Today's Anchorage Daily News story focuses on the (oft mentioned here) combination of Seawolves speed and size. It's been clear for a couple of years now that Shyiak et al ... are actively seeking big players that can motor; especially on the front end. Coach Shyiak is consciously bucking the current years long WCHA paradigm by doing so. He told Doyle Woody,
Over the last decade, many WCHA teams have more or less begun to look like the Dean Blais coached UND squads; run and gun hockey if you will. It is and has been a prized commodity in the league. Many WCHA teams now consider themselves to have excellent run and gun style (to varying extents) teams on the ice. Bucking a trend in such a situation can prove fruitful. Kane Lafranchise addressed the importance of physical play adding,
Bucking the trend was essentially what Dean Blais was doing when he created the current run and gun paradigm. Great coaches in any number of sports have followed a similar strategy with success; think Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers who dramatically changed the NFL in the 1980's by opening up his offensive attack in a time when everyone else was emulating Tom Landry's defensive schemes.
I suspect that if a current NHL coach stacked his team full of Ryan Duncans, Tyler Hirschs, Kevin Clarks, Dean Larsons, Theo Fluerys, Paul Kariyas etc ... that he'd possibly find some success skating around their bigger counterparts. Nick Haddad summed it up nicely for Doyle's article saying,
I've found the fact that the Seawolves are much bigger than their competiton so compelling that I sent an email to Adam Wodon in October of 2007 over at College Hockey News requesting that he add a height/weight averages from their Alamanc section to their weekly "Tale of the Tape" comparisons. Adam replied the same day that they had done so. He's awesome like that.
And since then, I haven't often failed to point out that comparison in just about every weekly preview I've written. When all NCAA teams finally submit their official rosters I predict that UAA will be THE BIGGEST team in Division 1.
If everybody else is building a run and gun team then the team(s) that succeed will be the one(s) that have the best run and gunners. It's a sort of "beat em or join em" question. And Coach Shyiak clearly hopes the answer "beat em" will bring the Seawolves success. After all, who really wants to "join em" if it means creating a team that looks like SCSU?
Good luck to the Seawolves this Friday night. Soften them up for the rug rats up the road eh?
"If we play physical and finish our checks, it wears teams down and they get tired and make mistakes, as a staff we demand our guys finish their checks and play physical. You're looking for talent and skating, and size is always a bonus.Aspects of the game wax and wane over time. Once upon a time, every Minnesota Golden Gopher team that visited the Sullivan Arena rarely had a player under 6 feet tall (Wooger was all about big guys). When one team (especially when it's the Gophers) have success built around such an aspect then other teams naturally gravitate to that paradigm. It's never a bad idea to emulate success.
"We're fortunate with being able to find guys who have good size and can still get around the ice. We're strong along the wall and that really levels the playing field against more skilled teams.''
Over the last decade, many WCHA teams have more or less begun to look like the Dean Blais coached UND squads; run and gun hockey if you will. It is and has been a prized commodity in the league. Many WCHA teams now consider themselves to have excellent run and gun style (to varying extents) teams on the ice. Bucking a trend in such a situation can prove fruitful. Kane Lafranchise addressed the importance of physical play adding,
"Our style is getting more and more like that. We're getting harder and harder to play against. If we played that way all weekend (last season), by the second or third period Saturday night, teams were dumping the puck more, playing it safe and staying away from hits."As fans, I think we saw excellent examples throughout the season of what Kane is talking about, specifically against hated rival UAF. Many fans in both Anchorage and Fairbanks agreed that UAA "squashed them like bugs". The 2nd game of the regular season series in Denver provided another good example. The Seawolves buzzed around the ultra-talented Pio's for the 2nd half of that game outplaying them badly.
Bucking the trend was essentially what Dean Blais was doing when he created the current run and gun paradigm. Great coaches in any number of sports have followed a similar strategy with success; think Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers who dramatically changed the NFL in the 1980's by opening up his offensive attack in a time when everyone else was emulating Tom Landry's defensive schemes.
I suspect that if a current NHL coach stacked his team full of Ryan Duncans, Tyler Hirschs, Kevin Clarks, Dean Larsons, Theo Fluerys, Paul Kariyas etc ... that he'd possibly find some success skating around their bigger counterparts. Nick Haddad summed it up nicely for Doyle's article saying,
"If you're a big monster, but you can't catch guys, you're worthless out there. That's why coach says we have to be the best conditioned team in the league."Whether or not such Shyiak's strategy will be paradigm changing is obviously still a very open question. The Seawolves have yet to have any major successes utilizing their size, but there are indications of a progression to success for the Seawolves via this 'Size/Speed' combination.
I've found the fact that the Seawolves are much bigger than their competiton so compelling that I sent an email to Adam Wodon in October of 2007 over at College Hockey News requesting that he add a height/weight averages from their Alamanc section to their weekly "Tale of the Tape" comparisons. Adam replied the same day that they had done so. He's awesome like that.
And since then, I haven't often failed to point out that comparison in just about every weekly preview I've written. When all NCAA teams finally submit their official rosters I predict that UAA will be THE BIGGEST team in Division 1.
If everybody else is building a run and gun team then the team(s) that succeed will be the one(s) that have the best run and gunners. It's a sort of "beat em or join em" question. And Coach Shyiak clearly hopes the answer "beat em" will bring the Seawolves success. After all, who really wants to "join em" if it means creating a team that looks like SCSU?
Good luck to the Seawolves this Friday night. Soften them up for the rug rats up the road eh?
9 comments:
You're up early! Another great article, and it's good to see one in the ADN as well. Thanks for the link.
Bob asked Shyiak about recruiting players who are big, and when I told him it's always fun to watch the Wolves push the Nanpooks around, he got a big smile on his face. LOL
Maybe I was just up late? LOL ...
Actually, you're right. Waking up at 2AM isn't fun. Even if you did fall asleep at 8 ...
Now I have a busy day and I'll be yawning the whole time.
Very appropriate video for the ADN article and the blog.
Lets just hope that our physical nature doesn't lead to penalties, checking from behind, elbow, interference, etc. That seemed to be our problem in years past, hopefully we can improve on that. We had a 77.8% power kill last year, drawing 230 penalties, 81 minutes of which came from Clark.
Speaking of special teams, we went 29-180, for 16.1% on the power play Lets hope we that increases.
Also after two periods, when trailing, we were 0-10-1, so we will need to improve on ability to come back in the third period, even it if is to tie the game, cause one point is better than no points.
We were 4-2-1 after leading in the first period. We only scored 20/95 goals in the first period last year, so hopefully we can find the puck the pick in early to set the tone of the game. We were also 11-3-2 after leading through two periods.
Clark only had 35 penalties last year less than 1 per game.
The team's in abilty to kill powerplays kill them last year.
When a player can get 1 pt per game he offsets 1 peanalty.
Wish the rest of the team would play tough but score and assist his teamates. A big team never intimtates skill players at this level. Und, wisconsin put out there best players on the powerplay and the penalty kill.
Let's use our seniors and juniors like the rest of the wcha does. Rolling four lines is a Joke.
Fan.
I would have to agree that size could be an asset but I am trying to think of a game where UAA has won because of it.I think the referees nuetralize things pretty quickly so that advantage is really not much. Maybe if they let the teams play like juniors it would work but it is of no advantage in the WCHA especially on the big ice. Maybe that will change. Good luck guys this Friday Night.
The coach has built a team with size and the ability to skate with any team in the WCHA. What is still needed is more pucks in the net. We had too many games where although we held the other team to a low score, we failed to score enough goals to come out on top. We have guys that need to put more pucks on net. It would be nice to see us pepper the other goalie for a change.
We should expect nothing less than the team finishing in the top five this year.
I talked to Kurt and he voted UAA at the number 6 slot in the poll.
The Great 58 has been released on INCH. UAA is at 38. UA_ at 30. As a matter of fact. every UAA oponent in the first two tourneys of the year is ranked above us except robert morris. Time to prove them wrong :)
First, it was the return of football, then it was last night-the start of the NHL reg. season, but all that only wetted my taste buds..........IM READY FOR SOME HOCKEY,.........ARE YOU?
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