For the UMD men, it’s a bittersweet final home weekend with Miami in town. For the women, it’s the start of the most wonderful time of year, the playoffs.
Here, it’s nine more rambling thoughts.
9 THOUGHTS
1. “It’s go time.” UMD sophomore goalie Eve Gascon smiled when it was mentioned to her that it’s playoff time for the UMD women.
The Bulldogs were swept last weekend at Minnesota, but it wasn’t without controversy. The only goal of Saturday’s 1-0 Gophers win came when Abbey Murphy shot a puck into the UMD zone, it hit the end glass, then bounced over the top of the goal. Gascon tried to glove it, but her momentum brought the glove far enough over the goal line that the officials — after a review — determined the puck crossed the goal line, even though they couldn’t fully see the puck in Gascon’s glove.
Ever the honest soul, Gascon said she believed it was in the net.
“I saw it coming off the glass and as I was catching it, I think the movement of my glove went in the net,” she said. “So I think it was a goal, personally. I saw my glove in the net. But I was trying to hide it.
“I told Tindra and Anna (backup goalies Tindra Holm and Anna Byczek), ‘I think that was a goal.'”
Her head coach wasn’t as convinced.
“They had an overhead view that they all felt that it had crossed the goal line,” Laura Schuler explained at her media conference Wednesday. “When Eve turned with her momentum to grab it, that it looked like it had crossed. I also saw it. I didn’t think it was conclusive enough to be able to call it (a goal). You can definitely see a bit of the logo, but I don’t think you can see the full puck.”
On the Big Ten Plus stream, the overhead replay was not shown. The only angle we saw was from the main camera, and it was as far from conclusive as you can be.
2. A familiar opponent awaits UMD this weekend. St. Cloud State returns to Amsoil Arena for the WCHA quarterfinals for a third straight year.
The results have been very much in UMD’s favor.
The Bulldogs have outscored SCSU 13-1 over the previous two playoff series, both UMD sweeps. Gascon blanked the Huskies twice in the regular season, both 3-0 finals in January. UMD is 9-1 all-time against St. Cloud State in postseason games, and the Huskies haven’t won a game in Duluth since beating UMD 3-2 on Feb. 9, 2019.
The success UMD’s had defensively is a big reason why. St. Cloud State has scored just two goals over its last 10 games in Duluth.
“I think it’s just playing the game plan,” Gascon said, “and we know what we have to do, limiting the threat that they have. They’re a opportunistic team. So just making sure that we’re taking every play and just staying in the present moment and doing one shift at a time, one shot at a time. We’ve had success in the past, but we stay in the present moment and we have a series to win.”
3. UMD is hosting the WCHA Final Faceoff next weekend in Duluth. The winner gets the league’s automatic entry into the NCAA Tournament.
If the four home teams win this weekend, the automatic bid won’t be needed for any of them. League champion Wisconsin, Ohio State, Minnesota, and UMD are all locks for the NCAA Tournament, especially if all four win this weekend (UMD could be in a bit of a pickle if it loses this series, but even that conversation is very much up in the air right now).
The Badgers host Bemidji State, Ohio State gets St. Thomas, and Minnesota will face Minnesota State, all in best-of-three series.
Either way, next weekend’s games are virtually guaranteed to be the last college hockey games played in Duluth this season. The odds of UMD hosting one of the women’s regionals really took a hit with that St. Thomas sweep in late January, and UMD hasn’t moved up from sixth in the PairWise since (the top four will host regionals).
4. Down the hall at Amsoil Arena, the UMD men will finish up at home against Miami this weekend. Any chance UMD had to attain home ice in the NCHC playoffs went away with North Dakota’s sweep of the Bulldogs last weekend.
It wasn’t unlike a few other weekends UMD’s had this season. A weekend where the Bulldogs did a lot of good things, but found a way to lose a game they had a chance to win, then melting down for one bad period that cost them the other game.
North Dakota scored five second period goals, the first in a four-on-four, the other four on the power play, and routed UMD 6-1 to claim the sweep.
“We played five good periods,” graduate forward Joe Molenaar said. “Unfortunately, in the end stage, that’s not always good enough. We take a period off or whatever you want to call what happened on Saturday in the second period. I think it’s just another lesson this group has to learn, right? It’s a young group. We understand we’re getting towards the end. There’s still as much belief as we’ve had in this room.”
5. A big moment Saturday came when junior forward Jack Smith hit UND junior Dylan James from behind into the boards near the UMD bench. After a three-minute review, Smith was given a major penalty and ejected for checking from behind. His night was over, and North Dakota tallied three times in the first two-plus minutes of the power play, chasing Klayton Knapp and putting the game away awfully early.
It was UMD’s eighth major penalty of the season. While the first five didn’t hurt the Bulldogs on the scoreboard very much (only gave up one total goal), the last three have been extremely impactful.
On Nov. 23, Western Michigan scored twice on a major power play to take the lead for good in a game it won 4-1. On Feb. 15, Omaha picked up two goals on a late major power play to blow a close game wide open, going on to win 5-1. Saturday, it was North Dakota getting three goals to turn 2-0 into 5-0.
“Don’t put yourself in that position,” UMD coach Scott Sandelin said. “I know they’re going to happen sometimes. But you’ve got to be smarter, and you’ve got to make sure that you don’t put yourself in those type of compromising situations. That’s all. You’ve got to have some discipline there.
“Jack doesn’t go and do egregious things, right? It happened, he was being aggressive. If it’s any player, they probably want it back. I’m not mad at Jack. I hope they learn from it, just like our team does, and we don’t put ourselves in those positions again.”
6. Sandelin didn’t have much of an update on freshman forward Zam Plante, who left Friday’s game at UND with an upper body injury. He got tangled up with Fighting Hawks freshman forward Sasha Boisvert while trying to stick check him.
While the head coach didn’t rule Plante out for this weekend, he also didn’t say the youngster would play.
Calling it a “tricky” injury, Sandelin said Plante is “day to day,” “week to week,” or “minute to minute,” depending on the day, week, or minute, I guess.
He also explained a bit about his philosophy on injuries.
“Whenever you’re dealing with injuries, you got to make sure that number one, they’re healthy enough to play, number two, mentally they’re ready to play,” he said. “The second part’s probably bigger than the first part, because guys play with injuries sometimes, but just making sure that they’re mentally ready. Whether it’s through having two, three days of practice, just knowing that they’re in a good spot. And (we’re) never gonna put anybody in harm’s way. I don’t care if it is the playoffs.
“There’s some guys that have higher pain tolerance than others. So there’s a lot of things that go into it, but we talk a lot with Suz (director of sports performance Dr. Suz Hoppe) and Cass (resident athletic trainer Cassidy Pierce) and the player.”
7. UMD will host Miami to finish the home slate this weekend. The Bulldogs took all six points from the RedHawks in Oxford earlier this season.
Miami is 3-25-2 under first-year coach Anthony Noreen, and the RedHawks haven’t won a league game since Jan. 13, 2024, a 4-3 home win over Western Michigan that preceded a 16-game losing streak to end last season. Miami is 0-33-1 in NCHC games since that upset over the Broncos.
Noreen took the Miami job knowing what kind of work was awaiting him. After a successful run with USHL Tri-City, Noreen decided he was ready for college hockey, and he strikes as the kind of person Miami needed to hire.
“What I said to the beginning is what we say still today, which is right now it’s culture above everything,” Noreen said this week. “And a lot of the decisions we’ve made in the short term were, whether it was lineup wise or whatever it might’ve been, things that we felt would give us the best chance in the long term and maybe even at times were harmful to us in the short term.”
Noreen lauded his older players, including a handful of fifth-year seniors, for their willingness to take on this challenge and help reset the foundation going forward.
“I just think it says, first off, it says a ton about their belief and their love for Miami,” Noreen said. “And I think if anyone that’s been associated with this university, that’s whether that’s as a student, as a student athlete, as a faculty member, there is a lot of pride in people that come here, are a part of this place, and love it. So those guys love it, they believed in it, they believed in what we were doing. And for them, I told them from the very beginning, you guys might not see the fruits of what you’re gonna be a part of until a couple of years down the line.”
Noreen is happy with the job his staff has been able to do recruiting, and the present-day version of Miami sure hasn’t quit on its coach.
“You can look at their record and talk all you want about it,” Molenaar said, “but at the end of the day, if you look through some of their games, they’re in a bunch of one, two goal games that really could have gone either direction. And our group knows it. We know they’re a lot better than their record says.”
“It’s going to be tough,” Sandelin said. “Every game is tough. I mean, we were down 2-0 to them in their building on Saturday after a pretty good Friday (UMD scored six goals in relatively quick succession before winning 7-2).”
8. Saturday is Senior Night for UMD, with the Bulldogs’ six seniors — forwards Dominic James, Carter Loney, and Molenaar, along with defensemen Luke Bast, Will Francis, and Owen Gallatin — recognized with their families pregame.
“One of the best parts about Senior Night is being able to have family, friends, and attendants, the people that have made the journey of your hockey career possible,” Molenaar said (he was recognized on SCSU’s Senior Night last year). So I think just honoring them while at the same time enjoying your teammates and enjoying being celebrated for what you’ve done for this program.”
Sandelin was asked Wednesday what Senior Night means to him.
“It’s always hard, especially when you’re not playing here in the playoffs. It’s always hard to see your guys play their last games here. You want to win the games for those guys so that they remember that, too.
“You build relationships and they’re like your kids. And then, you know what? Pretty soon they’re leaving. They’re going on to something else and they’re not part of your program. They all have impacts in different ways and they all bring something to this program over their time here. And so they’ve all had a value to this program. It’s funny because you go to the next year going, ‘God, I wish we still had him’, right? That’s the relationship you build with the players. And hopefully they feel the same way, that it’s been a good experience for them. Hopefully they can finish it off with a good weekend.”
9. The Penrose Cup could be handed out this weekend in Kalamazoo, as Western Michigan hosts North Dakota. The Broncos will win the league title for the first time if they can get stay ahead of Arizona State and hold at least a six-point edge on Omaha after the weekend (the Sun Devils are at Omaha this weekend). That’s because ASU is wrapping up the regular season this weekend, taking next week off before likely hosting a first-round series the following week in Tempe (that isn’t clinched yet, but it’s certainly trending that way).
Elsewhere, St. Cloud State travels to Denver. This will have some relevance on where UMD finishes in the final standings. If UMD can have a good weekend and get six points from Miami, the Huskies would need to get at least five points out of Denver in order for next weekend’s finale in St. Cloud to have any relevance toward the final standings. UMD leads SCSU by four points for seventh right now.
_______
We’ll hit the air at 6:30pm Friday, 5:30pm on Saturday. Back pregame with lines.
Comments