Denver took 5/6 points against UMD which is good for us delusional fans in the race for 7th. Would have been nice for denver to win in regulation Friday night though.
CC did what we couldn’t and ended UNDs non regulation loss streak. They swept UND and went undefeated against them in the regular season. There’s a bunch of annoying whiny Nodak fans online calling for Berry to be fired and calling this unacceptable blah blah. Very entitled coming from fans of a team that’s in 1st place in the NCHC, #3 in pairwise, and have gotten points in every single NCHC game they’ve played this season until this weekend. I’d gladly switch places with them if they want a coach that’s about to be fired so bad
Also this just shows how possible a rebuild in the NCHC is. Just four years ago CC was dead last in the standings 4 points behind Miami. Today they are only 4 points back of first place with a legitimate chance to win the Penrose and are close to a bid to the NCAA Tournament. If they can do it……….
Part of me doesn’t want CC to make the run at first place. They’re obviously heating up right now and we have not been very good against them in the past 4 years.
I’d almost rather see a UND team who we’ve played well against (especially on Friday nights) in an arena most of our players have actually won in (plus it would be so funny to eliminate ludvig)
Or even St. Cloud who we’ve had two ties and a big win against last year and a couple close games this year (ignore the blowouts lol).
Interesting how first place is wide open now when a little bit ago we were looking destined to play the green hawks
How bad is this Miami team?!
The gap between Miami (8th place) and 7th place in the NCHC is 15 points while the gap between 7th place and 1st place is 16 points.
To be fair they have looked better this season play-wise if you watch the games. Way better effort consistency and competitiveness. Feels like they’re actually in games and get close to winning them instead of being slapped around and blown out every week. They just have a very hard time finishing games out.
IMO their overall consistency has been more spread out across the games this season and it’s been good enough to look and play better each night but not good enough to win games where in the last couple years they’d have entire games playing like salted booty cheeks for long stretches of the season but they’d muster up all the effort they had in a couple select games where they’d pull out wins to get points. Now that that effort is spread out across multiple games instead of just piled into a couple we’re seeing less points even though we’ve played better especially this January/February. Just my theory
Also we haven’t seen a lot of OT (tbh probably a good thing for us we suck in ot) but at least being able to get the loser point sometimes would help. There are 5 NCHC teams that have 5+ games that have gone to OT where you’re guaranteed a point and we have 2.
We can technically still catch up to 7th, even 6th place if Omaha and UMD lose out and we win out. And maybe the growing consistency is a sign of berge rebuilding things the right way from bottom up without haste? Improvements are happening just very slowly.
Like I guess I’d rather have a consistent team than one that lucks into wins because that’s not reliable and isn’t how a good program runs? But we could use some luck this weekend and I can see how ppl would rather take the 6 points on the left.
I’m not like a bergeron fanatic or anything but I can see the fruits of his labor starting to show. I like the foundation he’s built with the program.
The only thing is the process has been so slow and is way behind schedule. It’s like our lease on our house ended when blasi was fired and we needed a new place to live so we hired Berge to build it but 5 years later he’s just now getting through the foundation It’s a nice foundation and an incredible house could be built on it but at this point we’ve been homeless for five years living on the streets off scraps amongst the rats trash and poo where it’s hard to even imagine that house we’re told should be coming.
I’d just feel better about the future of the team if we were seeing this budding improvement like 2 years ago instead of now. Maybe someone else can finish the house
There was no way not to fire Mannino when Rico was let go. (Or, more accurately, no way to keep him on, because assistants are all year-to-year rather than long-term unless they’re some superstar type.) You only get three assistants in hockey. Can you really expect to tell the new head coach that 1/3 of his staff is already full, and the guy you have to keep isn’t someone with deep ties to the program, but a guy you just hired in the last offseason?
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I sympathize with Mannino. He moved his whole family here and surely thought he’d be here at least longer than a year. But (1) that one-year gig is an inherent risk of being an assistant rather than the top guy, and (2) with the way things turned out, Rico had to go at the end of that season.
I’m not sure where this myth that we’ve gotten better this season came from. Our average margin in conference games has gone from -2.38 to -2.28. Our pythagorean win% in conference games has gone from .142 to .166 (equivalent to 2.6 vs 3.0 wins through 18 games).
If you squint you can maybe say that this season’s dogshit is slightly less shitty than last season’s dogshit, but we’re not at all meaningfully closer to not being shit. Bergeron has had 5 years to fix this (including 3 years post-covid) and we’re supposed to celebrate the fact that analytics says we should have 3 wins through 18 games instead of 2.6 wins?
