Re: UNH Wildcats 2014 Post-Season Thread: "Maybe Dick" Hunts the Great White Whale
Re: UNH Wildcats 2014 Post-Season Thread: "Maybe Dick" Hunts the Great White Whale
Here is depth chart for Blackhawks D-men this season:
name, games played, goals+assists=points, +/-
Duncan Keith, 71, 5+50=55, +23
Brent Seabrook, 72, 6+32=38, +30
Niklas Hjalmarsson, 72, 4+22=26, +15
Nick Leddy, 72, 7+22=29, +15
Johnny Oduya, 70, 3+12=15, +9
Sheldon Burbank, 39, 1+4=5, +2
Michal Rozsvial, 38, 1+6=7, +4
David Rundblad, 14, 0+1=1, -2
So, lot of depth there, although I do not know who might be a free agent, etc.
Looks like TvR can plan on spending lots of quality time in a Rockford Icehogs uniform next season.
On the issue of "rooting" for other HE programs in the D-1 tourney ... let's put it this way. There is ROOTING for a team, which is what we all do for our selected favorite team. After that, there are different levels of more "casual rooting". Let's take for example a UMass Amherst fan who REALLY likes their college hockey. Small sample size, for sure.
Anyway, your team makes it to the TD Garden about once a decade, and makes it to the D-1 tourney, what ... once a generation, if that?? On top of that, you have a lot of "down time" from the end of the HE regular season (and let's face it, this year the "play-in" games were extensions of the RS) since your program makes the QF round of the HE tourney about 50% of the time historically (maybe an exaggeration, but not by that much
). So you have a lot of "down time" and you love your college hockey, so you look around at ways to keep engaged through to the end of the D-1 tourney.
Call it a "second team" ... a "tourney team" ... heck, in many ways, this is more a "fantasy team" approach than picking players and adding up stats ferchrissakes
. It's just about people having fun, when their REAL favorite team stays home from the post-season tourney(s). It is not exactly ROOTING, nor probably even rooting, but more likely just
kinda rooting.
As UNH fans, it's literally been a full generation - since VERY early in the Coach Umile era, I believe - that the 'Cats have not make it to the D-1 tourney two out of three seasons. That's not a good trend, and a lot of fans are used to at least being engaged in the season until this coming weekend. Heck - there was a series of six post-seasons between '98-'03 where UNH fans were directly engaged in the post-season through its final weekend. We've been spoiled. And now we're finding out what we've been taking for granted isn't in any way a "given" or entitlement. Our friends from the Downeast have been dealing with these shifting realities for a little longer than we have, so it's not necessarily just a "UNH thing". Even perennial powers BU are arguably at an all-time ebb in their program's fortunes.
There's probably a very good discussion topic to be had in the offseason about something a recent poster (I forget who, but it's a page or two ago) said about "what is the acceptable level of expectation for UNH Hockey" these days? A lot of us - myself very definitely included - set our sights relatively low at simply making it to the Garden and the HE semis. The team got there and did that one step further, so kudos to them. But the damage had already been done to UNH's chances to qualify for the D-1 tourney over the course of the RS, and we all saw that writing very clearly on the wall well in advance. So we adjusted our expectations accordingly, and now we end up with a "kinda sorta" semi-happy ending to the season. So be it.
But standing back and looking at this year in the context of what's happened in the preceding seasons ... this season was probably smack-dab right in-between the '01/'02 season (low point) and the '02/'03 season (somewhat false "high" point, largely due to a very quick start). And if you take those three seasons and compare them with the preceding three seasons, there is a slight fall-off ... and with the three seasons before that, a further drop ... and so on right up through the early part of the last decade.
Which brings me back to the whole UMass Lowell thing. There are a LOT of similarities between UML and UNH, if you consider that at both schools, D-1 Men's Hockey is the flagship team and primary revenue generator for their respective schools. Both play in arenas that were built within anout a year of each other, and were both seen at that time as landmark developments in their communities. Both programs can look back at a past history led by iconic coaches (Holt at UNH, Riley at UML) who put their programs on the map. And now both programs have an alum who played with the program under their iconic predecessors, and both have now won a pair of HE Tourney titles while in charge of their respective programs. Both programs have now been to the Frozen Four. I won't go into fanbase comparisons at the risk of pandering, other than to say there are plenty of similarities there as well.
I'm not sure if I posted it on this thread or on another one in recent days ... but it will be interesting to see if UMass Lowell becomes the "next UNH", with strong RS performances, some success in the HE tourney, but ultimately coming up short in the D-1's ... OR ... if they become the "next UMaine", which had a slightly longer period of success, won more HE titles, and did manage to get over the hump to win two D-1 tourneys (ironically with one against UNH, the other ... well, we'll omit the obligatory reference to "clouds" for today).
There is every reason to believe UMass Lowell will be a force in HE (and possibly nationally) for the forseeable future. As a UNH fan, I can either be jealous - which I choose not to be - OR I can simply expect that the folks in charge of the UNH program will just have to "up their game" to compete with the best. Why should I begrudge a program like UML any success they might enjoy, so long as they are doing it on the up-and-up ... just because UNH can't or hasn't been able to keep up??
If I take anything out of UML's recent rise to power, it is that if it can happen in Lowell, why not again in Durham?
Good luck to the Riverhawks. I'm
kinda sorta rooting for you guys this weekend.
ABBC&ND too.
JMHO.
