UConn Hockey 2012-13 | Page 2 | The Boneyard

UConn Hockey 2012-13

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The Huskies have played well against the two tournament teams from last year thus far on their schedule, 'Mack and Union (only one more remains, and that's Air Force in two weeks). Which makes the early season stinker against UMass and the shutout sweep at the hands of Niagara equally worthy of a head scratch.
 
kingdobbs said:
The Huskies have played well against the two tournament teams from last year thus far on their schedule, 'Mack and Union (only one more remains, and that's Air Force in two weeks). Which makes the early season stinker against UMass and the shutout sweep at the hands of Niagara equally worthy of a head scratch.
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To be fair, Mack didn't make the tournament last year, though they did in 2011. Hockey is an odd sport.
 
Nice win...who knows what was going on earlier with the coach, too. that might have influenced play. Plus whoever said they have no depth I think hit on something. When you watch UConn they often have 1 line that could play with anyone. Maybe not first line at BC but they could play at BC. But it tends to drop off faster than at some other programs. Then add in the fact that historically UConn relies on a fair number of freshmen and it often take them a few weeks to adjust to the college level. I typically watch what they do starting with the UConn tournament. If they can play well there, it usually sets up fairly well for the league season.
 
brasssbonanzaa said:
To be fair, Mack didn't make the tournament last year, though they did in 2011. Hockey is an odd sport.
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Huh, I guess I misremembered that, although they were close to an at-large now that I look at last year's ranking.
 
brasssbonanzaa said:
To be fair, Mack didn't make the tournament last year, though they did in 2011. Hockey is an odd sport.
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Without knowing anything about college hockey (watch a lot of NHL though - love hockey), I imagine that if a team loses their goalie it can completely change the success of a team from year to year.
 
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Yes mack was the last team out in the pairwise. They did still have their stud goalie Joe cannata, but he's gone this year and theyve regressed a bit though not to the point they were five or so years ago when they were a doormat for everyone else in the league. Still a good win for UConn.
 
It will be interesting to see if UConn can build on this. They have a couple of tough games coming up. it would be nice to see them win this weekend then win at least one against Air Force next weekend. But as I said, they tend to play lots of freshmen who just take time to become acclimated. If they could put together a few wins during this stretch it would put them in a good spot going forward.
 
our puck guys, recruit brent norris info?!?!?!
 
I've never seen him play but here's his player page for Nepean (http://nepean.stats.pointstreak.com/playerpage.html?playerid=3143747&seasonid=5781). He's a smallish '93 center who is putting up a good scoring total in an OK league that turns out a decent number of D-I players. It's his 4th season of junior A which usually means he wasn't considered a highly regarded prospect for the top lines/top teams but you can often get solid, mature players that way to fill out the roster.
 
So he did commit and i saw a tweet that said he was a pc commit before
 
Don't know much about the league, if he's a '93, he'll be coming here as a 20 year old freshman (not unusual in hockey). If he was formerly of PC it would seem they might have wanted him to spend another year in juniors before coming there for roster reasons (again, not uncommon) and he may have wanted to play quicker and looked elsewhere. I don't know about that, total guess, I don't really follow much hockey recruiting, mostly because it's far more convoluted than basketball or football.
 
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Norris may be an interesting story. He was apparently committed to PC for this season. After a high scoring '10-'11 for Nepean he joined Cedar Rapids of the USHL for the '11-'12 preseason but he either didn't make the team or left. He then signed with Youngstown of the USHL and produced 3 points in 15 games (slow starts are pretty normal for kids making the step up in class). He was either let go or chose to return to Nepean where he once again scored at a good clip. Sometime along the way he and PC split up.

His Jr A scoring rate shows he has potential but the failure to stick in the more advanced USHL is a red flag. Let's hope it was just a mismatch (it happens) and not an indication that he's maxed out.
 
Attendance for the Saturday afternoon game against Air Force in Hartford was reported as 1,985 (by comparison, the Friday afternoon tilt with the Falcons drew only 640 to Freitas, but that's just about the expected total when students are on break).

I was at the XL Center for the game, and I wasn't sure it was *quite* that many, but that's an encouraging sign for the HEA future. As an alternative to switching an already-scheduled game in the fall, they could (and probably should) schedule a handful as part of their spring release (maybe swing something with a future HEA opponent like Amherst or Providence), and I think there might be a slight bump in interest.
 
I was away for the holiday weekend but I was curious about attendance at the XL. I figured even if the number was sightly high it was still pretty solid. I agree that rather than a last minute switch they could play a couple of games there next season with some advanced notice and billing. PC, UMass-Amherst or somebody makes sense.
 
It wasn't heavy by any stretch (I would've guessed it was around 1K), and a visual survey saw more Whale green than UConn blue during the game.

The promotion of UConn during the Whale game was pretty weak, though, in spite of it being declared "UConn Hockey Day", which is less than encouraging. Whale fans should be a pretty easy sell on UConn hockey, but apart from a couple appearances from Jonathan (who was curiously absent from the *actual* UConn game), there wasn't a whole lot of promotion there.
 
For fun, I decided to try and find a way to buy tickets through UConn's website for the XL game, and the website was screwed up and there wasn't an option to do so, at least last week there wasn't. Pretty bad job there. sub 2K numbers at XL would not be a good sign for a UConn HE game, that would put them more or less dead last among average HE attendance numbers.
 
brasssbonanzaa said:
For fun, I decided to try and find a way to buy tickets through UConn's website for the XL game, and the website was screwed up and there wasn't an option to do so, at least last week there wasn't. Pretty bad job there. sub 2K numbers at XL would not be a good sign for a UConn HE game, that would put them more or less dead last among average HE attendance numbers.
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Not so sure about that. Keep in mind that A. UConn isn't in Hockey East. They played Air Force not BC.
B. The game wasn't scheduled at the civic Center until about 2 weeks ago and it wasn't exactly pushed as "must see"
C. the "casual" UConn fan was home watching what ended up being a pretty exciting football game.
D. It was a holiday weekend so the students were home visiting Mom, Aunt Flo and Grandma...In my mind if attendance is more than double your typical gate (and even if they over-stated the gate, I doubt it was by 50%) in a game that was moved with minimal fanfare, that is pretty hopeful.
 
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brasssbonanzaa said:
For fun, I decided to try and find a way to buy tickets through UConn's website for the XL game, and the website was screwed up and there wasn't an option to do so, at least last week there wasn't.
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Yeah, that was a mess. The fact that it was basically a Whale game with a UConn undercard probably had something to do with the online ticketing arrangements being fubarred.

Pretty bad job there. sub 2K numbers at XL would not be a good sign for a UConn HE game, that would put them more or less dead last among average HE attendance numbers.
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It certainly wasn't ideal. We could go through the myriad ways in which it wasn't ideal (which freescooter really nailed most of), but I'm certain that the intent here was to do a dry run to find out where the warts are, from both the UConn and the XL side of things (we do not under any circumstances want the XL management to be getting cold feet about this arrangement, because it would be a major embarrassment to both UConn and HEA if the arena falls through).

So I think the next logical step, like I said upthread, assuming another game can't be arranged for the late season with a little more lead time to advertise, is to negotiate for 2-4 games next year to be pre-scheduled at the arena rather than at Freitas (1-2 league games, and another 1-2 non-conference matchups).
 
kingdobbs said:
Yeah, that was a mess. The fact that it was basically a Whale game with a UConn undercard probably had something to do with the online ticketing arrangements being fubarred.



It certainly wasn't ideal. We could go through the myriad ways in which it wasn't ideal (which freescooter really nailed most of), but I'm certain that the intent here was to do a dry run to find out where the warts are, from both the UConn and the XL side of things (we do not under any circumstances want the XL management to be getting cold feet about this arrangement, because it would be a major embarrassment to both UConn and HEA if the arena falls through).

So I think the next logical step, like I said upthread, assuming another game can't be arranged for the late season with a little more lead time to advertise, is to negotiate for 2-4 games next year to be pre-scheduled at the arena rather than at Freitas (1-2 league games, and another 1-2 non-conference matchups).
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Right. and you could do all sorts of things from selling "XL season tickets" to providing busses for students if this was arranged for next season. I'd hope to land a couple of HEA teams or maybe one plus Yale or some better known ECAC, plus maybe Holy Cross and Army from Atlantic.
 
I don't think any fans of the program disagree with this sentiment. But there are 2 factors that take precedence right now. first, the Hockey East deal needed a facility that held more than 1800 or so. Second, the program needs some selling and nuturing as it grows. right now the college hockey fan base in Greater Hartford is relatively small. this is an effort to grow it. Never lose the good in order to get the perfect. this move is good. The perfect is unattainable at the moment.
 
brasssbonanzaa said:
Blah, keep it on campus where it should be.
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"Should happen" and "will happen" aren't always concepts that will find a happy intersection.

I mean, if I'd had my way, we'd have had a modern D-I caliber arena 10-15 years ago, and the idea of playing in Hartford except for special occasions would not be even on the table.
 
dan mele from springfield pics commits. when i was at wne i know that program went thru a lot of changes, any 1 got info on the kid or what that program now is about? i think they feed wne a shitton of kids now as they are tyring to build a good d3 puck program...
 
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Nice weekend sweep of the Skating Pegulas.
 
I was at Friday's game. Very exciting hockey game. Nice job by the backup goalie. Took UConn a while to get untracked (after scoring 28 seconds into the game) but they seemed top pick it up later. One thing that I don't quite get is they seem to allow an awful lot of shots. I think they got out shot 39-24 Friday and 41-21 Saturday. They seem to play an awful lot of the game in their own end. When they do break out they look pretty good though.
 
freescooter said:
I was at Friday's game. Very exciting hockey game. Nice job by the backup goalie. Took UConn a while to get untracked (after scoring 28 seconds into the game) but they seemed top pick it up later. One thing that I don't quite get is they seem to allow an awful lot of shots. I think they got out shot 39-24 Friday and 41-21 Saturday. They seem to play an awful lot of the game in their own end. When they do break out they look pretty good though.
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were they good shots though? some teams' defensive scheme is to purposely give up higher numbers of low quality shots especially if they think the opposing team won't be able to hold their zone and they can get some breakouts from it. I've seen HE teams do this quite frequently with some success. Nice two wins for UConn, even if it is against a glorified club team. Good for the fans to see they got two wins over a school they've heard of.
 
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