The University of North Dakota’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
season continues. Coming into tonight’s game the University of North Dakota had
a respectable record of 3-1-0 on Friday nights. On the flip side, the UND
hockey team has yet to win a hockey game on Saturday nights, 0-3-1 and 1-0-0 on Sunday.
Tonight, with the 6-3 loss to the University of Minnesota
Duluth Bulldogs, UND now has a 0-4-1 record on Saturday nights. Through 10
games (4-5-1 – 3-5-0 NCHC), the Green and White has yet to win a hockey game on
Saturday night. Tonight’s loss didn’t appear to sit well with UND head coach
Dave Hakstol.
“We didn’t play a complete game as we needed to,” Hakstol
said. “I thought we had to play really intelligent complete game. Little bit
low on energy. I thought…we didn’t manage obviously the last two minutes of the
first period very well after playing an excellent first period. After digging
ourselves out of that we didn’t manage the last minute of the second period
very well. That’s the difference in the game, those three, three and a half
minutes. The end of the day it’s the result that counts.”
The UND hockey team faced some adversity this week. Key
players are dealing injuries. Quite a
few players missed practice because of the flu. You also have to give credit
where credit is due, UMD played a better hockey game than UND did tonight.
“It’s been a bit of a long week,” Hakstol said. “We
didn’t cut ourselves any slack. We needed to play very intelligent and full
60-minutes tonight to give us a chance to win this game. That’s the way that I
feel. I give Duluth all of the credit in the world, they’re a good hockey team.
They made a lot of plays. I don’t think we did everything that we need to do
tonight... to give ourselves the best chance to win
this game. “
“Obviously there’s some stuff we need to work on as a
team,” North Dakota freshman defenseman Paul LaDue said. “We had a few
breakdowns and they (UMD) capitalized on them.”
In a night where some might want to look at the
negatives, there were a few positive points to build on going forward. Ladue also
scored the first goal of his UND career.
“It felt pretty good, but it would feel a lot better with
a win right now”, LaDue said. “It’s good to get it off my back and hopefully
they will keep coming.”
But another positive to take away from tonight’s game, UND
sophomore forward Bryn Chyzyk scored his first goal of the season.
“Just kind of got a loose puck off of the wall,” Chyzyk
said. “Just tried to feed it to the net – it must have hit a few sticks or
something. I don’t know, but it went in. Obviously it wasn’t enough.”
Next weekend, UND travels to Boston, Massachusetts to
play a two game nonconference series against the Boston University Terriers at Agganis
Arena.
