Saturday, November 16, 2013

UMD Slaps UND 6-3

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.
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