With a month to play in college hockey’s regular season, the race for the Big Ten title is all but over. After they took five of a possible six points from Minnesota last weekend, Michigan State’s mathematical odds of a repeat are nearly 90 percent, per the gifted people who crunch these numbers.
But if you think for a second the Gophers have little to play for this weekend with Wisconsin coming to town for a pair, you clearly don’t understand how much the sight of those fire engine red sweaters from the other side of the river make some players’ blood boil.
“It’s always a good time to play Wisconsin. It’s gonna be a fun weekend, and I think Mariucci’s going to be rocking,” Gophers defenseman Luke Middlestadt said this week. “They’re a good team. They play hard and don’t make many mistakes.”
The visit by the Badgers comes in the midst of what could be the Gophers’ most challenging stretch of the season. After a lopsided loss and a tie last weekend at Michigan State, Minnesota is 19-6-3 overall and ranked fourth nationally in the latest polls, but the Gophers have gone a pedestrian 2-3-1 in their past half-dozen games.
Wisconsin was one of the surprise teams in college hockey a season ago, sprinting to the top ranking in the national polls at one point and making the NCAA tournament in head coach Mike Hastings’ first season in Madison. It has been a tough act to follow, as Wisconsin stumbled to a 2-8-0 record in its first 10 games, which included Minnesota coming to the Kohl Center and winning a pair of 3-2 games in November.
Hastings said the Badgers (11-12-3 overall) have been toughened by the early adversity.
“Every single year you go back and check the lug nuts on the tires to see what was good and what wasn’t, what was tight, what was loose,” said Hastings, who took Minnesota State Mankato to the 2022 NCAA title game before accepting the Wisconsin job a year later.
“We had that bad combination of not being able to stop it enough and not being able to score enough. That is what we were. We had to own that, identify it, but also look out the front windshield because once it goes by, there’s not much you can do. … You flush it. You learn from it, and you move on.”
For the Gophers, the focus this weekend is getting off the recent rollercoaster of results that has them liking their effort and the results in just one of their two weekend games.
“You don’t want to see any inconsistencies throughout the year, but we’ve had a couple ups and downs the last few weekends, and we’ve talked about it with our group,” said Gophers assistant coach Ben Gordon. “We know where we’re at, and at the end of the season there’s not much time for ups and downs anymore.
“We’ve got to be a pretty solid machine moving through. We’ve talked about that this week, and hopefully we’ll minimize those stinkers coming up.”
The most notable recent “stinker” was last Friday at Michigan State, where a 2-2 game in the second period went sideways in a hurry before culminating in a 9-3 loss. Minnesota rebounded for a tie and a shootout loss the next night.
“It’s definitely a learning experience, but it took us less than 24 hours and we went to a shootout with another one of the best teams in the country,” Gophers forward Matthew Wood said. “So, I don’t think it affected us too much, and you learn from it.”
Friday’s meeting with the Badgers is a 7 p.m. start. The Saturday series finale begins at 5 p.m. Fox 9 is broadcasting both games.
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