GAMES TUESDAY 11-26-24

[elliott70]

Friday afternoon.

[East Side Pioneer Guy]

The Zephyrs will be fine. They may be down this year by their standards - however I think thats yet to be determined. They're in a section that is currently a cakewalk for making it to State. It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if they're back at the X representing section 4A this year, and it wouldn't surprise me if they are yet again playing on Friday night. They have a great program from youths on up, they are well-coached, and they have a supportive community. They do lose talent to privates, no doubt about it. But they'll be just fine.

What's I find a little interesting is that Mahtomedi seems to get a pass from the criticism other dominant A programs have faced. Mahtomedi is a well-to-do suburban metro district with nearly 1200 high school students. They have owned their section for a while now, won multiple recent championships, and have been a borderline lock to make it to Friday night at State for the better part of a decade. Yet they face zero calls to move up, and are somehow still seen as the little engine that could. It's sort of baffling to me. Any other white collar community metro program with their success in A and the size of their student body would have faced all sorts of chirping by this point. If ever there was a Goliath in David's clothing, it's the Zephyrs.

I largely agree with this. They get to hide in the shadow of WBL and HM, and to a lesser extent, Stillwater. I'm too lazy to do a deep dive into the records of the Tradition Rich Metro East Conference, or it's prior iteration as the Classic Suburban. But I'd hazard a guess that the majority of years they split the home & home series. The Zephys apparently prefer to coast to the state A semis, rather than cowboy-up & try to get past two of the three top teams in 4AA, which they could probably do once every 3 or 4 years. That 4AA final last season was by far the worst HM-WB section game ever; I wondered if either team wanted to win. An inspired Mahtomedi could have beat either of them that night.

I suspect another reason they get a pass is that for a long time, they got to the soon-to-be-renamed Fuse Box but didn't do much when they got there. Poechl is getting a little long in the tooth. Sometimes an old hand just wants to ride it out, rather than re-tool. Maybe a new coach would be the push needed to raise the bar. This is just speculation on my part, maybe he'd be thrilled to move up.

Another possibility is that enrollment changes may push them into AA at some point.

[5girls]

Largely agreed on all fronts. I’d like to see them move to AA. There’s a longstanding debate in the community as well - what would a move to AA do to their retention efforts? With multiple higher end players departing high school hockey early, and several more making contributions on the HM roster, it would be interesting to at least see if that change would have an impact. Perhaps it would. Perhaps those days are over, regardless of class.

[SEC Scotty]

Scoring 4 goals on a 5 min major is very impressive. I've seen plenty of 5 min majors with no scoring, and several with only one goal. Even a 5 on 3 doesn't do much to mitigate that. And I'd imagine to get a minor penalty during a major, it would likely have to be fairly flagrant.

So without the major it would "only" have been 5-1? As if beating the Zephs by 4 wouldn't be notable? Sorry, 9-1 is a serious beatdown.

Yea. St. Thomas beat Tartan 15-1. Pretty impressive.

[stateofhawkey]

For what it's worth, I found last Tuesday's full game between Mahtomedi and Hill-Murray. If anyone wanted to see why there was a 5-minute major, or how the whole game played out.

https://youtu.be/z0Sz4Zqj8a8?si=T5pqjGmE4B_a9-Wt

[East Side Pioneer Guy]

So having seen the pertinent portion of the video, I've also looked at the box score more closely. (Hockey Hub took a while to post it.) The first 2 minutes of the Zephs' major was negated by the concurrent HM 2:00 minor. This makes the 4 goals even more impressive. It got pretty garbled, as Hill's initial PP goal was due to the subsequent Zephs' minor at :39 of the third, but the man advantage due to the Zeph major didn't occur until 1:28 of the 3rd, when the Hill minor expired and the Zephs' minor ended due to Hill scoring.

Hill, or anyone, scoring three goals during a 3 min major is very impressive. Any attempt to down play this Hill win is really a reach. This not to say that Mahtomedi is done as a program, or will go 10-25 this season.