Re: Northeastern Huskies 2011-2012 Season Thread: Year of the Mad Dog
OMG can we stick to hockey. Our team is in trouble we don’t have the depth to loose 2 top offensive players. HE playoffs are in doubt and we could easily wind up 9th. Also, comparing UMASS-Lowell to NU academically in this day in age is ridiculous NU is a now, a TOP TEIR National University and Lowell is not. It's the number 2 campus in a good state system. However arguably it’s top students are likely as good as ours and its pot smokers and sellers are also as accomplished as ours. So why argue, the real issue I see right now is that it’s hockey players are better than ours and I keep asking myself why? After firing an alcoholic coach who should have been given his walking papers 2 years earlier they are a top team in arguably the nations toughest league with a new 1st year coach and only a handful of top prospects. Let’s talk about that.
1. When the infamous "our institution of learning is better than your institution of learning" argument comes out, it's safe to say you've conceded the hockey argument. Good for you, there's no point fighting hopeless battles.
2. In terms of the quality of players on each team, it's tough to say. My personal feeling is that Lowell has had some talent the past few years, even last year during the worst season in school history, and the coaching change was a long time coming. I loved MacDonald as a coach, but for whatever reason the results weren't there. He was never able to balance out the class sizes either, locking Lowell into a pattern of being awful when the large class were freshmen, getting better the next two years and threatening to make noise when they were seniors. Two classes in a row (05/06 and 09/10) that senior-season run failed, miserably, at the end.
Lowell knows it has to recruit outside the box to compete in Hockey East.. Since I started going to games, Lowell has had only three drafted players: Ben Walter, Chris Auger and now Scott Wilson. For a while it seemed we were recruiting slightly older players who may have been slower to develop and who other programs had written off. Now it seems we're taking guys younger, giving them their chance at D1 while other programs want them to wait a season or two before jumping in. In some cases, like Scott Wilson, Lowell was the first to get there and he (to his credit) stuck with the 'Hawks, even when bigger programs came knocking and Blaise was let go the summer before his freshman year.
When I look at what Lowell has to offer players, it starts with the Tsongas Center. Arguably 1a/1b with Agganis as the nicest arena in Hockey East. Attendance, students especially, is linked to performance, which is to be expected from a program that goes up and down and lacks the hardware or the mystique of other programs in the conference. The education is a solid, state school experience, on par with the other state schools in the region. What Lowell does have, is a lot of balance. Middle ground. They're located in pretty much the center of geographical Hockey East. The 14K students is very close to the mean HE mean of 15200. They're not tucked away in the middle of nowhere like Amherst/Maine/Vermont but they're not in the big city like BC/NU/BU. Whether or not that speaks to players for whatever reason, I don't know.
As to why that is beating out Northeastern, I'm not sure. NU has a lot going for it. Right in the city. The Beanpot. A historic rink with an unreal student section. Academically it's a great university. I would question the recruiting practices. NU has picked up a lot of talent over the years, but have they tried too hard to go head to head with some of the bigger programs? I don't know enough about their recruiting history to really answer that question. Looking at it from how Lowell has been doing things, sometimes it's more fruitful to go after the "very good's" and "has potential's" and snatch some unknowns that will play hard for four years than it is to fight over the "elites", getting a lot of scrap parts and those 1-3 guys that will leave after a year or two.
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