it appears to have so badly wanted to take up for the referees that it forgot the story the referees told Crowell at the time of the decision.
Crowell said the explanation she received for the failed challenge was that because (Gabbie) Hughes’ head was down, (Madeline) Wethington had nowhere to go but hit Hughes in the head.
“I thought it was a clear contact to the head major penalty,” Crowell said. “I don’t think it’s on the puck carrier to have to have her head up in order to avoid contact to the head. You’re not supposed to hit somebody in the head regardless of where they are. If it’s a shorter player, you’re still not supposed to hit them in the head. Her trying to control the puck is what she’s allowed to do and you have to control how you’re going play that as the defender. I thought it was an unfortunate call. I liked our challenge and I would challenge it again if we had another opportunity.”
Saturday’s game was as poorly-officiated as any men’s or women’s Division I game I’ve ever witnessed. From the start, it was chippy, and despite the rising temperature (figuratively) on the ice, it was impossible to tell what the men in stripes were going to deem a penalty. They tried — poorly — to manage the game instead of officiating it, and that helped create an environment where stickwork and hitting were very common.
The missed major was nothing more than a mistake, but the WCHA’s decision to change stories and stand by the bad call only speaks to a lack of leadership from the league office, which has been notably absent from Amsoil Arena all season long.
In a week where we marked National Girls and Women in Sports Day, the young women playing hockey in the WCHA deserve better than they’re getting from the top of the conference.
Special start time Friday for CBS Sports Network, as we’ll hit the air at 7pm. Back pregame with the lines and any other notes worth bringing up.
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