Re: Maine thread (cont) - Hobey Abbott goes Dancing
Maine had horrible recruiting classes in '05 and '06 when they were going through the Grant/Guy/Danny transition. As those classes got older thats when Maine was awful. Maine has been an NCAA team or thereabouts the last couple of years but haven't made it because of goaltending, injuries, and a bit of bad luck. This year's team was pretty **** good. Beyond that I really think that this is a real hardworking lot with great attitudes. People can say well they only made it to the first round of the NCAA tourney, but that doesn't really tell the whole story. UMD is a good team with a lot of experience and confidence. It showed last night to. There's probably 10 teams in the tourney that if we would have drawn we would have beaten but that didn't happen. I can honestly say that I feel significantly better about the team going forward now than I did after the 2007 frozen four.
Agree with much of this especially the recruiting issues, which I have also chronicled. I applaud posters on this board for their willingness to give credit where it is due compared to the idiocy going on at the BDN site. Had the good fortune to be on hand for many of the critical games this year, the sweep of BC and BU, at Lowell, the Garden, and last night. Suffice it to say BC better play their best game tonight as that UMD team is scary.
We all knew that goaltending was a huge ? going into this year. Sullivan was 10x's better than he was last year and the team played with confidence in front of him as a result. With Morris coming in (please no 3 goalies again) we should have a very good tandem.
Scoring depth was also going to be an issue, or depth in general and that showed last night. Having said that I like our team much better going into next year than I thought I would at the start of the year. Maine does have one flight risk in Mangene. Was sitting near some scouts last night and told them to leave 57 alone, his response was "better tell him to slow down". If Mangene comes back he may be a legitimate Hobey favorite.
Diamond, Beattie, Shemansky, Anthoine, Pryor and O'Connor all made nice strides in their development and Parker and Higgins will be good players. Lomberg and Shore could be the two most significant freshmen we land in quite some time. Need Shore to show up in Orono as Major Junior remains an options, and I guess it will depend upon who drafts him. Obviously we will need Hutton to be a stud on D as there is big room for improvement in terms of puck moving d-men.
I do feel much better about the future than I did at the start of this year, but expectations moving forward need to be to improve upon this year. Much thanks to Flynn, Abbott, O'Neill, Hegarty and Andersson. Nice gesture by Tim last night to put them all on the ice together for the last 10 seconds. Tampa won't be the same without you, but at the start of the year I never thought there was a prayer of you being in the tourney.
Are we settling, I don't think so I think this was a first step. Important to improve upon it and realize this was not something we built up to, but really a first step.
Money is probably the stumbling block as usual.