Earth-shaking Anchorage weekend for Tech
While reviewing video in a 17th-floor hotel room in Anchorage last Saturday morning, Michigan Tech coach Jamie Russell got a strange feeling unfamiliar to residents of the Upper Peninsula.
“It was shaking pretty good for a little while,” Russell said of the hotel room. Along with the pair of 3-3 ties they collected at Sullivan Arena, the Huskies also got to experience a little taste of life on the Pacific Rim, as an earthquake struck Alaska that morning.
The earthquake had its epicenter more than 150 miles from Anchorage, but was still felt throughout the region, although with a magnitude of 5.7, no damage or injuries were reported. By contrast, the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 had an 8.4 magnitude and left 131 dead.
The off-ice adventures really began for the Huskies on Friday night, when they headed to the rink only to find the route to their team bus blocked by more than a dozen Anchorage police cars (lights and sirens in full bloom) for some major arrest taking place right outside the hotel. That distraction and a delayed arrival at Sullivan Arena didn’t stop them from rallying late in the third period to earn a point versus the Seawolves. Then came the plate tectonics-induced wake-up call on Saturday.
Russell doesn’t believe he has any experts in fault lines or other geologic phenomena on his roster, but he turned to the team’s resident expert on everything, junior defenseman Eli Vlaisavljevich. A 4.0 student majoring in biomechanical engineering, Vlaisavljevich is a candidate for a renowned Goldwater Scholarship and some predict he may become the second Rhodes Scholar (after Colorado College’s Paul Markovich in 1988) to play in the WCHA. Although, according to the coach, Vlaisavljevich’s detailed explanation of the forces at work causing the ground to shake was of little help.
“Eli started to explain things for me, and he lost me about three sentences into his presentation,” said Russell, with a laugh. The 5-18-5 Huskies have this weekend off before hosting Colorado College in their annual Winter Carnival series and are quickly running out of time if they hope to escape the WCHA cellar. Russell said the team’s spate of injures has been well-documented, but as much of a struggle has been a schedule filled with ill-timed matchups.
“It’s not always just who you play, it’s when you play them,” Russell said. “We first played at CC early in the season when they were the defending league champs and things were going well for them. We got to play Minnesota in November when they were ranked one or two in the nation. And more recently we got North Dakota when they were in the middle of their normal second half run.”
Rest leads to rust for Pioneers, but Salazar still shines
Take away all of the mess they’ve come to call “Gwozgate” in North Dakota this week, and for the coach at the center of the attention, what was done by his team on the ice was of much bigger concern than any conversations with officials or suspension-inducing visits to the pressbox.
After having a weekend off prior to his team’s visit to Grand Forks, Denver coach George Gwozdecky was hoping that the rest and recover would be good for the Pioneers. Instead he saw something akin to rust as the Fighting Sioux stormed to an early 4-0 lead en route to an 8-3 win.
“You could certainly see we were nowhere close to being ready for the speed and the intensity we were facing in the first period on Friday,” Gwozdecky said. “I can’t remember a time in all of my years of coaching when I’ve seen that many odd-man rushes given up in so short a span.”
The optimist will point to the Pioneers’ perch atop the WCHA standings (they lead North Dakota by a point with 10 conference games remaining) and say that all is well in the rink that students have come to call “Boonetown.” Others point to Denver’s 2-2-2 record in January as a sign that all is not as it should be, and that the loss of Tyler Bozak is hurting more than is admitted.
“We are where I think we should be an where I expected we would be by this point in our development,” said Gwozdecky. “We’re still in the process of trying to find our best lineup.”
Although any lineup you could sketch for the Pioneers would certainly feature a prominent role for surprising freshman forward Luke Salazar. The suburban Denver kid scored his team-leading 12th goal last weekend and is a solid bet to be DU’s next member of the WCHA All-Rookie team.
“To say he’s been a pleasant surprise is too obvious a statement,” Gwozdecky said. “Like a lot of our young players, he continues to get better and better by learning as he goes. They become more multi-dimensional by the day.”
The Pioneers host Alaska Anchorage this weekend, then play five of their seven February games on the road.
