Friday begins with Beaver Pride Lunch with both squad's Coaches & WCHA Commissioner McLeod, Friday from 11:30am to 1pm at the BRECSeriously! I think Dave Hakstol is a class act and a gracious host and has gone out of his way to travel to other programs on the east coast when other programs in the WCHA would have stayed home and played a home game instead. If Hakstol said he wanted to practice in stead of going to the luncheon I would not fault him one bit. While UND did in fact benefit from the trip to Alaska and will be able to schedule two more games because of it, I am sure that UAA probably did benefit from UND being in their tourney.
Where is the Beef?
The Golden Gophers had better expect to be hit and hit often this weekend when they play the UNO Mavericks in the WCHA season opener. UNO is the biggest team in Division 1 hockey and I don’t know if the Gophers will fair will if they attempt to get into a physical game. The Gopher coach Don Lucia tends to recruit more of the finesse type players.
Goal Gophers --- "We got off to a a good start last weekend, but now it is WCHA play so the intensity goes up a little more," Budish said.
UNO is the nation's biggest Division I team. The Mavericks average slightly over 6-1 in height and 199 pounds, one inch and 11 pounds more per man than the Gophers.
"We got a lot of guys who can play the body," said Budish, a former Division I prospect at linebacker when he played football at Edina. "We've got some big forwards. We've got a couple big D back there. We can play physical and match teams like North Dakota and Nebraska Omaha that have bigger guys.
"Even little guys on our team play the body. You don't have to be 6-foot to play the body. Little guys like [5-8 Jacob] Cepis and guys like that play physical and they finish their checks. We've got to get it from every guy in the line-up."
The Gophers coaches have stressed that, especially this week.
