For the first time in the three-year coaching career of head coach Mike Eaves at Wisconsin, the No. 11
Badger (16-9-3 Western Collegiate Hockey Association, 23-12-4 overall) men's hockey team advanced to Minneapolis for the WCHA Final Five with a hard fought two-games-to-one series win over last year's nemesis, the Alaska Anchorage Seawolves. Every game in the series was decided by only one goal.
If battling Alaska Anchorage was tough enough last weekend, this weekend the Badgers will find out why sliding outside of the top three seeds in the conference is not helpful. For Wisconsin to win the WCHA playoff tournament, it must win three games in three nights. No team, since the WCHA tournament adopted this format in 1992, has ever pulled off this feat. Also, by sliding down the rankings in recent weeks, the Badgers still are in a precarious position as far as getting into the NCAA tournament as an at-large team.
It all starts St. Patrick's Day night with a Thursday battle with the North Dakota Fighting Sioux, a team playing some of the best hockey in the country right now. Just three weeks ago, these two teams played in Grand Forks, N. D., with the Sioux (13-12-3, 20-13-5) skating away with a win and a tie. The series was the turning point in what at the time was a lackluster year for North Dakota's first-year head coach Dave Hakstol, who was saddled with the responsibility of replacing one of the leagues best coaches, Dean Blais.
Also Hakstol had to find a way to replace 50 goals that it lost from its first line alone. North Dakota was in a tailspin going into that series, having won just two of its last nine games. But, sophomore goaltender Jordan Parise heated up, giving Hakstol a go-to goalie, and North Dakota finally got some scoring from players other than their top-line guys, especially key seniors that had been fighting scoring slumps.
\Your seniors and your leaders have to be your best players this time of year,"" Hakstol said.
In just three weeks, North Dakota went from being outside the NCAA tournament picture, and potentially falling out of home-ice in the first round of the WCHA playoffs back onto solid ground. The Sioux are comfortably in the NCAAs as an at-large team after smoking defending WCHA regular season champion and Frozen Four participant Minnesota Duluth 8-2, 6-1 to move on to Minneapolis.
North Dakota's second leading scorer, freshman forward Rastislav Spirko, summed up the turn around: ""Two or three weeks ago, we started playing real well-our game-and nothing could stop us. Right now, we are kind of on fire. Hopefully, we can keep going.""
For Wisconsin to compete with the Sioux Thursday night, they are going to have to be ready to battle. North Dakota has perhaps the most physical team in the WCHA, especially across their blue line. The Sioux's top five defenseman have an average build of 6'2', 215 lbs.
""They are a physical team, a pressure team, they aren't going to give you a lot offensively,"" Eaves said before UW matched-up with UND in late February.
If Wisconsin does manage to advance past North Dakota, then its road doesn't get much easier. Friday afternoon they would face Co-McNaughton Cup winner and the second-ranked Denver Pioneers who feature the top scoring offense in the country. If Wisconsin wins that game and advances to the championship game, they would face either Co-McNaughton Cup champion and the top-ranked Colorado College Tigers, which feature the top two scorers in the country, or archrival Minnesota, which is basically playing in front of a home crowd at the Xcel Energy Center.
But Wisconsin must beat North Dakota to even start thinking about any of this.
-USCHO.com
contributed to this report
