is scoring first. I'm not being flip, or saying that the game was over 9 minutes in, but it is really huge in today's game and we put ourselves in a hole so many times frankly we may have been "lucky" to be playing the game in the first place.
All those years in the CCHA watching Ferris State burned that notion into my head. If you scored first against those particular Bulldogs we'd almost always win, if we didn't, it seemed like they beat us every time. Two seasons ago this was literally true. They did not win a single game (0-12-2) when the other team scored first. They didn't lose 2/3rds of the games when they did score first.
I might have wanted more set carry-in plays with out best puck handlers, but we have a lot of guys with different skill sets and I don't know to what advantage overall it might have been to double or triple shift some guys at the expense of others. Playing well, our big so-called checking forwards, guys like Brauer, Wegworth and O'Leary, can really bottle up the other team on a forecheck and wear them down, maybe cause an icing and allow you to swap them out for your best three forwards for a faceoff play, or even scoring timely goals of their own. Those guys combined for 14 goals this year. This worked well against Michigan, as we scored 2 or 3 off faceoff plays. Its hard to abandon something that worked well in your previous game, especially since for all but 8 minutes of the game it was tied or we were just one play away from tying it.
Also, the fact is we just did not play well without the puck. No matter what adjustments Jackson was going to make, there are always 4 skaters without the puck (5 obviously if you are defending) and we did not play well without or away from the puck. That killed us. I don't know why that happened, other than I know it had nothing to do with the effort players and coaches gave. I honestly think we just made a few too many mistakes, and in hockey in 2018 you really need to be perfect sometimes to beat a skilled, well coached team. There is far more randomness (I actually don't like the term luck in this context) in winning this tournament than there is in winning a basketball one, or the 4 team playoff in football.
I'm long-winded and droning enough, but believe me, I could go on and on for hours about why I think hockey is a lot less interesting in 2018 than it was 30 or 40 years ago, and it has a lot to do with the style of the game today and why teams like UMD can and often do beat teams that are supposedly "better" in one and done tourneys.