UncleRay
M-A-I-N-E, GooOOO, Blue!
Yes. The retirement home.
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Coaching carousel?
- Thread starter The Sicatoka
- Start date
Yes. The retirement home.
Chuck Murray
WIS & Effingwoods Hockey Almanac
This might be the most ridiculous measure of relative success I've seen floated (almost exclusively from UConn folks BTW). As if we're somehow talking about "plucky little UConn" which was suddenly thrust into battle against schools that were all multiple times larger than they were, like Merrimack (or more germane to CT, Sacred Heart). Not gonna fly, sorry, sell that story elsewhere, UConn's unrivaled success in Hoops over the span of my adult lifetime gives that game away.
Now to the year-by-year, nuts-and-bolts of where UMass and UConn stood when Luce started:
2012-2013: John Micheletto's first year at UMass, finishes 9th in HEA
2013-2014: Luce's first year at UConn, finishes 3rd in Atlantic Hockey; UMass finishes 10th in HEA
2014-2015: UConn finishes tied for 9th in their inaugural HEA season; UMass finishes 12th (last)
2015-2016: UConn finishes in 8th place in HEA; UMass finishes in 12th again (Micheletto fired)
2016-2017: UConn falls back to 9th place in HEA; Carvel's first year at UMass, finishes 12th (last)
2017-2018: UConn finishes tied for 5th in HEA; UMass finishes in 8th
2018-2019: UConn finishes in 9th in HEA; UMass finishes in 1st, makes NCAA's, loses in FF Final
2019-2020: UConn finishes in 5th in HEA; UMass finishes in 2nd (no postseason - cancelled)
2020-2021: UConn finishes in 4th in HEA; UMass finishes in 3rd, wins HEA Tourney, wins FF Final
2021-2022: UConn finishes tied for 4th in HEA, wins first postseason games EVER in HEA
UMass finishes in 2nd in HEA, wins 2nd straight HEA Tourney, makes NCAA's
So what we have, as outlined in my previous post, is a moribund UMass program that somehow managed to finish well behind UConn in the Huskies' first four HEA seasons, including Carvel's first two rebuilding seasons. After that, it's no contest, UConn has just this year won its first ever HEA Tourney games (and yes, that includes several seasons of first round sweeps), while UMass has won 2 HEA Tourney titles, qualified for the NCAA's 3 times (likely 4 if the COVID season played out), played twice for a National title and won one (while possibly being deprived of one more of each in '20).
What 20 years of Joe Mallen, Toot Cahoon and John Micheletto have to do with providing anything remotely approaching a "springboard" effect for Carvel upon his hire is utterly laughable.
Try again ...
ericredaxe
Veteran
100% This
Spin it however you want, I wasn't comparing Carvel to Cav, I was comparing the success of UMass and the success of UConn the first 8 years in HEA.
You are right, UConn should be held to the same standard as BC and BU hockey, because the UConn basketball teams competed for national championships. Makes sense.
Why did it take UMass 20 something years to be competitive after entering the league, but only took UConn 8 years to get to the championship game? Their basketball teams? And using that logic, I remember Marcus Camby leading UMass to successful runs in the NCAA tournament, why would it take them 20+ years and UConn 8? Not to mention, UMass was recruiting to, at the time, the state of the art Mullins Center vs. UConn was recruiting to Freitas Arena, which makes prep school rinks look like TD Garden.
Answer time - UConn hired the right guy, and it took UMass a few tries to find their guy.
P.S. - you can no longer use the "can't win a playoff game" line. That's yesterday's news. We use yesterday's news to wrap today's fish.
Sean Pickett
2009 NCAA Champions
UMass started their program from scratch and only played one season against mostly D3 teams before becoming a member of Hockey East.
Also, it didn't take UMass 20 something years to be competitive. Their ninth season in the league was their first overall winning season as a league member and in their tenth season they had a winning record both overall and in the league as they finished 3rd and advanced to the championship game (which they lost in triple overtime).
Sean
Harry Cleverly
New member
UNH's annual Umiliation continues to this day, even without Dick and his turtlenecks.
Harry Cleverly
New member
Unfair to Toot Cahoon.
The Minutemen were reasonably competitive under Cahoon, who was a decent coach. He resigned during the summer when the school administration would not provide the hockey program with the resources that he felt were necessary to compete in Hockey East. UMass answered by making a bad hire in Micheletto.
When UMass hired Carvel they also provided him with what Cahoon had been asking for all along.
Sol Diablo
Active member
Sean Pickett
2009 NCAA Champions
I've driven professionally for several years and it's my experience that Google maps assumes we drive 5-10 mph over the speed limit.Maybe a little, but google maps assumes we drive the speed limit!
Sean
Chuck Murray
WIS & Effingwoods Hockey Almanac
Yes, it's unfair to Cahoon. But the preceding point I was addressing was our UConn friend's implication that somehow, Carvel had enjoyed some level of a "springboard" factor in the 20 or so years of the UMass program's prior HEA history, that his new hero Luce had been deprived of in his time at Storrs. Which is silly, because even if Cahoon did enjoy some limited "success" for a relatively brief stretch in Amherst, it was already well passed by the end of his regime, and he finished out pretty much where he started, i.e. close(r) to the bottom of HEA. And of course, Micheletto only deepened that downturn even further.
Now, had Cahoon left a few years earlier, when he'd brought the program up to (overall) middle-of-the-pack status, and Carvel had come in right after that (skipping the Joe Micheletto era totally), the UConn poster might have had an argument on Carvel benefitting from a "springboard" effect, or at least a consistently higher starting position. But that's just not what happened.
Truth be told, Cahoon was a demonstrably better NCAA D-1 HC than Luce Canaan has ever been. Four winning seasons out of eight at ECAC stragglers Princeton, parleyed into the UMass HC job where the program had its first three winning seasons over his first eight years on the job. Luce has just had his first (1) winning season at UConn in his eight seasons in HEA.
UConn fans are entitled to worship the guy if they see fit. Good for them. The way I figure it, he's probably no better than the 9th or 10th best HC in HEA, looking at who finished up this past season in those positions. The only HC he's clearly better than is his former so-called protege at UNH, and possibly the guy who just started up at UVM (too early to tell). Maybe in a few more years, he'll have moved a couple of steps further up the ladder, depending on how guys like Woodcroft, Borek and Barr progress, and who takes over the BC, BU and (eventually) UNH jobs over the next 12 months.
I will say this for Luce, however. He's parlayed his (very recent/limited) success at UConn into a better deal, leveraging the very timely retirement of his mentor at BC. So he's committed to UConn long-term, as opposed to doing what a lot of folks always had expected him to try to do, which was to succeed York at BC. I absolutely do NOT believe he was told the BC job was his if he wanted it; quite to the contrary, I believe he was told he could be part of a larger competition for the job, and Luce decided he wasn't going to subject himself to such a process, and the possible (I say probable-if-not-definite) outcome that BC would go in another direction in the end. So the next-best outcome was for Luce to stay put, get more money and more time, and continue to see if he can finish what he started in Storrs. So that's what he did. And now we all get to see whether Luce can continue to build on his recent progress ... if he continues to hover in the middle of the pack like he has in recent seasons ... or (like Carvel) can turn a formerly nowhere HEA also-ran into a legitimate national D-1 power.
Gonna make for an interesting next few years to see how the HEA competitive landscape evolves.
I probably should not have said 'class' but rather as J.D. referred to as antics/tactics in managing games. I do know that off ice Jack Parker was very classy and a good representative of the program. That being said Pecknold is in the mold of Parker behind the bench and he would be a great fit at BU. I actually would like to see that happen and the BC/BU rivalry would heat up even more if it did.
Sol Diablo
Active member
I drive cross country several times a year, doing so right now. Am "beating" Google maps estimates by a significant amounts.
DrunkTrainPolka
GO TECH GOLD!
barely educated guess;
MiSU - hastings
MnSU - knott
UofM - blashill
BC - brown
BU - pandolfo
MiSU - hastings
MnSU - knott
UofM - blashill
BC - brown
BU - pandolfo
What about Mel? smiley face
Greenbayguy
Registered User
As AD Manuel said "Coach will be 'fine'." Whatever that means.
The Sicatoka
Kicizapi Cetan
mookie1995
there's a good buck in that racket.
Christ almighty…. Mookie is old enough to have already forgotten what he had for breakfast this morning and UConn is not even close to establishing itself as a decent hockey team. Shut.up. UConn can’t even sniff the sniff of umass’ jock.
carry on
carry on
