There are times when the brotherhood of hockey shows itself, as men who wear different-colored sweaters come together to show that the game uniting them is stronger than the adversarial on-ice differences that divide them.
The past week in the WCHA was not one of those times.
Perhaps it’s the weight of a tight conference race combined with the mid-season doldrums when injuries pile up, but the league sounded like anything but a dozen teams united under one banner over the past seven days or so.
Don Lucia says it might be a while before the Gophers are back in Grand Forks.
It started, as so many of college hockey’s newsworthy events seem to, in Grand Forks on Saturday, as the final seconds ticked away on Minnesota’s decisive 6-2 win over North Dakota. As the final horn sounded, North Dakota defenseman Ben Blood fired a puck which touched off a brief scrum with a few players from both teams. In the subsequent handshake line, Blood took a swipe at Minnesota’s Kyle Rau, which touched off another tussle, as Blood and Seth Ambroz paired up.
High above the ice, Gophers radio announcer Wally Shaver took exception at Blood’s action and launched into an on-air rant, which concluded with the radio booth veteran calling North Dakota, “cheap hoseheads.”
North Dakota coach Dave Hakstol, to his credit, did the right thing to send a message internally and externally, stripping Blood of the player’s assistant captain status early in the week.
That same night, several hours drive south down I-29, Nebraska Omaha managed to do what no other team had accomplished since the second week of the season. The Mavericks got 43 saves from Ryan Massa, and beat top-ranked Minnesota Duluth 3-1, snapping the Bulldogs’ 17-game unbeaten string. But before the final horn sounded in that one, there were words, possibly gestures, and at least one dangerous hit exchanged between Omaha’s Dominic Zombo and Duluth’s J.T. Brown.
On Tuesday the WCHA announced a one-game suspension for Zombo, for a knee-to-knee check on Brown. This prompted Mavs coach Dean Blais to question why Brown wasn’t punished for some unpleasantness of his own. Blais told Rob White of the Omaha World-Herald that Brown had flashed an obscene gesture during the game, which should be worthy of a suspension as well.
“You suspended Zombo for a hit, OK. Now, what are you going to do with J.T. Brown?” Blais asked rhetorically. “To me, that’s worse than the hit.”
As of this writing, the WCHA has taken no action against Brown, and it is unknown if there will be a further league review of the alleged incident. In past years, Hakstol was suspended for two games for flashing a middle finger on TV during a game.
The tension between Minnesota and North Dakota reappeared later in the week when Hakstol fired back at Shaver on a radio show.
“We all work for somebody, I get it. I understand that,” Hakstol said. “But a man that I’ve known for a long time, almost 20 years, I thought really crossed the line. I haven’t spoken with him but I’m really upset about it and I think it was wrong.”
A day later, when asked about the high-tension rivalry between the Gophers and North Dakota, Minnesota coach Don Lucia suggested that a cooling off period might be in order starting in two years when the teams are no longer in the same conference.
“We will go back there as a non-conference team,” Lucia said at his weekly gathering with the media. “We have a great rivalry. Sometimes it gets a little over the top and I’m not sure that is healthy for anybody. So we will continue to play, but I doubt we will continue to play each and every year.”
He added that the Gophers’ schedule for the 2013-14 season, their first in the Big Ten, is set save for two home games that they have to fill, and it does not include a trip to North Dakota. That means it will be at least three years before Minnesota’s next visit to the Ralph.
The official breakup of the current WCHA is still more than a year away. But with some actions on the ice and some words off the ice this week, it looks like some cracks are already appearing.
