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Minnesota Gophers 2024-25
- Thread starter ManBehindTheCurtain
- Start date
StPaulSam
Goldy Gopher's aide-de-camp
What a missed opportunity today. reminded me, unfortunately, of our 2023 OT loss in the NCAA semifinal...in that very arena...to that very team.
God bless her forever and ever amen. The anguish on her face after that fourth goal, my heart is broken for her but there was just no way for her to block it. It must take enormous mental toughness to handle being a goalie, let alone as a freshman in the WCHA.
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Still Eeyore
Well-known member
This is getting old. Since the lost 2020-21 season, when the Gophers didn't make the national tournament because the NCAA is innumerate, they've played eleven games in the WCHA Final Face-Off and the NCAA tournament. Here are the results, in chronological order:
2022 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 5, UMD 1
2022 WCHA Final: Ohio State 3, Minnesota 2 (OT)
2022 NCAA Quarterfinal: UMD 2, Minnesota 1
2023 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 4, Wisconsin 2
2023 WCHA Final: Minnesota 3, Ohio State 1
2023 NCAA Semifinal: Wisconsin 3, Minnesota 2 (OT)
2024 WCHA Semifinal: Wisconsin 4, Minnesota 3 (OT)
2024 NCAA Quarterfinal: Clarkson 3, Minnesota 2 (4OT)
2025 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 6, Ohio State 2
2025 WCHA Final: Wisconsin 4, Minnesota 3
Minnesota is 5-6 in those eleven games. Every win has been by at least two goals. Every loss has been by one goal, four of them in overtime. In total over those games, Minnesota has outscored its opponents 32-25.
There's no question that Minnesota hasn't had particularly good regular season teams relative to their previous performances. But, in post-season play, they have been outstanding. They have significantly outplayed, in aggregate, eleven opponents, none of whom were ranked worse than #7 in the country. And they have a losing record to show for it.
There is a lot of bitching by a lot of Gopher fans about how their team hasn't been competitive with the best recently. This is primarily evidence that a lot of Gopher fans are clueless. This has been a great team. They're just snakebit.
2022 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 5, UMD 1
2022 WCHA Final: Ohio State 3, Minnesota 2 (OT)
2022 NCAA Quarterfinal: UMD 2, Minnesota 1
2023 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 4, Wisconsin 2
2023 WCHA Final: Minnesota 3, Ohio State 1
2023 NCAA Semifinal: Wisconsin 3, Minnesota 2 (OT)
2024 WCHA Semifinal: Wisconsin 4, Minnesota 3 (OT)
2024 NCAA Quarterfinal: Clarkson 3, Minnesota 2 (4OT)
2025 WCHA Semifinal: Minnesota 6, Ohio State 2
2025 WCHA Final: Wisconsin 4, Minnesota 3
Minnesota is 5-6 in those eleven games. Every win has been by at least two goals. Every loss has been by one goal, four of them in overtime. In total over those games, Minnesota has outscored its opponents 32-25.
There's no question that Minnesota hasn't had particularly good regular season teams relative to their previous performances. But, in post-season play, they have been outstanding. They have significantly outplayed, in aggregate, eleven opponents, none of whom were ranked worse than #7 in the country. And they have a losing record to show for it.
There is a lot of bitching by a lot of Gopher fans about how their team hasn't been competitive with the best recently. This is primarily evidence that a lot of Gopher fans are clueless. This has been a great team. They're just snakebit.
I wouldn't call the first Wisconsin goal yesterday a snakebite. It was a continuation of poor judgement and sloppy play that should be cleaned up after watching game films. After that first goal I thought, 'here we go again'. I give credit to the Gopher team for making a game of it, but was not surprised by the ending.
Now there are two more games where we will see if the coaching staff and the team can tighten things up. They should know that they have the potential to beat anyone. They can't go out at this point in the season and act like they are playing Lindenwood.
Still Eeyore
Well-known member
I never said that any particular goal was being snakebit. I never even implied it. But there were a bunch of chances where the Badgers got lucky that Minnesota didn't score.
Given the number of close chances the Gophers had over the entire sixty minutes, rather than focusing only on one specific 15 second stretch, I absolutely stand by my statement that they are unlucky to have lost every single one goal game that they have played in the last three weeks of each of the last four years. You have provided exactly the sort of commentary on the Gophers that I was trying to mock to begin with. You can't focus on the entirety of their play, judging them solely by their worst moment of the game. That's stupid.
Gophers went 1-7-1 against Ohio State and Wisconsin after the new year in 20-21. An invitation to leave the Gophers out of the tourney that the innumerate NCAA decided to accept. Understandably as far as I'm concerned.
The Gophers streak about "how their team hasn't been competitive with the best recently" is not 4 years old, it is 9 years old. It's understandable to judge the team by their worst moment of the game when it is the decisive moment of the game during a streak that is 9 years old.
You left out the 3-0 win over UMD in the NCAA quarters in 2023 to finish up their best 3 game run of the last 9 years. Then they stunk up the joint in the 2nd and 3rd periods the next game against Wisconsin.
ARM
Fan of chipmunk-like mascots.
Twenty years ago, our biggest rival was still UMD. UM has fared better than the 'Dogs since then. Unless I'm forgetting something, after hanging all three banners in a surprising 2010, I don't think UMD has taken any of the three crowns since. Okay, so that's a positive. But in all honesty, UMD came closer to winning the big prize in 2022 than the Gophers have in any season since 2016.
Why has UM underperformed when compared to any comparable stretch in its history? Maybe they had so much success in a five year period that this is just the universe evening things out. Personally, I remember a lot of blown leads resulting in those one-goal losses, that supposedly don't end the pursuit of a championship as surely as a thumping does. I could spit out some stats that you would refute, so I'll just save everyone the trouble. I'm clueless, I'm stupid, and I'm definitely spoiled. Defensively, they haven't been as good as when they had a benchmark program. Maybe it's because they don't possess the puck as often as they once did; I'm not smart enough to do know. I thought only in 2019 and 2023 did they have a realistic chance at a title. Wisconsin outplayed them in total in 2019, and when it mattered most in 2023. I won't blame any droughts on snakes.
Why has UM underperformed when compared to any comparable stretch in its history? Maybe they had so much success in a five year period that this is just the universe evening things out. Personally, I remember a lot of blown leads resulting in those one-goal losses, that supposedly don't end the pursuit of a championship as surely as a thumping does. I could spit out some stats that you would refute, so I'll just save everyone the trouble. I'm clueless, I'm stupid, and I'm definitely spoiled. Defensively, they haven't been as good as when they had a benchmark program. Maybe it's because they don't possess the puck as often as they once did; I'm not smart enough to do know. I thought only in 2019 and 2023 did they have a realistic chance at a title. Wisconsin outplayed them in total in 2019, and when it mattered most in 2023. I won't blame any droughts on snakes.
eastcoastgopher
Member
Lose a couple close games and it's unlucky. Lose every close game and there's probably something wrong fundamentally with a couple of important people. The reverse is also true. Win every close game and you just have the people who know what to do when it counts, a la the Kansas City Chiefs. I feel the same watching Team USA play Canada, where there are clearly some members of the younger American core who grip their sticks a little tight when the games are close at the end. It just really appears right now that every time Wisconsin has played Minnesota since they started winning titles again Mark Johnson has looked at the other bench at some point during the game and started licking his lips. What needs to change and who is to blame is definitely up for debate, and I'm not sure where I stand on this. But to say that there's nothing that needs to change is absurd to me. Since the last title only in 2019 have they felt like the best team in the country at the start of the tournament (and they weren't the top seed but the championship did feel like a pick-em). Not even in 2023, when they definitely felt better than the team they lost to.
Still Eeyore
Well-known member
If you want to argue that there weren't enough teams that earned a spot to fill out the bracket, I'd be sympathetic. They probably shouldn't have played that season at all, and fewer chances to spread disease would have been fine. But that's not what the NCAA did. They chose UMD instead of Minnesota. The Bulldogs had a slightly better record and finished slightly ahead of te Gophers in the WCHA standings, so that's who they took.
The innumeracy comes in because they had no idea what those records meant. Due to Big Ten covid protocols, WCHA teams didn't play anything resembling a balanced schedule. The slate of teams that UMD played was much weaker than Minnesota's schedule. On top of which, the Gophers won the only two head-to-head matchups. They provided a much stronger invitation for the NCAA to leave them out of the tournament, and the very innumerate NCAA declined to accept.
No. Absolutely, 100% not. Anyone who judges a game by a single moment has no idea what they are doing. When you do that, no team has ever deserved to win any games, because no one has ever played an entire game of hockey, even when they shut out their opponent, without making at least one bad play.
Your claim that they have been disappointing for nine years marks you out as exactly the sort of fan I have no use for. It means that the only way you are not disappointed is if they win the national title. Anything less, and you declare them to be a failure. That's reprehensible.
I sort of left it out. I only listed ten games, but it is included in the overall 5-6 record. So, over those eleven games, they outscored their opponents 34-25. That still means that they have significantly outperformed their overall opponents over that stretch.
Still Eeyore
Well-known member
There's a funny thing about leads. In order for it to be possible to blow one, you had to build it first. For some reason, we have collectively decided that it's better to lose by one goal if you never had a lead than it is if you did. I have never heard a good argument for why that is.
It largely stems from our need to turn sports into a morality play. People don't like the idea that the reason why one team wins and the other loses is usually because the first team is bigger, faster, and more skilled than the second. Given the how much emotion we invest into rooting, we want to believe that winning is the product of virtues rather than talent. Sometimes, the gap in raw ability is too big to ignore, but when things are closely matched, we ascribe victory to one team wanting it more, or the losing team choking.
In the case of blown leads, the arguments are usually that the team that comes from behind never gave up, which is virtuous. The team that loses despite having a lead got complacent, or some other euphemism for not trying their best once they got the lead. Most often, though, it's just the order of events without impinging on anyone's effort level.
It is definitely the case that rooting for the team that comes from behind is more exciting than is rooting for a team that barely holds on. But reading anything beyond that about a the quality of a team's performance is generally a mistake. But that's not a satisfying narrative, so we ignore it.
No, they haven't been. But that's a strawman.
Another strawman. At least try refuting arguments I made, rather than ones that I explicitly did not. After all, my original comment included, "There's no question that Minnesota hasn't had particularly good regular season teams relative to their previous performances. "
Wisconsin did not outplay Minnesota "when it mattered most" in 2023. This, again, is the path dependency fallacy. In terms of winning or losing, every one of the 60 or more minutes of a game is as important as every other minute. The only reason Wisconsin had to play better at the end is that they failed to play well enough earlier on.
Minnesota had several razor close chances late in that game and overtime. If one of them had gone in, you'd be writing a very different just-so story, despite the fact that almost nothing in terms of actual performance would have been different.
And now I'm going to quote some of the research you mock. Winning close games is very rarely a repeatable skill. A team's record in one score games (one run in baseball; one goal in hockey; a touchdown or less in football) is not predictive of whether they will continue to win one score games. If you want to know which teams are likely to be better in the next season than they were this season, one of the key metrics is their record in one score games. If they had a terrible record in those games this year, they are likely to have a better record, both in close games and overall, next year. A team that had an outstanding record in close games is probably going to be worse. There are a few things (a baseball team with an elite bullpen; a basketball team with elite free throw shooters; being coached by Mike Tomlin) that can give a team a small edge in close games, but those outcomes are pretty close to random.
In close games, luck beats skill
www.sfgate.com
Is the "Close Game - Clutch Play" Story Backwards?
by Jim Glass Do Teams that Lose Clutch Games The Win More in the Playoffs -- and that Win Clutch Games, Lose More? "Great teams win close g...
Why We Feel How We Feel About Clutch
Apologies for walking on trodden ground. None of what’s below is new. Many of you already know everything in here, but I feel like this is a good opportunity to review why our position is our position.
Eleven games is too small a sample size to really generate robust results. But the evidence that we have suggests that the Gophers really have been unfortunate to have produced a losing record over that stretch.
ARM
Fan of chipmunk-like mascots.
You decide to show up here, and now I'm restrained to only talking about topics that you raise? I'm talking about the Gophers, not about you.
Windchill22
Member
Anybody else feel like Murphy is sticking around for another year in the NCAA based on her interview during the selection show? Not sure the exact phrasing - but she said something like 'hope it's not the last' - referening to NCAA championship tournaments she'll be playing in.
Funny stuff, you put in a hard day's night!
FiveHoleFrenzy
Well-known member
Yes, for this poster... This is the way.
And the first post back in awhile for this poster is classic rationalization. I'm kind of partial to posting that they have a 5-6 record in playoff hockey and then saying they have been "outstanding"? WTH...Who the heck cares how much they won or lost by? They still have an under 500 record in the games that were posted unless, of course, you go with the excuse that the tunnelers have just had "unfortunate" things happen to them. And btw, if the "sample size" is too small why did this poster post the record?
It really is funny stuff as KTDC said...
StPaulSam
Goldy Gopher's aide-de-camp
We're fans of teams in Minnesota. The pessimism and masochism will continue until morale improves.
Exactly!
Timothy A
Let's go RED!
This thread reads more like the BC thread than Minnesota thread lol
FiveHoleFrenzy
Well-known member
Sort of...But the difference is one of the named teams plays in the WCHA and other...Well it is HockeyLeast for a reason. The tunnelers have some issues but they aren't at bc level...Yet.