During Wednesday’s hockey press conference, there was a common theme, the University of North Dakota Hockey team needs two wins in their season-opening series against the Canisius Golden Griffins. Nothing else is ideal.
Last season, UND lost a two-game non-conference series against Canisius to start the second half of the season torpedoing their NCAA tourney chances. That series loss didn’t sit well with the Fighting Hawks. Make no mistake about it, the Golden Griffins are going to see a very “determined” North Dakota hockey team when the puck drops on Friday night.
There’s already a business-like feel to the Fighting Hawks as they get ready for the 2019-20 season. A couple of the guys look like they had great offseasons. Sophomore defenseman Gabe Bast is one of them.
“Like Schmidty (Cole Smith) said a couple of weeks ago, it was a salty offseason,” Bast said. “This year, we’re really trying to establish a swagger to our group and play with confidence every night and just believe in ourselves that we can get the job done.”
Historically, games against Canisius have been seen as just another hockey series. Not this season.
“Usually, Canisius isn’t a rivalry game,” Bast said. “But we’re taking it as a rivalry game this weekend.”
It’s simple, the Hawks have to win two games this weekend. They don’t want to have to spend the rest of the season agonizing over the Pairwise ranking. The Fighting Hawks players know that a couple of losses to Canisius would put them in a tenuous situation.
“We know how the Pairwise can kind of… you can win a couple of games here and there and don’t move up a whole lot,” senior captain Colton Poolman said. “At the time it was like, it might hurt us a little bit, but we didn’t realize it until, obviously, we didn’t make the tournament. So it’s definitely the message, the games are right here, right now. We gotta make sure we do our job.”
Fear not, the opposition has already arrived in Grand Forks. If you haven’t seen it, Danielle Podlaski interviewed the Golden Griffins head coach Trevor Large.
VIDEO🤓: Canisius coach talks upcoming UND series and what he expects from UND this time around https://t.co/2XQYcentK6
— Dani Podlaski (@dani_podlaski) October 11, 2019
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