Bulldogs find familiar foe — Gophers — in national semifinal
It will be a couple of cases of the same-old, same-old when the national women’s college hockey tournament is held Friday and Saturday at Matthews Arena on the Northeastern University campus in Boston.
The NCAA is not conducting the tournament, it is run instead by USA Hockey and the women’s coaching assiociation. There is one crucial difference. The NCAA stresses that one of its criteria is to try if at all possible to not have teams play other teams from their own leagues in the national tournament.
Because there is no such guideline this week, the UMD Bulldogs will face the University of Minnesota for the sixth time this season in Friday’s 7 p.m. semifinal. That will be preceded by the fourth meeting between Brown and Dartmouth in the first semifinal.
Brown (24-3-3) is ranked No. 1 in the country, and beat Dartmouth 1-0 and 6-1 during the ECAC regular season, then whipped Dartmouth again 6-3 in the ECAC playoff final.
The Bulldogs, meanwhile, beat Minnesota 5-4 and 1-0 at Mariucci Arena, lost to the Gophers 4-3 before being tied 2-2 by the Gophers in Pioneer Hall. Then UMD beat the Gophers 2-0 in the WCHA playoff final to stand 3-1-1 against them.
“Can you believe we ended up against the Gophers again, after all this?” said UMD coach Shannon Miller.
Because UMD didn’t play either Brown or Dartmouth, the Bulldogs have a 3-1-1 record against other teams in the final four, while Minnesota is 4-3-1, having beaten Brown once and Dartmouth twice. Brown is 3-1 against the field, having beaten Dartmouth three times and losing once to Minnesota, while Dartmouth is 0-5.
The USA Hockey criteria factored won-lost record, strength of schedule, head-to-head play, record against common opponents, and record against teams under consideration — all very similar to the NCAA evaluation measures. Last week’s coaches ratings showed Brown first, Harvard second and UMD and the Gophers tied for third, with Dartmouth sixth.
Dartmouth upset Harvard 3-2 in overtime in the semifinals, but then lost 6-3 to Brown in the title game, after regular-season champ Brown also had dispatched Northeastern 2-1 in the semifinals. The criteria had called for the ECAC regular-season champ and playoff winner to be selected, along with the WCHA playoff champ, leaving one at-large berth to be filled. But when Brown beat Dartmouth to add the playoff trophy to its regular-season title, it left two at-large teams. The committee selected Minnesota and Dartmouth.
Minnesota, like UMD, hasn’t played since their conference tournament final two weeks ago. The difference was that UMD knew it had the automatic bid, and the Gophers didn’t know they’d be selected until Sunday night.
In the final coaches rating, Brown came out first, with UMD moving up to second, and Minnesota holding third, while Dartmouth moved up to fourth, just ahead of Harvard.
“In our criteria, when you compared Minnesota, Harvard and Dartmouth, Minnesota came out on top,” said Heather Ahern, USA Hockey media liaison. “The final decision came down to Dartmouth and Harvard, and Dartmouth had beaten Harvard three times.”
True, but Dartmouth’s 20-11 record pales against Harvard’s 21-5-3, and Harvard had thrashed Minnesota 8-3 at Mariucci Arena.
As for pairing up the teams East-vs.-East and West-vs.-West, Ahern said that the USA Hockey ratings showed Brown-UMD-Minnesota-Dartmouth in that order, so it was a simple matter of pairing 1-4 and 2-3.
Gophers’ ‘home-ice’ goes to Sioux, Badgers in puck regional
Reaching the NCAA tournament was so commonplace for the University of Minnesota that it set a record by making the select field for 13 consecutive years, and in all those years the regionals were held elsewhere. Now that the six-team West Regional finally is coming to Mariucci Arena, the Gophers will serve as host only at Mariucci Arena Friday and Saturday.
Wisconsin and North Dakota, the 1-2 finishers in the WCHA, and the teams rated 1-2 nationally, both earned byes as West No. 1 and West No. 2 for the event, which means both will need to win only one game this weekend to advance to the final four in two weeks at Providence.
The West Regional opens with New Hampshire (23-8-6) facing upstart Niagara (29-7-4) in a first-round game Friday, with that winner advancing to play North Dakota (26-8-5), which beat Wisconsin 5-3 in the WCHA playoff championship game Saturday night at Target Center.
The second Friday game will put Boston College (26-11-1) against Michigan State (27-10-4), with that winner taking on Wisconsin (31-8-1) in Saturday’s second quarterfinal.
In the East regional at Albany, N.Y., the third WCHA team, St. Cloud State (21-13-3) will face Boston University ( 24-9-7) on Saturday, with that winner advancing to face the East’s No. 2 seed, St. Lawrence (24-7-2) on Sunday. The other Saturday qualifier has Michigan (26-9-4) playing Colgate (24-8-2), with that winner drawing Maine (26-7-5), the defending national champion and the winner of the Hockey East playoff. The four finalists will advance to Providence for semifinals on April 6, and the final on April 8.
The Gophers had the toughest role in the WCHA Final Five last weekend, having to beat Minnesota State-Mankato 6-4 on Thursday to gain the right to enter the semifinals, where the Gophers fell 5-3 to Wisconsin. That put the Gophers into Saturday’s third-place game, but playing the third game in less than three full days proved too much, and the Gophers fell 6-4 to the Huskies.
Don Lucia, in his first year as Gopher coach after taking Colorado College to five straight NCAA appearances, had said he thought that the Gophers stood a good chance of being invited if they could have won the third-place game. In fact, he suggested the Gophers might be wise to rest some players against Wisconsin because the third-place game might be more important.
However, the reality was that even if the Gophers had beaten St. Cloud State Saturday afternoon, it’s doubtful they would have displaced St. Cloud State, which finished third in league play, and was 21-13-3 overall, compared to the Gophers, who wound up sixth in the WCHA, fourth in the playoffs and 20-19-2 overall.
“It’s disappointing for me not to make it, because I’ve been there five straight times,” said Lucia. He also said he thought the Gophers took a step forward this season, and that the future looked promising because the Gophers dressed “14 freshmen and sophomores, and only two seniors,” he said. However, the excuse of being young was Lucia’s choice.
Lucia dressed captain Nate Miller and Dave Spehar, the mercurial winger from Duluth East who had been in and out of Lucia’s doghouse all season. Spehar went from being scratched from the lineup in the regular-season finaly at St. Cloud State, to playing regularly in the two-game playoff sweep at Colorado College. He played well and scored a goal in the victory over Mankato, and after playing two periods on the third line against Wisconsin, he was moved up to Erik Westrum’s line when Lucia decided to go with two lines in the third.
Against St. Cloud State in the third-place game, Spehar played on Westrum’s line until midway through the second period, then he skated on the fourth line with Mike Meyer and defenseman Ryan Trebil. That was more than fellow seniors Mike Lyons and Rico Pagel, however, neither of whom played the last month of the season.
Lucia pointed out that the Gophers had played the toughest schedule in the country, and indeed they had played 19 games against the 12 teams selected for the NCAA tournament. But the Gophers were only 3-14-2 in those games. Even UMD, which finished eighth, was better than that, going 5-9 against the 12 NCAA entries.
In the final criteria, the NCAA gave Niagara the chance to make the field as a new team from one of two new leagues in the country. However, while going 9-6-2 against teams from the four major conferences, Niagara’s 29-7-4 record also includes 10 games against teams not considered full Division I programs. The Purple Eagles will get a chance to test their wings against a Hockey East power in New Hampshire, with the Wildcats being heavily favored to advance and meet North Dakota, where coach Dean Blais has the Fighting Sioux on a mission to atone for last year’s quarterfinal upset loss to Boston College.
Hockey East followers and ESPN broadcasters have suggested Hockey East could get all four of the finalists, because Maine, UNH, BU and BC all are in separate brackets, but the WCHA has a chance to return to the pinnacle with three of the four finalists if Wisconsin and North Dakota advance in their brackets, and St. Cloud State — the hottest WCHA team since Christmas — can get by BU and then St. Lawrence.
New UMD hockey coach should look close to home first
UMD athletic director Bob Corran won’t make a more significant move on his own resume than when he decides which finalist to pick as the new Bulldog head hockey coach.
The state high school hockey tournament, the success of programs at St. Cloud State and Mankato, and the new “open-door” policy at the University of Minnesota combine to indicate that with the right coach, UMD could rise up to be a contender, suddenly and swiftly. With the wrong choice, things could go from struggling to worse. Corran will choose — if he hasn’t already — from among John Harrington, Scott Sandelin, Norm Maciver, Troy Ward or Tim Bothwell.
The selection will have a definite challenge. Don’t forget, being a contender is not automatic, particularly for the smaller schools. Under Mike Sertich the Bulldogs had nine seasons above .500, and even with the past two seasons being forgettable for wins and losses, Sertich was still over .500 for his 18 years — a feat that will look more and more impressive if his replacement doesn’t get out of the starting blocks quickly.
UMD always has recruited from Minnesota and from Canada, with a few sprinkled in from Superior, or North Dakota. We can presume a new coach will continue to do the same. The University of Minnesota, meanwhile, has decided to alter its all-Minnesota status. Don Lucia already has slapped the face of all the Gopher alumni who were proud that the Gophers were all-Minnesota. The hockey-challenged among Twin Cities media clamored for such a move, either because they resented hockey’s boast of purity, or because they were so naïve as to buy into the claim that faltering teams were the fault of limited talent.
Being a non-Gopher himself, Lucia cannot have any idea of what the mystique of being all-Minnesotan meant to the Gophers. The players never jumped up and down in the dressing room, or chanted in unison about being all from Minnesota, but there was an unspoken bond among them, and for a lot of years, every kid growing up in Minnesota wanted to be a Gopher, just to play with the players they’d grown up playing against.
When Lucia says that times have changed, and increased competition from more and more college programs in the state forces the Gophers to go elsewhere, he is showing disdain for that mystique. Go out and get a couple kids from outside the state, and bring in a couple of Canadians while you’re at it. But you know what? The Gophers had better make sure that the imports are superior to the Minnesota kids they’ll bypass. And the Gophers had better win with those imports.
From UMD’s standpoint, it means that suddenly all the Minnesota kids who grew up always wanting to be Gophers will look at other offers much more openly. Some of them already had started looking elsewhere, as the Gopher program slipped, badly, in recent years. It will slip more, now. The Gophers have punctured their own mystique, and every non-Minnesotan recruited by the Gophers will increase the size of the puncture.
Have Minnesota players dropped in caliber? Or has Minnesota gotten the wrong ones? Neither. The Gophers still don’t recruit, they select. But that will change. North Dakota has nine Minnesotans on its roster, Wisconsin six, but those teams always have taken a share of Minnesotans. St. Cloud State has 19 Minnesotans, and Minnesota State-Mankato also has 19, and very few of them were sought by the Gophers. St. Cloud finished third and Mankato fourth in the WCHA, ahead of the Gophers’ sixth.
Looking beyond the Duluth and Iron Range areas, there was an interesting array of talent statewide. But virtually all the coaches, and certainly all the Gopher coaches, stressed that there were precious few kids who could make the jump from high school to college. For evidence, they pointed out how few have gotten scholarships. Amazing. These are the guys who give out the scholarships, and after they refuse to give them to high school kids, they turn around and say that not many high school kids got scholarships.
When the state tournament opened, Roseau hit the ice with a big centerman named David Klema and a tough, agile defenseman named Josh Grahn. No offers, they say. The last game of the first day at the tournament was a big shocker as Blaine let loose a group of big, extremely fast, tough and skilled players. They included seniors Matt Hendricks, Brandon Bochenski, Chad Smith, Matt Moore, Trevor Frischmon, Scott Foyt and Scott Romfo — among others. Of those, Hendricks is committed to St. Cloud State and Moore to Air Force. You don’t think the rest can play? Then you weren’t watching the same state tournament I was.
In fact, if you started a Division I program with only the prospects from Blaine and Eden Prairie, which didn’t make the tournament, you could be looking at a contender in short order. In fact, you probably could help any football program at the same time, because the top players at both those schools also were football stars. So we know they’re great athletes.
When St. Cloud State whipped the Gophers, and the Bulldogs for that matter, top Huskies included Brandon Sampair, a junior who came from Mahtomedi by way of Hill-Murray, and Nate DiCasmirro, a sophomore who played at Burnsville. Mike Pudlick, a sophomore from Blaine, was an all-WCHA defenseman, and goaltender Scott Meyer, a junior from White Bear Lake, was the surprise of the WCHA this season. Those aren’t household names. They weren’t hotly contested by Minnesota, or UMD, before choosing St. Cloud State. Mankato’s roster was filled with more of the same, guys who were scoffed at when they went off to play for the Mavericks. Nobody is scoffing now, at least nobody from Minnesota or UMD, the schools that finished below St. Cloud and Mankato.
This is not to say that UMD should have gotten all those players, or even tried for them. What it does mean is that a new coach at UMD had better be aware of what is available close to home, and he can either rubber-stamp Minnesota’s contention that there aren’t enough good players available in the state, or he could go after the picks of the litter. Thanks to the new “we’re-not-all-from-Minnesota” policy the Gophers have adopted, a new UMD coach will find more Minnesotans available than ever, and they will all be more willing to listen to offers to by something other than Gophers.
Five UMD hockey coaching finalists to be named today
UMD’s search for a new head hockey coach has already funneled down from over 25 initial candidates, and speculation is that the five finalists for the job could be named as early as today. The five-person search committee met Saturday to pare the list down from the total list of candidates to a more workable number, and further meetings Monday brought the number down to the five finalists.
The most-mentioned top candidates are John Harrington, a former UMD and U.S. Olympic star from Virginia who currently is coaching at St. John’s University; Scott Sandelin, a former North Dakota and professional defenseman from Hibbing, who currently is associate head coach at North Dakota; and Tim Bothwell, a former pro player who is currently head hockey coach at the University of Calgary, where he was hired by current UMD athletic director Bob Corran before Corran made the move from Calgary to UMD.
Those three are expected to be among the five finalists. Another likely finalist is Norm Maciver, a former UMD All-American defenseman from Thunder Bay, who returned to UMD to complete his degree this year after playing pro hockey for 12 seasons with the New York Rangers, Hartford, Edmonton, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Winnipeg and Phoenix, and served as a graduate assistant the second semester. The fifth finalist is expected to be Troy Ward, who coached at Wisconsin-Eau Claire when Dale Race, Corran’s current aide, was basketball coach there, and who since has been assistant coach at Denver University and with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The five finalists will be brought in this week and next week to be interviewed by the search committee, and a decision could be made by the end of next week, to replace 18-year head coach Mike Sertich, who, as they say, “got resigned” after this season.
However, UMD’s haste in naming a coach might not be hasty enough, considering that Minnesota State-Mankato also is searching for a coach to replace the retiring Don Brose. Harrington and Sandelin are both known to be high among Mankato’s list of finalists, and Mankato could make a move by the end of this week.
Fighting Sioux beat Badgers 5-3 for WCHA playoff title
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.—North Dakota finished second to top-rated Wisconsin in its quest for an unprecedented fourth straight WCHA championship MacNaughton Cup this season, but the Fighting Sioux claimed some revenge Saturday night by whipping the Badgers 5-3 for the WCHA playoff championship.
“Last year we won the title but we lost the playoff, and it left us with a hollow feeling that carried over into our first NCAA game, which we lost to Boston College,” said North Dakota coach Dean Blais. “This year, we were in contention for the league title, but once Wisconsin got far enough ahead so we knew we couldn’t win the MacNaughton Cup, we changed direction. We decided to get better and make a run at the playoffs. Hopefully, we wanted to get Wisconsin in the finals and beat ’em to go to the NCAA.”
Both North Dakota (28-8-5) and Wisconsin (31-8-1) were assured of reaching the NCAAs, which will be announced today, and both Wisconsin and North Dakota are likely to get the West’s two byes for the West Regional at Mariucci Arena next weekend.
Lee Goren scored his 30th and 31st goals of the season, and the Sioux broke from a 2-2 deadlock in the second period with three straight goals. Once ahead 5-2, the Sioux cruised to the finish by playing a frustrating style to simply turn the puck back into the Badger zone through the last 15 minutes.
“They put pressure on us in the first period, we put pressure on them in the second, but they came back and had more jump than we did in the third,” said Wisconsin coach Jeff Sauer. “Then they kept giving the puck to us but they didn’t come at us, they just sat back and jammed us on the blueline.”
The Fighting Sioux had lost 3-2 and 6-5, both in overtime, at Wisconsin, and beat the Badgers 3-2 in overtime in the holiday tournament in Milwaukee. Badger coach Jeff Sauer pointed out that North Dakota never led in any of those three games except for the overtime winner at Milwaukee.
But in the final, Panzer staked North Dakota to the lead at 1:35 of the first period, when he carried in on the right for a shot that was blocked by a defender. Tim Skarperud played the puck and shot on goal, and when Graham Melanson blocked it, Panzer was speeding by the net just in time to score on the rebound.
David Hukalo tied it for Wisconsin when he pulled up on a rush and shot from 30 feet, scoring on Andy Kollar at 6:56 of the first period. Kollar was playing his second straight game in the Final Five, as star goaltender Karl Goehring didn’t dress with the after-effects of a concussion. Goehring was crashed into during a 1-on-1 rushing drill in practice Tuesday, and he fell back, striking his head on the ice. He said he was pretty much over the headaches, but doctors wouldn’t clear him to play, and coach Dean Blais figured he’d hold him out until the NCAA regional, just to be safe.
It only took a minute and a half for the Fighting Sioux to break the 1-1 tie, as Lee Goren carried up the left side, passed to the slot for a shot by Jason Ulmer, and freshman Ryan Bayda scored his 16th goal on the rebound.
Dustin Kuk tied it 2-2 at 0:49 of the second period, skating in 1-on-1 and using the defender for a screen for a 50-footer that eluded Kollar.
But the Sioux power play reclaimed the lead at 3-2 when Goren scored from in front on a pass out from behind the net by Bayda at 2:58 of the middle period. Goren scored again at 1:02 of the third, rebounding a shot just three seconds after a power play had expired, to make it 4-2.
“We’re definitely on a roll,” said Goren. “It’s the best feeling in the world.”
At 5:55, when the Sioux got on the power play again, Chad Mazurak moved in from right point and one-timed a slapshot by Melanson to make it 5-2.
From then on, the Sioux just played smart, efficient hockey, forechecking not at all and using their quickness to defuse the Badgers and flip all the pucks back into the Wisconsin zone.
With 3:44 remaining, however, the Badgers big line made a run. Dany Heatley fed Steve Reinprecht, who rushed in on the right side and fed a perfect pass to Brian Fahey on the left side. Fahey’s shot beat Kollar but hit the far post solidly. As it landed, Reinprecht knocked it in for his 26th goal, cutting the margin to 5-3.
But that was all the offense the Badgers could generate. They outshot North Dakota 36-31 in the fast-paced game, but it was only 9-7 in the rope-a-dope third period.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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