For the newcomers, 9 Thoughts is a weekly column where we look in-depth at the UMD men and women, along with the NCHC and college hockey. The format is blatantly stolen from SportsNet’s Elliotte Friedman, who has a 32 Thoughts column and podcast because there are 32 teams in the NHL. There are nine teams in the NCHC, so 9 Thoughts was born.
The men are safely home from Alaska, and have spent the last couple days at practice shaking off the inevitable jet lag. The women were off last week after sweeping a four-game road trip out east, and now they will try to take down the defending national champions to open the WCHA season.
Amsoil Arena will host college hockey fans this weekend for the first time. Scott Sandelin took a few minutes at his weekly media conference Wednesday to try to sell some tickets.
“It’s our parents’ weekend. We do it early in the year. That’s cool. I think it’s the only UMD sporting event in town this weekend (he’s correct). So hopefully we get a good crowd and get people behind it, because that’s when this building is fun. And I can tell you, there’s some fun players to watch in this team. So if you want to see them live, come to the game.”
9 THOUGHTS
1. Armed with a 4-0 start, the UMD women face the champs this weekend in Madison. The Bulldogs lost all five games against Wisconsin last season, including a 3-1 loss in the semifinals of the WCHA Final Faceoff at Amsoil Arena. But the three games in Duluth were all very competitive, and second-year coach Laura Schuler is obviously hopeful that the Bulldogs can carry that into this season and into a building where they’ve tasted some success (UMD’s last three wins over Wisconsin have all come in Madison).
But let’s not make any mistakes here. The Badgers are quite good. Mark Johnson has simply reloaded after Patty Kazmaier winner Casey O’Brien took her talents to the PWHL. Heck, his team is so deep and talented that Laila Edwards — a Patty Kaz finalist as a forward last season — is playing defense (at least part-time) this season.
(Edwards is expected to be a candidate for the U.S. Olympic Team as a defender, not a forward, so she’s gaining valuable experience in college with the Games looming in February.)
Must be nice.
2. Schuler has plenty of respect for Wisconsin, and she’s clear about how she thinks her team has to play against the Badgers to have success.
“They’re super talented,” she said. “They have a ton of depth. So our angling and steering is going to be really important. We’ve got to make sure we’re taking the body in all aspects of our game. And we have to play a real resilient game. I mean, as soon as pucks turn over, we’ve got to get on top of them and smother them and make them feel pressured.”
Schuler lauded her younger team for the way they’ve gone about their business in the early going.
“First off, they’re students of the game. They are so attentive. We do have a lot of new, like including transfer students and first year student athletes, but they are all students of the game. They’re super attentive. They want to learn. They’re in for doing video and I will say that our returners have done a really good job in scooping them up and bringing them along and helping.”
UMD’s older players have been in this battle before, and they know what to expect this weekend in Wisconsin’s capital city.
“I would say it’s a physical game,” senior forward Danielle Burgen said of the matchup with UW. “Very fast paced. So just making sure that we’re staying consistent, sticking to our game plan, and focusing in on our habits. Following what the coaches tell us because they know what they’re doing. And as long as we follow that, we’re in a good spot.”
3. It helps that UMD has elite talent at the top of the roster. Canadian standouts Eve Gascon and Caitlin Kraemer have been off at an Olympic camp, but both are expected to play this weekend against the Badgers.
Kraemer started her sophomore season with four goals in four games. She’s already established herself as a top player in this league, and the best is yet to come. I asked Schuler, Burgen, junior forward Grace Sadura, and assistant coach Ashleigh Brykaliuk this week what they think Kraemer’s best asset is: her skating, her strength, or her smarts.
“All of those play into who she is as a player as a whole,” Brykaliuk said. “But her edges, her strength on her skates is remarkable. I remember her first couple of weeks last year, coming in as a freshman in preseason practices. We had a lot of fifth year players last year. So they’re 21, 22, 23 years old and five, six years older than her, some of them. And I just remember her stiff arming, protecting the puck, just throwing these older players around, on her skates going full speed. And I was like, wow, to see it, that was my first time seeing her live in person. And I was like ‘Yeah, this is, this is going to be special.’ Especially with our league. It’s so physical, so strong, so tough. Seeing her stiff arming fifth years in mini games and practice, I thought ‘Okay, this kid’s gonna transition just fine into our league.’ And she did.
“I would obviously say all those play into it, but she’s a beast on the ice and it’s fun to watch.”
“I feel like she’s, if you can believe it or not, I feel like she’s gotten even faster,” Schuler said. “Just the work that she’s done this summer in terms of her conditioning and her on and off ice training. When she first came back this year, I didn’t think you could get faster. She looks even faster. And when you just look at her from her physique standpoint, she looks even stronger. She’s, just like every single player on our team, super dedicated to their fitness. And she, without a doubt, went home this summer and went to work.”
Sadura went off the board with her answer, but it was such a good answer that we’ll allow it.
“If I can add something,” Sadura said. And who’s going to stop her? “Strength, smarts, speed, that all is obviously really important to being a hockey player. But the teammate that she is, I would say, goes unmentioned sometimes. She’s obviously a phenomenal hockey player, and she’s getting the recognition that she deserves. But I think that what goes unnoticed is what’s in the locker room and the connections that she has on this team. She’s just an overall great teammate. you can always rely on her to have your back. So I would say that’s probably her biggest asset.”
4. The UMD men started their season with a road sweep for the first time in over 60 years. Hockey SID Kelly Grgas-Wheeler and I tag-teamed on some research over the weekend, and we couldn’t find an instance since 1962 where UMD opened its season with a road series and won both games.
(There was at least once instance where UMD won two games away from home to start a season. In Scott Sandelin’s second season, 2001-2002, the Bulldogs played in the Maverick Stampede, beating Omaha and then Michigan.)
The Bulldogs won 5-1 and 4-1, and while the scorelines were similar, the games were not. Friday was a (mostly) crisply-played game that UMD controlled from start to finish. Saturday was the farthest thing from crisply-played, a game that lasted nearly three hours without overtime. There were 52 faceoffs in Friday’s game, the number got over 70 on Saturday. Many of those stoppages were longer than normal, as well, as we had center after center thrown out of the faceoff circle.
Sandelin offered the idea that the choppiness of Saturday affected the way his team played, but he wasn’t thrilled about that.
“You gotta find ways to fight through that, too,” he said. “I thought their team, especially in the second half of both games, played hard.”
Sandelin also conceded he “liked our Friday game a lot more than Saturday.”
5. Just like last season, the top line did top line things in the season opener. Max Plante scored twice, Jayson Shaugabay had two assists, and Zam Plante had a goal and an assist.
But Sandelin was most pleased with the contributions UMD got from other lines. The all-freshman line of Daniel Shlaine, Hunter Anderson, and Ryan Zaremba scored on their first shift. Newcomer Scout Truman had two goals on Saturday.
“I liked the fact that our freshmen got off to a good start,” Sandelin said. “It’s nice to see Scout score a couple goals. It was nice to see some different scoring on Saturday. Bentzy (Harper Bentz) gets a big goal. There were a lot of five on five goals. The thing that we (probably) didn’t like was we didn’t score a power play goal.”
(Bentz, by the way, is out around a month with an injury sustained in the third period Saturday.)
(To be fair, Sandelin did think the power play improved as the weekend wore on, and given the results they produced last year at over 20 percent with a lot of inconsistency personnel-wise, it doesn’t seem like a major concern at the moment.)
“We had a fast start both games,” said sophomore defenseman Ty Hanson. “I think that was pretty crucial in what we wanted to do up there. And just kind of give them no time to kind of get back into it. So we got off to a quick start both games, and I think that was key.”
6. Zaremba had two assists in his UMD debut, and that freshman line merits watching. Shlaine and Anderson played a lot of minutes together last season with Lincoln in the USHL. Sandelin has always talked about being a two-thirds guy when it comes to line construction, meaning he feels that if he has two players clicking on a line, that line will be good. And Sandelin also doesn’t like to re-invent the wheel. When Dominic Toninato and Alex Iafallo arrived on campus after playing together with Fargo of the USHL, he kept them together. They stayed that way for basically all four of their years at UMD.
Zaremba talked about the importance of not being a third wheel on that line.
“They touch the puck,” he said. “They do good things. Instead of just sitting, like if I were to come in and just kind of hang out in the high ice and hope they find me, that’d probably be how I’d be the third wheel. So I think it’s just keep playing my game. Don’t try and back off and be like, ‘You two go.’
“I think I compliment them well. They compliment me well.”
Last week, Sandelin offered that Zaremba had been a bit of a surprise through the September practices. He said staff had discussed whether Zaremba needed another year of junior hockey, but decided to bring him in.
“This is September,” he said, “and when the rubber hits the road and things get real and things get really physical and hard, we’ll find out. But he’s impressed us. I think every day he’s been pretty consistent with his effort. He can get around the rink. He’s got really good skills. He’s an offensive player, but what he’s learning is the play away from the puck, and certainly you have to play on the defensive side of the puck when you don’t have it.”
Zaremba said his confidence built through that strong September.
“In the back of my mind, you never know,” he said. “Obviously my summer training went well, but I didn’t skate with any D1 players, so I was not too sure what it’d be like. But I think in September I really thought my speed was up there, and it really gave me a lot of confidence. I didn’t feel like I was super far behind. I felt like I fit right in well.
“Going into the games, I wasn’t nervous at all. I actually had quite a bit confidence knowing that I could keep up with my teammates, and I think it helped a lot.”
7. The Bulldogs will face the Augustana Vikings this weekend at Amsoil Arena. It’ll be the first meetings ever between the schools, with Augustana in just its third year of Division I hockey. Sandelin said he recruited Augie head coach Garrett Raboin before he ended up at St. Cloud State, and they’ve remained friends. UMD will head to Sioux Falls next season and play two games at Midco Arena, the Vikings’ glistening $70 million-plus facility that opened up during the 2023-24 season.
Augustana won 18 games in its second season, sweeping Colorado College in Colorado Springs and Omaha in Omaha. After playing a partial CCHA schedule last season, the Vikings will play a full 26-game conference slate for the first time. All eight non-conference games are against the NCHC, with UMD on the road and Arizona State, Omaha, and CC all in Sioux Falls.
Sandelin talked about how different it is nowadays to start up a program with the presence of the transfer portal, harkening back to when he took over at UMD and tried to execute a rebuild. Back then, you were forced to do that with larger classes of freshmen. My first season covering the team was 2005-2006, when UMD had 11 freshmen. Sandelin had just graduated a large class, so the spots needed to be filled.
“It was a lot harder back then than it is now, for sure, because you can go and get one or two or three year players to help balance those classes. You look at how long it took Penn State even to get going under the old rules. You look at the newer programs now, they’re being successful a lot quicker. And a big part of that is the portal.
“We did have to go recruit some bigger classes because we were doing some turnover and trying to find the guys that were here that, after that first year, kind of fit how we wanted to play. And some did a great job. Some lacked some confidence, maybe, and gained some confidence, maybe, over the time they were here. But some of those guys that I inherited had some really good years. It’s totally different than it was back then. I could have probably built it a little bit quicker. But I think you’re seeing that now with the new programs.”
“It was it was an absolute necessity,” Raboin said of the portal. “I had a whole year worth of time not having to coach a team. We’re trying to build a rink and excite a fan base. But you start to build out your classes and initially you’re traditionally recruiting. You’re trying build out your recruiting base. Right around Christmas, your board is a third full, and there’s a bunch of blank spaces and you’re trying to identify some guys that could potentially enter the portal.”
8. Raboin has done a very nice job in a short amount of time. He took the job a year before the program launched, giving him time to recruit players and get everything set to go for the inaugural year.
The first of the recruits was Grand Rapids native Hunter Bischoff, who is Augie’s leading returning scorer after a ten-goal season. He’s one of four Rapids natives on the roster, joined by sophomores Easton Young, Joey DelGreco, and Garett Drotts. Bischoff will serve as the Augustana captain this season.
“He’s been with us the whole journey through and really embodies everything,” Raboin said. “Like a lot of captains around the country, what we see our program becoming. A real blue collar kid, completely selfless, earns everything he gets. It’s a privilege to have guys like him on our team. He really drives our group every day, and we’re looking forward to seeing what he can do this year.”
Junior goalie Josh Kotai returns after a standout season that saw him post a .936 save percentage in 31 starts.
“The net was up for grabs,” Raboin said of last season. “He kind of staked his claim on it really early in the season. Played really well. There was a stretch that there might’ve been no one better in the country. Now he’s entering his junior season. It’s the challenge to build on it. We feel like he’s had the summer he needed. Mentally he’s in a great space. He’s the guy.”
9. Everyone in the NCHC plays non-conference games that count this weekend. Defending national champion Western Michigan goes home and home with Ferris State, Thursday in Kalamazoo and Friday in Big Rapids. That’s just the start of home-and-home series this weekend. St. Cloud State and Bemidji State start in Bemidji on Friday, while North Dakota and St. Thomas begin in Grand Forks on Friday before wrapping up Sunday evening at Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul.
Arizona State hosts the Ice Breaker in Tempe, playing Notre Dame Friday, then either Alaska or Quinnipiac Saturday.
It’ll be Maverick-on-Maverick violence in Omaha with Minnesota State in town. Miami visits RPI for two games, while Denver travels to Air Force Friday before hosting Bentley Saturday. Bentley plays at Colorado College Friday in CC’s only game of the weekend.
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We’ll be at Amsoil this weekend, 6:30 pregame Friday and 5:30 on Saturday. Join us by the “I LOVE DULUTH” sign behind the DECC for a chill tailgate both nights.
Back pregame Friday with lines and anything else you need to know.
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