The Winter Olympics are less than a month away in Italy, where the talk remains about facility construction ahead of the hockey tournament. And the women’s event starts Feb. 5, ahead of the opening ceremony and the start of the men’s draw on the 11th, so time’s running out quickly on that.
Nations participating in the hockey tournaments have released their rosters, and UMD is adding to its impressive list of Olympians, in both men’s and women’s hockey.
Included on that list this year are three current UMD players who will get this potentially life-changing opportunity.
9 THOUGHTS
1. Adam Gajan’s addition to Team Slovakia might have felt like it came out of nowhere.
You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.
“We had heard it might be a possibility, then we didn’t really hear anything,” UMD coach Scott Sandelin said before Friday’s game against Lindenwood. “But I did get a phone call from one of their Olympic people and he asked, we had a discussion, and (it’s) pretty hard to say no to that for any player. Pretty special opportunity for him, unfortunately we’ll miss him for a time, three or four games probably. I think it gives other guys an opportunity and hopefully he goes over there and has a great experience.”
Slovakia isn’t long on professional goalies at this point, but a decision by veteran goalie Patrik Rybar to stay with his KHL team instead of accepting an invitation to the Olympics may have helped open the door for Gajan, who popped up on the radar by playing exceptional hockey for the Slovaks on two World Junior teams. In this article that we had Google translate to English, here’s what Rybar said:
“Representatives of the Slovak national team contacted me, but we decided that I would stay with the Shanghai team because we are currently fighting for the playoffs.
“Especially when there are no clear rules between the IIHF and the KHL regarding invitations to the Olympics. I’m staying here,” said the 32-year-old participant in last year’s world championships.
Gajan is joined on the Slovak roster by Iowa Wild goalie Samuel Hlavaj and Stanislav Škorvánek, who plays professionally in Czechia.
Really cool opportunity for Gajan, and a fun development for UMD fans, as the UMD men’s team wasn’t going to have an alum in the Games.
(In case you’re wondering, St. Cloud State coach Brett Larson worked with the U.S. staff at the 2022 Games. Asked him about getting that call this week, and he was still emotional about it. SCSU alums Patrick Russell and Oliver Lauridsen — both of them predated Larson with the Huskies — will be on Team Denmark next month.)
2. Sandelin said Saturday that the decision to start sophomore Ethan Dahlmeir in the series finale was, at least in part, fueled by the news of Gajan heading overseas next month. He made 29 saves in UMD’s 8-4 win. Dahlmeir also started UMD’s Jan. 2 ex
Actually, don’t be shocked if you see Dahlmeir start again before Gajan leaves for Italy.
“Adam’s won 15 games for us and he’s started every game,” Sandelin said before Saturday’s game. “But it’s important for those guys (Dahlmeir and Cole Sheffield, who played the second half of the Jan. 2 exhibition) besides him to get in the net. We’re going to miss him (Gajan) for probably four games and someone’s got to play. So it probably won’t be the last time.”
It makes sense. By the sounds of it, Dahlmeir will get the call to start Feb. 6-7 at home against North Dakota, as well as Feb. 20-21 at Miami, his old team. UMD has a (well-placed) bye Feb. 13-14.
3. The UMD women will be short-handed for most of February, as senior forward Thea Johansson and junior defender Ida Karlsson made Team Sweden for the Olympics. It’s the first Olympic nod for both, and former UMD goalie Tindra Holm makes it three new Olympians with UMD ties, bringing the total Olympians in UMD history to 45.
UMD coach Laura Schuler, a former Olympic player and coach herself (more on this in a moment), is understandably excited.
“We’ll be missing them and we’ll feel it for sure,” Schuler said. “At the same time, super excited for them. And I know our team’s revved up for them.”
Schuler expects Johansson and Karlsson to leave around Jan. 26 to join Team Sweden, with a return sometime after the women’s tournament concludes (so they’d be back no later than the week of UMD’s first-round WCHA playoff series, which is increasingly likely to be in Duluth).
Johansson wasn’t available to join us at the media conference because she had class (OK excuse, I suppose, but you shouldn’t listen to someone who basically dropped out of college like I did). But Karlsson spoke of her excitement for the chance to play on the sport’s biggest stage.
“It’s obviously an honor,” Karlsson said, “it’s always an honor to go represent your country and especially on the big stage and Olympics like this, it’s surreal. I still don’t think I really understand.”
Schuler said Karlsson has “exceeded” the coaches’ expectations of her play.
“She just continues to keep getting better and better,” Schuler said. “We use her in all critical situations. She’s such an elite performer. She’s an elite athlete, elite person. We can’t say enough good things about her. Her skating is just so elite. It’s like one stride and she’s so powerful. She’s past people.
“Her game continues to evolve. Before, I think we were using her more in defensive situations. Now we’re using her more in offensive situations. So she’s getting the whole spectrum. And with that, we’re seeing her game continue to evolve and get better and better.”
As for Johansson, Schuler said the senior transfer has impressed from the start of her brief Bulldog career.
“Her skating stride is absolutely perfect,” the head coach said. “She’s another one like Ida, one stride and she can separate herself from the opponent. And I think that has led to a lot of her goals. If you look at them, it’s usually off the rush. It’s her outside driving and using her speed to to be able to get inside. And once she’s one on one with a goalie, she can find the open net.”
4. Schuler relayed a pretty incredible story from her Olympic playing experience. It started when she was asked about getting the call to play in the Games, and she noted that it was different for her group, because they were centralized in preparation for the Games.
(Centralization was a common practice — especially for the United States and Canada in women’s hockey — before the advent of professional women’s hockey. The players trained together for months ahead of the Games, with the U.S. and Canada commonly playing a bunch of exhibition games against each other. Maddie Rooney was gone from UMD for the 2017-18 season while centralized with the U.S. program, Ashton Bell the same for UMD in 2021-22 while she was with Canada. Now that the PWHL is more established, national teams are not centralized.)
I’m just going to let Schuler tell this story of how she ended up making Team Canada for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. It’ll blow your mind.
“I tore my knee two and a half weeks prior to getting to the Olympics, and nobody believed that there was something wrong with my knee. I basically kept saying there’s something every time I turn right, my knee’s going out. I ended up getting an MRI and before I got it, they basically said, you realize that if your knee’s gone, that you’re not going to the Olympics. And I had said, well, if you know, I want to make sure I’m putting my teammates first, because right now I know I wouldn’t be able to play.
“So they were really surprised because the orthopedists that looked at my knee couldn’t get it to go out. So when I had an MRI, sure enough, my ACL was completely gone, my MCL and my medial meniscus (as well). The doctors thought because my muscles were acting as secondary stabilizers, because I trained so hard, that if they put me in a brace, I would be able to do it.
“I had two and a half weeks to rehab while my team continued on the pre-Olympic journey, playing against the US. I think we had like 11 games against them prior to the Olympics. Then I flew over with the team to Nagano. My replacement flew as well. And I had … two practices and a game to prove that I could still play.
“It was the day before the opening ceremonies that my coaching staff told me that I was a part of the team and the other person got sent home. So it was pretty intense, but the best day of my life.”
Laura Schuler, tougher than a $2 steak.
5. UMD’s coaches continue to seek a higher level of defensive play out of the team. The Bulldogs will be challenged this weekend by St. Cloud State, a team that has won four of five and is feeling pretty good about its game right now.
Larson said the only real change as of late for his group has been the results.
“I like our team,” he said. “I think back to the trip up to Duluth (a UMD sweep Nov. 7-8). We weren’t happy with our game at all on Friday, they kicked our butt. Saturday, we thought we played a great game. We played really well, played to our identity, and Max Plante scores a one timer from the boards in the OT to beat us.
“Even in some of the losses, we feel like we’ve played well. Two games at home against North Dakota, we played well, couldn’t get a win. It’s part of playing in our league, too, right? You can play well and lose. For the most part, I like this team. We’ve had a couple ups and downs. I think going out to California, winning the tournament, going out and getting a win on the road against Omaha, we’ve got a little bit of confidence. We know it’s a huge weekend for us, and we want to keep building on that.”
6. Sandelin cited the second period of Saturday’s game against Lindenwood as an example of what can happen when his team is sloppy.
“Second period Saturday was atrocious,” Sandelin said. “I don’t know if guys thought it was going to be a point night or easy, but we weren’t very good and they pushed and made it a hockey game. And I thought they actually played pretty good except for their discipline. I thought their lack of discipline cost them. Because I thought they played a pretty good game. They played to their game plan, they got pucks north, they pressured, they gave us some problems on the forecheck. And we helped that by turning a lot of pucks over.”
Sophomore forward Jayson Shaugabay said he thought the team “got a little loose” down the stretch of the first half, especially in that Saturday loss to Arizona State on Dec. 13.
But if you look at expected goals from College Hockey News, UMD has not been great defensively for a little while. In the Bulldogs’ first 15 games, they yielded 33.6 expected goals, an average of 2.24 per game. In seven games since, that number sits at 20.1, or nearly three per game.
(Remember, “expected goals” is a stat basically independent from goaltending. Every shot is assigned a value based on a number of factors, so the raw expected goals number is a reflection of generating quality scoring chances. Once you have that number, you can factor in goaltending, and UMD’s has saved around five goals above expected so far this season.)
(Yay, more parentheses! For added context, UMD has scored 80 goals this season on around 65 expected. Pays to have some finishers, no doubt.)
7. Zone exits remain a point of emphasis for Sandelin’s group.
“It’s not a one-way street game,” he explained. “As much as we want to play that way, you’ve got to defend. Defending is part of it, but also our exits. We’ve talked and had a couple drills and talked about exits this week. We’re going to get better with the comfortability of short pass support and getting pucks out. There’s lots of different scenarios that come up, whether it’s D with time, maybe it’s not an option to flip a puck out, chip it out. It’s got to get to the next zone.
“I think even watching when they (St. Cloud State) played Omaha, the number of times Omaha didn’t get the puck out, the extended offensive zone time, we’ve seen that with our team. When we are a little better on exits, and some are easier than others, but when you’re in those tight situations, and you’ve got structure, you have to know how to get pucks out, and I think we need to do a better job of that moving forward for us to spend less time there.
“You’re always going to defend, but (we want to) spend less time and not just make soft plays. (We need to) have a little more calmness to getting pucks out and being comfortable with not everything has to be tape to tape. You watch the NHL, you watch a game, lot of pucks are flipped and it’s a race in the neutral zone, but pucks get out.”
8. UMD freshman Grayden Siepmann will be missing from the blue line this weekend, a result of a hit he took in the first period Friday against Lindenwood. Sandelin didn’t give a timeline when asked, so we’ll check back on Siepmann next week.
When you consider the Olympic ice surface at the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center (this is the final season of it), it’s a loss for UMD, as Siepmann is an elite skater whose confidence within the Bulldogs’ system was growing by leaps and bounds. This is a void that will be tough for the Bulldogs to fill on the fly, but we saw the seven healthy defensemen play last Saturday against Lindenwood, and the minutes were pretty spread out, with Ty Hanson the only one of the seven to play more than 20 minutes.
Sophomore Adam Kleber will take Siepmann’s place on UMD’s second power play unit, and he (Kleber, that is, pronouns pal) said he’s feeling more like himself a week and change after returning to the team from the World Juniors. Sandelin gave Kleber a couple days off after the U.S.’ premature exit Jan. 2 before getting him back on the ice to prepare for Lindenwood last week.
“It’s the tournament,” Kleber said. “It’s emotionally taxing, especially ending it the way we did. It’s kind of hard to just move on from that right away and to practice on Monday with your team that you’re playing with. I think it was hard last week just getting back into the swing of things with our team. I really didn’t feel my best against Lindenwood. I feel more natural this week, more kind of in the swing of things. And I’m excited to kind of get a couple games in against St. Cloud.”
9. While Western Michigan, Arizona State, and Colorado College take the weekend off from league play, there are two other series in the NCHC this weekend.
Denver visits North Dakota for the latest chapter of their long rivalry. UND finds itself in the driver’s seat for yet another Penrose Cup, which normally I would say buys Dane Jackson immediate job security, but we all saw how that worked for his predecessor.
(BRUCE! 😉)
Anyway, Denver got swept at home by Western Michigan last weekend, but the Pioneers sit just five points back of North Dakota, so within striking distance, but it becomes much less realistic for them if they can’t take points this weekend in Grand Forks. Jackson has North Dakota hitting on all cylinders, and the Fighting Hawks appear a big favorite to not only win the conference, but to cruise to a No. 1 regional seed in the NCAA Tournament, something I would assume gets them placed in somewhat-nearby Sioux Falls for a regional there.
Elsewhere, Miami’s improvement has been talked about, but the RedHawks still sit in last place, two points back of St. Cloud State and Omaha. Miami hosts Omaha this weekend, a big opportunity for Miami to take a step out of a cellar it’s resided in for far too long.
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We’ll be in St. Cloud this weekend for pregames at 6:30pm Friday, 5:30pm Saturday. The UMD women host St. Cloud State this weekend, games at 6pm Friday and 3pm Saturday that you should check out. Just bring your earbuds and download the Northland News Radio app to keep up on the men while you’re here!
(Also, can we get the NCHC and WCHA on the same page and sync up these road series so both UMD teams are in St. Cloud at the same time?!?)
Anyway, back Friday with the lines and other notes from Concrete Jungle.
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