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