UAF 4, Michigan 2

First off, anything good that was said about Cook or Pochmara last night should be taken away tonight.

Tim Cook should not be playing hockey at Michigan. It's that simple. The kid is just terrible, and if Montville or Dunlap isn't good enough to get on the ice then we should be rotating 5 defensemen out there. I wrote last night that he was directly responsible for the first two goals. Having seen the replay today I'll back off a little bit from that, but he still played a role in both of them. On the first, he chased his man all the way out to the point (why, when you have forwards out there???). That left the front of the net wide open for the goal. Without knowing the system we run, it's possible that Cogliano should have rotated down, but it's hard to say. I still highly doubt it was the plan for our left dman to be out by the right point. On the second goal, Dest whiffs on a clearing attempt and takes himself out of position. Cook gets caught in no-man's land between picking up Dest's man (though Fardig was kind of there) and covering his own man in the slot. Instead he does neither, the pass gets across and it's in the net. I've always been told that in a 2 on 1, the defenseman should take away the pass, and leave the shooter to the goalie. Cook screwed up by letting the pass get across, but Dest needs to not whiff like that. They can share blame for that one.

And Pochmara just doesn't have a clue. I thought he called a good game last night, but he was brutal tonight. Everytime someone fell down, it's a penalty. To be fair, a lot of the calls went in our favor, but I can't believe how many times he fell for that diving crap that UAF pulls. I thought Gordon Bombay was coaching that team: "Take the fall! Act hurt!" The best was when Michigan was breaking out on a 2 on 1, the UAF player laid down like he was dead, Pochmara blew the play and the kid got up and skated off. That's just embarrasing. And he fell for it every time.

That being said, the guy only gave us about 6 power plays in the third period that we couldn't convert on. When they were just passing it around and not taking shots, they were shooting it right into the defensemen. UAF's PK was awesome tonight. They put a lot of pressure on the points, the backdoor play was open, but Cogliano whiffed at least 3 times and Kolarik missed a couple as well.

Once again, Bill Sauer couldn't be faulted on any of those 4 goals. I don't think I'm being overly biased since I like the kid. The defense just let him down once again. The first goal, for whatever reason Cook decided to go out past the circle on the PK leaving the front of the net wide open for a guy to walk in. The second goal he left his man open again. The third goal was a cross that was a slam dunk and the 4th he got bowled over. Can't fault the kid. Hunwick got beat to the outside a couple more times tonight...ugh. He was pretty brutal. As were our faceoffs. The stat was that we got beat 60%-40% which is an extremely large difference, but I thought it was worse than that.

That's about all for tonight. That was just 2 1/2 hours of not having fun. Blech. Cogliano was the only one that really cared last night it seemed. Everyone else (HENSICK!) was at half-speed.

And Cook sucks.