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although I am more focused on trying to give him enough PT to see if he has potential for next year. Rutledge has actually appeared in only 7 games and in minutes has played the equivalent of less than 5 games. Either he should be the goalie for the rest of the year, or, alternatively, the coaches should say "for the rest of the season, Racine plays every Friday night, Rutledge plays every Saturday night," no matter what (or vice versa).
If I thought we still had a chance for the NCAAs, I might be advocating Janecyk as the goalie, since I think at this point of the 3, he best fits the "just don't allow soft goals" objective. But these last 2 losses - which were 2 of the 5 most winnable games on our remaining schedule - have really done us in. I don't think winning the CCHA tourney is a must, but we would need to go like 12-3 the rest of the regular season, sweep 2 playoff series and maybe win 1 game at the JLA (winding up 24-16-2), and this group just doesn't have a run like that in them, even if one of these goalies all of a sudden started standing on his head.
1/12 12:19 PM | IP: Logged |
tournament. Just to far out of it, no matter what they do now, they just aren't going to make up the ground they have lost. If they can't win these home games, how are they ever going to get wins out there on the road and after tonight there is only one home game between now and the first week of March.
It's sport so you never say never until the last whistle of the last game has blown, but I have seen nothing from this bunch to give me even a glimmer of hope at this point.
1/12 5:38 PM | IP: Logged
because there is no way they can go 12-3 or so the rest of the season.
1/12 1:55 PM | IP: Logged
If they COULD manage the record I described for the rest of the season, the final W-L record would likely be good enough to get into the NCAA via Pairwise even if they did not win the NCAA tourney. I agree that this team is not capable of going 17-4 or 16-5 over the rest of the season (including CCHA playoffs).
1/12 4:59 PM | IP: Logged
Exactly what I think, too. For our D to allow 5 goals to teams that don't score- the level of improvement required to even approach the CCHA mid level teams is pretty massive.
I can see us split against Lake State, and maybe sweep State, but other than that, I can't really see wins without significant change. 3-9 to finish the season seems more likely than 9-3. With typical rate of imrpovement, 6-6 is possible. With current rate of "improvement"- 2-10 is more likely.
Last night was a good example- we scored at a decent rate vs shots. But we didn't have enough shots to score 5. And two of the worse scoring teams put up 5 in consecutive games. What happens when we play better teams?
1/12 2:36 PM | IP: Logged
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