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Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

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5mn_Major said:
:) Not what you'd hope to be a positive.

First time I cared enough to watch. Was kinda a snooze of a game. Still a major work in progress.
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Yeah... it was extremely boring and tough to watch. The all freshman line has been good this year but outside of that and some Pitlick moments it’s tough to watch.

The one thing I will say is they need to keep Reedy as fourth line center, I get that he was expected to be much better and all that but for now he at the very least is an improvement over what we had there. He has some hands and playmaking ability unlike Romanko and I’m guessing can shoot better than 3% on his career. Bob needs to make it happen. He can’t control who Lucia recruited but he can control who plays each night.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

5mn_Major said:
:) Not what you'd hope to be a positive.

First time I cared enough to watch. Was kinda a snooze of a game. Still a major work in progress.
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Since this was your first time watching you may want to be aware of the fact that last night's effort was the best we've seen of this team, in what seems like forever. We'll see if they can repeat or maybe even surpass that effort this evening. Hopefully we'll see a continuation of "a major work in progress" as you put it.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Wow! All I can say is how many power plays can you give your opponents and still get the win?
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Robson was amazing and if Phillips doesn’t trip him to gift the Wolves a goal it might’ve been only 2 goals he gave up.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

trixR4kids said:
Robson was amazing and if Phillips doesn’t trip him to gift the Wolves a goal it might’ve been only 2 goals he gave up.
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And one of those was fluky, coming as the result of neither of the D helping him to retrieve the puck in back of the goal.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Robson was a beast tonight. Just unreal.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Robson is insane. 1-0-1 on the road with this team against a rival. Yep, satisfied. The win was uglier than a Sconni hooker, but I'll take it. (There's a tee ball waiting to be hit)
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

It's not often when you take five more penalties than your opponent while allowing them 53 shots on net....and still manage to win the game. Certainly not a formula for long term success.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

As absurd as it may seem, this might be the blueprint for success for this team - take risks offensively and rely on Robson to stand on his head and bail the team out and keep them in games. Slowly plug along on cleaning up play on the defensive side and eliminating turnovers/opportunities in transition. Maybe by the end of the year they will be more complete and in a position to make a run.

It's impossible to overstate how important Robson has been in keeping this team's head above water. If you replace him with a "good not great" tender over the past 4 games, that is 6 less points in conference and possibly even more devastating a PWR record of 0-4 vs. 1-0-3. That could be huge if this team manages to come out of the break and routinely eek out wins.

Gophers definitely looked better this weekend than last weekend, though MI isn't nearly as polished a team right now as OSU is.
Also good to see Sheehy with a huge goal for the 2nd weekend in a row. We need that consistently out of him.
And Novak probably had his best weekend of the season. The bar has been set pretty low, but he didn't look terrible last night and actually was making some things happen tonight while not standing out as standing around on the other side of the puck. So crossing my fingers he continues to slide in a positive direction.

EDIT:
But yeah, the penalties tonight are inexcusable. That has to be cleaned up. Disappointing considering they did a good job of it last night only to revert back tonight.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Hockeybuckeye said:
Wow! All I can say is how many power plays can you give your opponents and still get the win?
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Six. ;) Between their undisciplined play and the Gopher defense struggling most of the game to clear the zone, Gophers certainly gave Michigan all the ammunition needed to win the game. Not sure if it's a record, but Michigan attempted 98 shots tonight. Credit Robson, who stood tall in net and stopped 50 of them for a season high.

If there was a highlight for the Gopher D, they laid out and blocked 24 shots to Michigan's 11 and the PK unit was good enough to leave Michigan with a goose egg on their PP.

Great effort by Brent Gates Jr. to literally fight his way in front and get his stick down to tip in the GWG. The tie and win this weekend puts the Gophers at 4-3-3 in their last 10 and only 4 pts. back of first in the Big Ten. Let's keep it positive! :)
 
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Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

SteveO said:
Six. ;) Between their undisciplined play and the Gopher defense struggling most of the game to clear the zone, Gophers certainly gave Michigan all the ammunition needed to win the game. Not sure if it's a record, but Michigan attempted 98 shots tonight. Credit Robson, who stood tall in net and stopped 50 of them for a season high.

If there was a highlight for the Gopher D, they laid out and blocked 24 shots to Michigan's 11 and the PK unit was good enough to leave Michigan with a goose egg on their PP.

Great effort by Brent Gates Jr. to literally fight his way in front and get his stick down to tip in the GWG. The tie and win this weekend puts the Gophers at 4-3-3 in their last 10 and only 4 pts. back of first in the Big Ten. Let's keep it positive! :)
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Well said, SteveO, spot on. However regarding blocked shot numbers, the Gophers SHOULD have easily won that stat, given the wide disparity of attempted shots and zone time. We are still having a terrible time of breaking out cleanly, and allowing our opponent WAY too much unnecessary zone time.

But overall, considering the Gopher's very poor play in most of their recent games, I'm seeing progress, and that's encouraging.
 
Stauber1 said:
As absurd as it may seem, this might be the blueprint for success for this team - take risks offensively and rely on Robson to stand on his head and bail the team out and keep them in games.
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It really isn’t a recipe for success but I’m glad it worked last night.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

SteveO said:
The tie and win this weekend puts the Gophers at 4-3-3 in their last 10 and only 4 pts. back of first in the Big Ten. Let's keep it positive! :)
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Sure doesn't feel like that has been their record, with the tiebreaker rules and the way they got outplayed for a good portion of those games. I am glad they finally pulled out the win before the break. Between their play and the Wild's recent downward spiral, my hockey world was feeling pretty bleak. (Not to mention, I am having trouble adjusting to my new skates, so feel like my own play has regressed considerably.)
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Koho said:
Sure doesn't feel like that has been their record, with the tiebreaker rules and the way they got outplayed for a good portion of those games. I am glad they finally pulled out the win before the break. Between their play and the Wild's recent downward spiral, my hockey world was feeling pretty bleak. (Not to mention, I am having trouble adjusting to my new skates, so feel like my own play has regressed considerably.)
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I went with Super Tacks for a few years, but for the most part I've always been a Bauer Supreme guy. Supreme's are a good power skate and it seemed like I could break in the boot quicker than Tacks. Vapors are a good speed and agility skate, but I never liked the boot fit. What kind of skates did you get?
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

trixR4kids said:
It really isn’t a recipe for success but I’m glad it worked last night.
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Well, depends on expectations and definitions.
I agree it's not a way to put together a long win streak, but I'm not sure I see any recipe for that with this team currently.

Yes MI put up over 50 shots, but the Gophers managed 28 while spotting MI a 6-1 advantage in PP attempts.
Seems to me this team needs to be taking some risks and putting more of an emphasis on creating offense over preventing it if they want to scrape together some wins wherever they can.
Do that while slowly plugging away on improvement in the defensive end and preventing giveaways, and maybe things will start evening out by the end of the year. Until then roll your dice on Robson keeping the Gophers in games where they are outchanced.

I like Robson as a 3-2 or even a 2-1 favorite over most the netminders out there.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Junior Gates nailed it: "We need more blue collar attitude to be successful". Sounds a lot like "Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn't work hard". His GWG was huge for this team going into the break.
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Stauber1 said:
As absurd as it may seem, this might be the blueprint for success for this team - take risks offensively and rely on Robson to stand on his head and bail the team out and keep them in games. Slowly plug along on cleaning up play on the defensive side and eliminating turnovers/opportunities in transition. Maybe by the end of the year they will be more complete and in a position to make a run.
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I don't think it's absurd. You have to game plan for your team's strengths or, in the Gophers' case, weaknesses.

I truly believe that is what Lucia did last year and was getting ripped for it. I think he realized the didn't have much for D that could transition the puck well and they were going to be offensively challenged. So they took chances when they were there and relied heavily on Robson. Sounds familiar doesn't it?
 
Re: Minnesota Golden Gopher Season 2018-19: The Motzko Era Begins!

Hockeybuckeye said:
Wow! All I can say is how many power plays can you give your opponents and still get the win?
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In fairness, some of those calls were weak IMO.

I am not a fan of refs evening up calls just because one team has taken the bulk of penalties in a game. Those refs definitely didn't fall into that category on Saturday, but I just really kept feeling like they were going to throw one the Gophers way sooner or later and it never happened.
 
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