Monday, March 16, 2009

Monday Musings.....

  • The most current PairWise from USCHO.com is out, and the Gopher hockey team is currently tied for 11th. The one-spot jump was thanks to the Alaska Nanooks taking care of Ohio State last night in the first round of the CCHA playoffs. OSU had been tied with the Gophers.
  • Thursday's WCHA Final Five game against UMD is still huge. The Strib's Roman Augustoviz thinks the Gophers are in a "win-or-else" situation going into the game - and so are the Bulldogs. I tend to disagree with Roman (I think the Gophers are in for reasons I will articulate in Tuesday's entry), but the game still has huge tournament implications.
  • We have a new Mr. Hockey. Plus, he's headed to the University of Minnesota.
  • Thursday evening also has the makings of a Gopher fan's clickfest, as the Basketball team will play Texas at 6pm, and the hockey team will play UMD at 7. We'll have a more detailed game preview on Wednesday, but at first glance, it's a tough draw for the Gophers. Although a 10 seed is healthy for a team which struggled down the stretch (and for a team which was likely one of the last four in), having to play Texas in the first round and Duke (in Greensboro, nonetheless) is a tall order.
  • Here are Aaron Gleeman's top 40 Twins prospects for 2009. He also has a great analysis of how these prospects were acquired and the youth in reserve position-by-position. It makes one excited for 2009 and for the future.
  • Nick Nelson continues his position-by-position analysis of the Twins by examining my dad's favorite player, Nick Punto.
  • I'll switch to more Twins-related blogging after the Gophers' seasons conclude - hopefully after two national championships!
  • Finally, I attended the Gophers' playoff game Saturday night against St. Cloud State and saw a gentleman wearing a Holy Cross jersey. I guess the joke is on me, since the Gophers lost to Holy Cross in the 2006 Grand Forks Regional, and that he had to pay $100 for an official College of the Holy Cross jersey. If he was a St. Cloud fan, it's simply laughable that he'd choose to do this as an "in-your-face" move, since his squad is yet to win an NCAA Tournament game in seven tries. If he was a North Dakota fan, give it up! We've moved on here in Minny. Besides, UND did not win the title in 2006 either - Wisconsin did. It's not like we Minnesota fans go out and purchase jerseys which celebrate North Dakota's misfortunes - there would certainly be enough of those to go around. However, please come down to the Twin Cities again this weekend, Sioux fans, and spend a lot of money!

Tuesday through Thursday will contain entries with previews for the hockey and basketball tourneys.

1 comment:

  1. I seen that Holy Cross win at the Ralph in '06 and it was the best (from what I can remember, I was sooo wasted!!). Gopher's suck, there arena sucks and The Ralph is the BEST arena in all of hockey, we have leather seats and the crowd goes nutz when they play the YMCA. I just bought my new Holy Corss jersey (with #69 on it!), some new green beads, and my goatee is in deer hunting season form. GO SOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

    ReplyDelete