One fed up Gophers fan:
I wrote to you last November and suggested that Gophers hockey fans needed to watch the season unfold before ranting. Now that the season has ended we can take a deep breath, look back and assess the situation. I am afraid that what we saw in Oct-Nov is what we saw the remainder of the season and it is not good. It's clear to me that the Gophers hockey program has a culture problem. What I have seen this season (and the previous two seasons) is not Gopher hockey. Over the last 3-4 years the skill level has seriously diminished and the up tempo and high scoring style has been replaced with no-grit, perimeter, careless play. Hard work and solid efforts have become the exception and not the rule. Too many times this program simply failed to compete. That responsibility lands at the feet of the players and the coaches who brought them to the program. In my opinion, the only way to change the culture is to make a change at the top. I am not sure what happened to Coach Lucia but if his CC teams played like this he never would have been hired at Minnesota. We just concluded year three of the great decline of Gopher hockey and I am convinced that year four is right around if the current coaching staff is brought back. Let's stop that in its tracks. Because for now, Pride on Ice has turned into Bag on Head. -- JN Comment: Coach Lucia said all this team needed was a couple of more victories, then Minnesota would have had home ice for the first round of the WCHA playoffs and who knows how far the Gophers could have gone. He is partly correct. The margin for error on the 2009-10 Gophers was pretty small. The team was not good at coming back from deficits when it fell behind. It played well at times, though, against good teams like Wisconsin and North Dakota. Certainly, it could have won a few more games. But the players often needed to be prodded to compete hard. That's a big problem. Lucia will have a few more players this season, so he can bench players if they don't show up for games. He is bringing in some older, tougher players. That should help. But enough of trying to lower expectations. Last season Lucia kept saying his team was not good enough to score more than three goals a game, and his goalies were doing their job if they held opponents to two goals. Not good. Talk like that is somewhat of a self-fulling prophecy, especially when coaching a team that seems to lack confidence in itself already.
