North Division Play Begins

The obvious question this early in the season, after a mere four games of NAHL play, and three exhibition games, is: So, how far do you think the team will go this year?

I’m very optimistic, but I’ll leave it that. It is too early in the season, too early to tell exactly the potential of this team. Instead, I’ll work around it, and let you decide.

There are some promising things coming out of last week, and some things that need to be worked on. Talking with head coach Bob Mainhardt and Curtis Carr on the bus ride back from Minnesota, they are impressed with the talent, they are excited about the potential of the rookies, and they were encouraged by the way the team bounced back after the loss to North Iowa.

More candidly about the showcase… The team did not put together an entire 60 minutes in the games I watched. Once we start playing teams in our own division, twice in one weekend, and multiple series in the course of the month, if we can’t put 60 minutes together, there will be some problems. To me, it seemed to be a mental thing - the team possibly losing focus for a few minutes - that ended up costing them key goals. Luckily, it only cost them one game, and this is a problem that can be easily remedied.

Let me put it this way, we could have real easily been anywhere from 0-4 to 0-2-2, but great teams find ways to win, even when they aren’t playing their best hockey, and that’s what the boys were able to do. So we are 3-1-0.

Thursday’s game was a great example of this. We were vastly superior skill-wise to the Texas Tornado. We were up 3-0 after one, and 4-1 with only a few minutes left in the second period. A late Texas goal in the second, accompanied by an early goal in the third, and the team seemed to lose focus. Before you knew it, the game was tied. Our boys stepped up though, some veterans came through, and Derek Graham was able to score the game-winner. In actuality, we should have won that game (and the other two games we won) by three goals at least.

I probably don’t even need to mention how easily the two shoot-out wins could have gone either way. But our talent and our goaltending stepped up to get us the W.

Just an observation here, but speaking of talent… Without having seen the North yet, I think we have an advantage already over the rest of the league. It seems as though we have put together a team of smaller, faster, more skilled players. Southern Minnesota and Topeka especially looked a lot bigger than us. But, with all the penalties called, and all the open ice that resulted, our speed and talent on the power play was usually the difference when we were matched up against bigger, but slower penalty killers.

I could go a lot further in-depth on the Showcase, but let’s look ahead to the upcoming showdown in Ann Arbor. According to the schedule, we are playing the U-18s as opposed to the U-17 team that we will be facing for just about the rest of the year. USA goalie Nick Maricic was the North Player of the Week at the showcase, winning 2 games, with one shut-out, a 0.50 GAA, and a .983 save percentage. Besides hot goaltending, we also have to face a team mostly full of future Olympians. I will be interviewing Bob and Curt later in the week, and I’ll be interested to see what kinds of things they are working on in practice specifically to tune-up for such a high-powered squad. I’m sure they will be looking at the game tape from the USA vs. Fairbanks game to see how Fairbanks kept up and won.

We are currently tied with Marquette for third place in the division, with St. Louis and the USA above us. This will be a great chance for us to move up. While the showcase was a great barometer to see how we compared to the rest of the NAHL, this weekend will be a chance for these boys to see how they measure up to the best in the world. What a great opportunity for these guys.