Pam (woof) Sweeney writes:
>And it was NOT Heather Machnik who wrote:
>>Minnesota sure looked beatable after
>>the SCSU-Minn WCHA Championship Game.  They may have been beaten if
>>not for Lowell having played the night before.
 
That was me.  I will take credit for it and stick by it...
 
>And in the final hockey-l poll, we could probably understand that some people
>might want to rate Minnesota lower than Lowell, even though they badly outshot
>them and pulled out the OT victory:
>>     5.   Mass Lowell              25-10-5   114         5        3-7
>>     6.   Minnesota                25-13-4   105         6        4-10
 
I can't speak for the other comments or the pollsters, but my comment
above was not anti-Gopher, just my opinion.  However, this tally
from the poll impressed me.  I do still think that Lowell was better
than Minnesota.  I think it is easy to explain why the voters ranked
Lowell higher.  Minnesota may have outshot Lowell and won in double
OT, but let's look at the shot totals (from my earlier post of the box
on 3/30/94):
 
>SHOTS ON GOAL: Mass Lowell     12-14--2--6--2 = 36
>               Minnesota       11--8-14-10--4 = 47
 
Whether 47-36 is badly outshot is debatable.  Either way, the numbers
here reflect the way the game went, which was that Lowell outplayed
Minnesota in the first two periods but ran out of gas in the third and
really had no business making it to a 2nd overtime.  I questioned whether
Minnesota would have come back to win if the Gophers had not had the
advantage of not playing less than a day before as Lowell did.  When I
read the poll results, I figured the voters thought the same way after
seeing the game or hearing accounts of it.  This was truly a game where
the lack of a day's rest killed the losing team.  Lowell came within 5:33
of winning in spite of it.
 
Now, on to a related topic...
 
I'm glad that the Gophers finished well to show up the naysayers who
suggested that they needed to recruit out of state to do well, but
there is another attitude that comes out of Minnesota that upsets a
great many people.  I read at least 2 articles I can recall from the
Twin Cities newspapers (got them at home somewhere) which almost
elevated Woog to sainthood for only sticking with in-state players,
and in so doing, directly attacked other schools for not having a
similar recruitment strategy.  For example, BU was ridiculed for
having taken several players from out of state and a couple from out
of the US (never mind that most of their players are still from
Massachusetts).
 
These articles angered me beyond what you can probably believe.  I
certainly think it is wrong for people to attack Minnesota for
sticking with in-state players, but when people from Minnesota attack
others who have a different strategy, they are no better.  Minnesota
is not better than anyone else because they recruit in-state, and they
are not worse.  It is simply the policy they choose to have.  It does
not deserve praise nor ridicule.
 
This particularly hits home because I support a program which would
not exist if it only recruited in-state.  There are 7 major DivI hockey
programs in the state of Massachusetts, tied with Michigan.  Minnesota
has only 3.  There are another 10 major DivI hockey programs within a 3
to 3.5 hour drive of the epicenter of hockey in eastern Mass.  That
makes a total of 17 major programs all drawing on the talent from the
state, which in raw numbers is probably less than Minnesota's.  I do
not believe Minnesota has nearly that many programs vying for its talent.
 
(numbers for those who were wondering: 7 MA = BC, BU, Harv, Mass Amherst,
Mass Lowell, Merr, Northeastern.  10 w/in 3-3.5 hr = Army, Brown, Dart,
Maine, NH, Prov, RPI, Union, Verm, Yale.)
 
Merrimack has been criticized by some in the area for not having as
many local players as some of the other programs.  But every year,
Merrimack tries to land the good local players, and almost every one
tells Merrimack to get lost.  You can imagine how this serves as a
rallying cry when MC plays a team like BC which has players who thumbed
their nose at MC - and BC lost 2 of 3 games to Merrimack this season.
 
There's also the player who reportedly turned down a full scholarship
to Merrimack so he could try to walk on at another local DivI school.
That would be like Eric Lindros turning down $50 million from Quebec
so he could pay Philadelphia $50 million to play for them, except that
the numbers here are more like $100,000.
 
And still, the team keeps improving and beating teams full of the
players who rejected them.
 
Merrimack used to survive in DivII by taking the Mass. "leftovers" from
the DivI programs, but that won't work now.  They need to be able to
steal some of the good Mass. players away from the established
programs.  That will happen as they become established themselves.
They will continue to get the best players they can get, as will the
other local teams.  If that means they have to go out of Massachusetts
or even to Canada, then that is what it takes.  I don't care if a kid
is from Andover, MA like Matt Adams or Gloucester, ONT like Marty
Legault.  He's still a Warrior.
 
Maybe some of the MN people can understand why I did not sympathize
with their criticism of Craig Dahl for not immediately taking all MN
players at St Cloud.  Why should he have settled for the second tier
of players after Minnesota took its chunk?  But now that he can
recruit on a par with the Gophers, he doesn't shy away from the
in-state players.  Seems to me like he has made good on the school's
promise.
 
It doesn't matter where you get your players from, as long as you get
good players and good people.
---                                                                 ---
Mike Machnik                                          [log in to unmask]
Cabletron Systems, Inc.                                  *HMM* 11/13/93