STrib: Despite Frozen Four loss, Lucia likes Gophers' potential

BleedGopher

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per the STrib:

“Most really elite teams have some really dominant players. We don’t have a bunch of dominant players,” Lucia said. “We have a bunch of good players that have bought into playing with each other.”

The Gophers’ buy-in produced a significant return. They lost several elite players to professional hockey last spring and relied on a large freshman class, but won a Big Ten regular-season championship, won the West Regional and advanced to the national championship.

It could have passed for a rebuilding year. The freshmen wanted more.

After just a month of the season, the young team had survived tests against New Hampshire, Boston College and Notre Dame.

Lucia wasn’t quite ready to classify his team as elite after this early stretch. Five-plus months later, with a national championship on the line, he still wasn’t ready to offer up the title.

“Almost all of us had played with each other in some point of our career, so I thought we had a lot of confidence coming in,” forward Taylor Cammarata said about the freshmen’s expectations entering the season. “Coming to Minnesota your job is to get to the Frozen Four, and we did a very good job.”

http://www.startribune.com/sports/gophers/255114841.html

Go Gophers!!
 

per the STrib:

“Most really elite teams have some really dominant players. We don’t have a bunch of dominant players,” Lucia said. “We have a bunch of good players that have bought into playing with each other.”

The Gophers’ buy-in produced a significant return. They lost several elite players to professional hockey last spring and relied on a large freshman class, but won a Big Ten regular-season championship, won the West Regional and advanced to the national championship.

It could have passed for a rebuilding year. The freshmen wanted more.

After just a month of the season, the young team had survived tests against New Hampshire, Boston College and Notre Dame.

Lucia wasn’t quite ready to classify his team as elite after this early stretch. Five-plus months later, with a national championship on the line, he still wasn’t ready to offer up the title.

“Almost all of us had played with each other in some point of our career, so I thought we had a lot of confidence coming in,” forward Taylor Cammarata said about the freshmen’s expectations entering the season. “Coming to Minnesota your job is to get to the Frozen Four, and we did a very good job.”

http://www.startribune.com/sports/gophers/255114841.html

Go Gophers!!

"Rebuilding year" is a cheap cop-out for a bad team. I was glad to see that our Gophs were not content with having a "rebuilding year", and instead did the best with what they had. We didn't have a lot of high-end talent (not even one player averaged a point/game). But instead if whining about it, they just went out and played their best hockey. Good season, disappointing last game.
 

He has every reason to be excited about this team going forward. It was a very young team and depending upon pro departures, they figure to be very good next year.
 




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