Re: NorthEastern Huskies 2011 -Improved
Some thoughts from the UNH coaching staff on the game Saturday, excerpted from the Wildcat Women's Hockey blog.
"Well, as a good friend used to remind me many many years ago, ‘hockey makes you humble’. Yesterday we lived it for the second time this season.
Give credit where credit is due. Northeastern played like a national tournament team yesterday. I could point to any number of reasons why this game got away from us, but the overriding take away is ‘speed’. The Huskies are easily one of the quickest teams we’ve faced and most likely as quick as any team in the east. Hockey is a game of time and space. When your opponent is consistently outskating you to loose pucks and keeping the pressure on offensively, you are going to break down.
This isn’t a ‘new’ revelation for anyone who watches the sport. The team battled yesterday, they scrapped and competed like I knew we would. We moved the puck better as the game progressed, but NU neutralized much of our best efforts simply by skating themselves back into position. They forechecked hard and when we were successful moving it up and out of our zone, they backpressured consistently to force turnovers. Their team speed enabled them to gamble aggressively throughout the contest and still recover when we got the puck behind them.
I told the team postgame that nothing has changed. We’re playing much better hockey right now and with lots of spunk. You park that game and start a new. We don’t have the depth, foot speed or high end skill to match certain clubs right now. That’s ok. We’ll get there. It just isn’t going to magically happen overnight.
NATIONAL TOURNAMENT MUSINGS -
If you look at the pairwise this morning there is still some shuffling that will take place down the stretch, but you can pretty much take a few things to the bank."... See the blog for more!
