After UMD swept St. Cloud State at home in January, our radio analyst, Kraig Karakas, and I were chatting. It was looking more and more like the freshmen standouts on UMD were trying to drive more and more of the team’s play and attitude. We saw that as a positive.
No, the results weren’t necessarily immediate. UMD lost 20 games and fell in two straight NCHC quarterfinal games at Arizona State.
But the foundation was being laid right in front of us.
Now, we see if they can take the next step.
9 THOUGHTS
1. However far the Bulldogs end up going, there’s little doubt that its stellar sophomores will have a ton of say.
Do I need to reset who we’re talking about? Primarily, it’s the Brothers Plante, Jayson Shaugabay, and Ty Hanson. There are others, but those guys are, as head coach Scott Sandelin often says, the “drivers.”
Max Plante and Hanson are alternate captains, Zam Plante and Shaugabay join Max on the top line. Fellow sophomore Callum Arnott likely joins these four on the top power play unit.
(We haven’t even mentioned guys like Adam Kleber, Harper Bentz, Blake Bechen, or Adam Gajan yet. All sophomores. All incredibly important players.)
“There’s a lot of familiarity there with that group,” Sandelin said. “So it’s a nice way to start. It’s probably been the first time we’ve really brought back a top line to start the year. And hopefully, those guys can do what they did last year and have even better years.”
Plante-Plante-Shaugabay (we’re still working on a nickname) wasn’t UMD’s top line last season from start to finish, but they were sure used like one down the stretch. Zam missed the Miami weekend with an injury, returned for the St. Cloud State series, and that trio was on the ice a ton in the playoff series in Arizona. That will continue in big moments, but Sandelin is hopeful he won’t have to pull the lever too much, because …
2. The coaches are really happy with UMD’s depth. Sandelin hasn’t tinkered with that top line so far, but he has with the others.
“They’re certainly going to get lot of ice time, they’re going get a lot of attention,” Sandelin said. “There’s going be games where they’re going to do their thing. And there’s games that like any top players, sometimes they’re going to get shut down. So that’s why you need that secondary group and the group underneath them to, to carry the load.”
That secondary group is keyed by the three veteran forward transfers. Kyle Gaffney, who played three years at Alaska, faces his old team this weekend and will likely center UMD’s second line to start, along with another transfer, Scout Truman from UMass-Lowell.
Senior Kyler Kovich, a transfer from Cornell, is expected to start by centering UMD’s fourth line.
Sandelin has lauded the preseason work of freshman Daniel Shlaine, Hunter Anderson, and Ryan Zaremba, a group we will likely see start as a line. Freshman Luke Bibby factors into the fourth line with Kovich, which will have a lot more size.
By the way, if you look at those three places that UMD got forwards to transfer from, there might be a common thread you notice.
3. UMD plucked forwards from three programs it has a lot of respect for. It might not have necessarily been “the plan” going in, but having players like Gaffney, Kovich, and Truman available, guys who played for coaches Sandelin likes and respects (Eric Largen at Alaska, the now-retired Mike Schafer at Cornell, and Norm Bazin at UMass-Lowell, respectively), well let’s just say that didn’t hurt the process at all.
“Well, it certainly helps,” said Sandelin. “You know where they’re coming from, you know the environments they’ve been a part of. Obviously, they’re getting great coaching. They’re all guys that I have a ton of respect for. They’re older players, which was a focus. I think all of them filled some needs that we had. We needed to get older, number one. We needed to fill some center spots.”
The respect goes both ways. Kovich had an extra year of eligibility because of a season-ending injury he suffered while playing at Cornell a couple years ago. But Cornell is in the Ivy League, which still uses rules from the 1850s, so graduate students can’t play sports. If Kovich was to use his extra year, he had to transfer, and UMD was, he said, the obvious fit.
“I don’t have enough time for all the reasons I wanted to come here,” he said. “I mean, starting with Coach Sandy (Sandelin), I mean, unbelievable coach. He has so much experience, championships, and all the assistant coaches, too. They’re just such a knowledgeable coaching staff.”
I talked to Gaffney in June, when the players all gathered in town for a couple weeks, and was able to ask him about his decision to join the Bulldogs.
“It was tough leaving Fairbanks, but I thought it was definitely the right choice,” Gaffney, a native of Plymouth, Mich., said. “I visited here about a month ago too, so staff was great. They were great talking to me in the portal. And then just meeting all the boys here, it’s been awesome. And the facility here at Amsoil is great. The campus is great. And we played you guys this past season. Seeing the fans, it was pretty cool. And I know it’s a very historic school here, too. So definitely an easy decision to make the switch here.”
Sandelin said it was a priority to also get bigger in the middle of the rink. Gaffney and Kovich will help them with that. Neither lacks experience in the middle. Both were over 50 percent on the dot last season, Gaffney taking 500 draws for Alaska and Kovich 229 for Cornell.
Defenseman Brady Cleveland brings size and grit to the back end after transferring from Colorado College, while Ethan Dahlmeir comes in after playing his freshman season at Miami.
4. The Bulldogs are banking on Gajan improving, and they believe he will. The Slovakian sophomore had, to say the least, and up-and-down debut season with UMD. Sometimes, we saw those ups and downs during individual games, sometimes over the course of a weekend. Take that Arizona State postseason series as an example.
After allowing a couple iffy goals early in the Friday game, Gajan settled in and largely gave his team a chance to come back, which it did. Twice. UMD rallied from 2-0 and 3-2 deficits, but couldn’t equalize after ASU retook the lead with 14:21 to go in the third period.
On Saturday, Gajan made 17 saves and may have played his best period of the season as UMD jumped to a 3-0 lead after one. Victimized by a couple horribly unlucky bounces, Gajan conceded three quick goals in the second that allowed the Sun Devils to tie the game, and while they never led during regulation, UMD never was able to get any real separation again, and Ryan Kirwan scored from a bad angle down the left wing in overtime to send Arizona State to St. Paul.
“So far they’ve they’ve looked good,” said Sandelin of his three goalies, with Gajan joined by Dahlmeir and freshman Cole Sheffield. “I think the dynamic amongst those three is is certainly better. I think last year there might have been some, maybe not great dynamics at times, but they’re all competitive. They all want the net and that’s fine.”
Sandelin noted that assistant coach/goaltending savant Brant Nicklin had a hand in recruiting both Dahlmeir and Sheffield.
“I defer to Brant on a lot of this stuff,” the head coach said to the surprise of no one. “He saw a lot of video on those guys. He was a driving force behind getting both of those guys. He’s excited to work with them.”
On Gajan, Sandelin added “Adam needs to have a better year. There’s no question, and we can’t pin it all on him. But I think he’s in a better spot right now, and hopefully (he) learned last year. He got humbled a little bit at times like like our whole team did. Humility can do some good things, but I think he’s in a good spot to hopefully take the ball and run with it.”
5. Sandelin has resisted the temptation to talk a lot about last season, preferring to look ahead with a still-young team. In previewing the season with me on my radio show, as well as with Matt Wellens and Zach Schneider on Bulldog Insider, Sandelin did drop a few nuggets that elude to his dissatisfaction with last season and optimism as we get ready for what’s to come.
There’s the quote above about the dynamic among his goalies not being what he wanted last year.
Here’s another quote from our interview, talking about some of the depth players he has up front: “I know I say this every year, but there’s there’s a lot of competition and I think the guys that maybe start in the bottom of the lineup are certainly going to bring us a little bit more depth. I think they have the right attitudes. I think they’re going to continue to work even if they’re in and out of the lineup. And I think that’s really important. I think sometimes over the past few years, we’ve missed some of that.”
From Bulldog Insider (click the above link for a partial transcription and the YouTube version, or download/subscribe wherever you get podcasts), Sandelin was asked about the culture of the program.
“What I like now is we’re getting kids joining our program that — we’re not coming off national championship years. They still want to play here. They hear about how good the environment is. Culture is a funny thing. It takes a long time to build and it can be destroyed and broken down very quickly. I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but there’s been some deterioration. There’s no question, which frustrates all of us on the coaching staff.
We have a group right now that doesn’t have any agendas except to get this program back to where they want to, where we were before, or at least close to that, and win.”
This isn’t about taking shots at players who aren’t here anymore (at no point were any of them mentioned by name that I heard). It’s pointing out that things under the hood might not have been great. In fairness, however, losing will do that to a lot of people. Win a few games, especially early in the season, and it’s amazing how great the vibes will be.
6. Sandelin is optimistic that the back end, which was retooled and not rebuilt, is going to be a strength.
UMD’s team save percentage last season was .887, seventh-worst in the country. I asked Sandelin if the combination of a more experienced and bigger defensive corps, combined with a forward group that appears capable of playing with the puck more, is going to lead to better goaltending numbers by itself.
“I think it’s a strength for us going into the year, no question if we can play with the puck more,” he said. “Obviously, defending is a five, six man thing. So that’s something we focused on here early in the year to try and make sure we understand that part of it. We’re trying to be a little bit more aggressive at times. We just want to play differently. I think we have the team to do that. We can hopefully pressure pucks more and play faster.”
Hanson and Kleber will likely start the season atop the depth chart, with Aaron Pionk working alongside freshman Grayden Siepmann. UMD’s only foray into major junior on the current roster, Siepmann played five years in the WHL. He can skate, has a good stick, and he’s in line to run one of the Bulldogs’ power play units. Cleveland will likely work with captain Joey Pierce on the third pair, giving UMD a couple hard-nosed defensemen who are going to be difficult for adversaries to deal with.
Sandelin lauded Pierce’s offseason, saying he was a “go-to” during a summer where the Bulldogs purposely didn’t name a leadership group until a few weeks after the players convened for the start of the season. Basically, it sounds like Pierce was a captain without the title.
“He’s got a ton of respect in the room,” Sandelin said. “Joe is such a good teammate and person. He’s kind of a soft spoken guy. He doesn’t say a ton, but I think when he does, guys listen. I think that’s probably what makes him a good leader. He’s going to get on the rink and work every day. He’s going to say what he needs to say. And his teammates, like I said earlier, his teammates have a ton of respect for him. And I think that’s really important when you’re a leader.”
Pierce, a Northland-born guy, talked recently about the honor of captaining this team.
“It means everything to me,” Pierce said. “It’s an honor that my teammates think of me in that way, and the coaching staff and the whole program thinks of me that way. It’s something that I’m gonna take a lot of pride in, and do everything I can to be a great leader for this team.”
7. Around the NCHC, roster turnover is a huge story. Nowhere more than Miami, where second-year coach Anthony Noreen welcomes 21 new players to the roster this season, the most of any team in the country. As I wrote in my NCHC preview, the days of etching Miami in ninth in everyone’s preseason predictions will not last much longer. Noreen has some very talented young players, and while it will take some time, this feels like the kind of group that can get the RedHawks moving in the right direction for the first time in many years. Miami starts at home this weekend against Ferris State, which has a new coach in Brett Riley after the retirement of legendary head man Bob Daniels.
Double-digit newcomers are the order of things. It’s the world we live in now, and it probably isn’t going away anytime soon.
But for many teams, there is no preseason exhibition to get everyone’s feet wet. It’s straight into the fire. Youthful Arizona State, after surprising nearly the entire college hockey world last season, has a marquee series right out of the gates against Penn State this weekend in Tempe. We’ll see the start to ASU phenom Cullen Potter’s sophomore campaign, locking horns with the top recruit in the sport, Penn State freshman Gavin McKenna. The WHL star is the presumptive No. 1 pick in next year’s NHL Draft, and he reportedly got a cool $700,000 from Penn State to make the jump to college hockey.
While many eyes will fixate on that series, there are others to talk about this weekend.
8. After an up-and-down season that ended short of the NCAA Tournament, Colorado College has a younger roster in front of senior goalie Kaidan Mbereko as the Tigers open at home against UConn. The Huskies were a whisker away from the Frozen Four in their first NCAA Tournament appearance last March, and appear to have a Hockey East contender again.
We’ll quickly learn about Kris Mayotte’s remade roster. Can they score enough goals to give Mbereko a chance to have a great year before he graduates?
St. Cloud State gets an exhibition against Augustana Friday before opening the season at home against St. Thomas Saturday night in St. Cloud. The Huskies have new goalies, but return some experience up front and could be a surprise team in the NCHC if that goaltending comes together.
The rest of the NCHC plays in exhibitions this weekend. Omaha hosts Air Force, North Dakota is home to take on Manitoba, Western Michigan draws the U.S. Under 18 Team, and Denver will host UNLV for a single game.
9. The UMD women started their season with a ten-day, four-game trip to face AHA opponents out east. After struggling to beat Mercyhurst 4-3 in overtime Sept. 19 in their season opener, the Bulldogs ripped off three straight regulation wins, outscoring the Lakers 5-3 on Sept. 20 before sweeping Syracuse with matching 4-0 wins the following week.
Sophomore Caitlin Kraemer and senior Thea Johansson, a Mercyhurst transfer, each have four goals in four games. Sophomore Josie St. Martin, a transfer from Ohio State, has four points in four games. Eve Gascon shook off a tough opener and now has a .933 save percentage after playing in all four games.
UMD is off this weekend before opening WCHA play at defending national champion Wisconsin next weekend. The Bulldogs finally play at home Oct. 17-18 against Minnesota State, and we’ll have the Saturday game on the radio.
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More to come pregame on this Alaska trip and the Bulldogs’ games against the Nanooks that kick off the season this weekend. 9:30pm pregames Friday and Saturday on Northland NewsRadio, as UMD hockey will now be available throughout the Iron Range and northern Minnesota on 650AM KDAH out of Hibbing. This weekend is the only time this season we plan on not traveling to cover the team in person, but we’ll broadcast from the studio off the video feed. I’ll be back a few hours before faceoff with lines and more thoughts.
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