When you are going through a tough stretch, some friends reach out with words of encouragement. Gophers men’s hockey coach Bob Motzko — whose team is off to its most challenging start in his eight seasons at the helm — has also heard from true friends who offer, well, other sentiments.
Motzko’s Gophers are 2-7-1 in their first 10 games. They lost twice at home to Minnesota Duluth to close the nonconference schedule, then opened Big Ten play with a pair of losses at Wisconsin last week, marking the first time in Motzko’s tenure at Minnesota that the Gophers have been swept in back-to-back series.
“I’ve been reminded of that,” Motzko said this week. “One of my good buddies called, said, ‘Good. This hasn’t happened to you. Glad you’re going through it. You live like the rest of us.’”
Motzko would not officially reveal the caller’s name, but he has spoken often in the past about his lifelong friendship with Bemidji State coach Tom Serratore. And Motzko confirmed the call came from a 218 area code number.
For the first time since before the 2020 pandemic, the weekly national college hockey rankings did not include the Gophers this week.
The numbers paint a clear picture of what hasn’t worked in the season’s first five weeks.
Minnesota is last in the Big Ten offensively, scoring just 2.2 goals per game, and is last defensively, allowing 3.5 goals per game. Similarly, their power-play and penalty-kill stats sit in the cellar among the seven teams in their conference. And they are short four players due to injury currently.
There’s a certain correlation with Motzko speaking about the dearth of goal scoring in the same week that Oliver Moore was called up to make his NHL debut with the Chicago Blackhawks and Matthew Wood scored his third NHL goal for the Nashville Predators. Those two, and St. Louis Blues rookie Jimmy Snuggerud, were members of the 2024-25 Gophers, and all three opted to sign at the end of last season rather than play another year in maroon and gold.
Tackling the Gophers’ challenges one at a time as Notre Dame comes to Minneapolis this weekend for the first Big Ten home series of the season, Motzko talked about improving the penalty kill primarily by staying out of the penalty box, and seeing his sophomore defensemen make a needed step into bigger roles.
One of those second-year blueliners, Leo Gruba, won a state peewee title for the combined Johnson/Como/North St. Paul youth hockey team. As a prep at Hill-Murray, he was a state champion in 2020. Before arriving on campus, Gruba’s Fargo Force team won the national junior title in 2024. But along the way, he learned a lesson about perseverance that they’re hoping to apply with 25 games remaining and ample time to right the ship.
“I was a first-year bantam and our goalie quit. We didn’t have a goalie, so we lost like the first 15 games of the year. Literally 0-15. Might be a record in there somewhere,” Gruba recalled. “I try to pull from those experiences. As a kid, you just get frustrated and you kind of want to quit, but it’s a good lesson in there for us. That specific season, we actually turned things around, made the regional. We had a good season.”
Alex Begley, a junior defenseman who also made his way to Dinkytown via Hill-Murray, said the focus now is to take the lessons from those tough first 10 games, then forget all the rest.
“It gets us ready for the whole season, but I think we put that behind us,” Begley said. “Forget about it but learn from it and take some positives out of it. But we also need to learn from those mistakes that cost us some games.”
Motzko admitted that he’s hearing from restless fans, and joked that his wife even locked him out of the house upon returning from Madison. But the person ,who more than anyone helped bring sellouts back to the Gophers’ home rink, knows that the fans haven’t gone away, they’re just eager for better results.
“We have to own where we’re at,” he said, referencing the army of Gopher fans who invaded Florida for the 2023 NCAA Frozen Four. “The criticism that comes now, we’ll take it. It’s the same program that, when we go to Tampa Bay, has 11,000 people there. So, we’re going to have a loud crowd both ways.”
Notre Dame comes to Minneapolis with a 3-4-1 record under first-year head coach Brock Sheahan. The Gophers and Irish — who lost a pair of home games to Michigan last weekend — are the only Big Ten teams not nationally ranked currently. The Friday and Saturday games are both 7 p.m. starts.
Briefly
According to Motzko, Gophers freshman forward Teddy Townsend is expected to join the team’s lineup later this month. Townsend, 20, was hospitalized following an on-campus assault the night of Sept. 20 and has not played as a result of the injuries suffered in the attack. On Oct. 29, U of M Campus Police arrested a former high school and college hockey player as a suspect in the attack. He was booked into the Hennepin County jail, and released two days later. He has not been charged. Townsend, who is from Eden Prairie, had 40 points in 56 junior hockey games for the Waterloo (Iowa) Black Hawks last season.
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