Episode 4 of the Chasing MacNaughton Podcast from Tech Hockey Guide; “One Crazy Fortnight.” This week Tim Braun, Rob Gilreath, Dustin Lindstrom and special guest Drew Evans from the BGSUHockey.com (times are approximate) discuss:
- Interview with Drew Evans (1:42)
- BGSU Questions (31:12)
- Review of Alaska-Anchorage Series (34:11)
- Preview of Clarkson Series (40:51)
- WCHA/MTU Questions (42:00)
- Weekend Predictions (54:20)
As liner notes to this week’s episode, we’ll include highlights from the UAA vs MTU series. For highlights of other series check out flohockey.tv.
Pairwise gets talked about a lot since this is how teams are selected for the tournament. We mentioned that MTU didn’t really improve their situation this week with the sweep of the lowly Seawolves. Going into the weekend, the Huskies were 10th in the PWR with an RPI of 0.5478. After all the games on Tuesday, Michigan Tech now sits 13th with an RPI of 0.5472. Now you might be asking, how did their RPI drop if they didn’t lose and winning against weak opponents can’t negatively impact RPI?
Well, in a vacuum their numbers didn’t go down but there were over 50 other games in the last week and every one of them plays into the rankings somewhere. Much like the loss for NMU the weekend before, a loss to UAA either night would have cost MTU almost 200 points. They’d currently be 19th in the PWR with an RPI of 0.5287. Once again this is from CHN’s pairwise customization tab. Hopefully soon our PWR predictor will be up and I’ll be able to get more in-depth analysis to show where MTU would be without the UAA games happening to know how much their standing changed from those results.
In the Clarkson preview we talked about how highly rated in both the polls and PWR Clarkson is despite the fact they haven’t really beaten anyone. I’m pretty sure Jonathan Zamaites will take the deep dive on this tomorrow but their best win by current PWR is against #32 Wisconsin. Most of their wins (7 of 11) have been against teams in the in the 50th. They can only play the schedule in front of them but heading into this series they haven’t faced two teams in the top 20 and they lost both those games.
Cutting Room Floor
This week I finally found time and thought ahead to release a full length episode on our Patreon site. If you sign up at the Black level, you’ll get access to the full episode which has over 23 minutes of additional content. I’ll be trimming down each episode as close to an hour as I can get and I’ll release an episode with a cleaned up edit that probably closer to 90 minutes. By signing up on Patreon, you’ll also get the content earlier. If things go well, hopefully I’ll get it published on Tuesday nights. We’ve also released the unpublished episode 0, our practice run from early November for your listening pleasure.
Now to discuss what was cut. Jeffry Frederick asked a bunch of questions and we talked about three of the four, but ended up excluding the segment about fundraising efforts for enclosing the south end of the Slater Family Ice Arena. We talked for like 12 minutes about this and the story wondered into cavernous building at OSU and Wisconsin.
We also discussed the next month for the WCHA laying out the 13-17 non-conference games between now and Sunday, January 5, 2020. This goes through MTU’s series with ASU and the Huskies have 6 of those games. To hear more of our thoughts you’ll have to sign up for our Patreon or maybe we’ll rehash it again next week. For reference here are the 13-17 games:
| MTU vs Clarkson (x2) | MTU @ GLi (x1-2) | MTU @ ASU (x2) |
| FSU @ GLi (x1-2) | MSU @ Mariucci (x1-2) | BSU @ Mariucci (x1-2) |
| LSSU @ Catamount (x2) | UAH @ UND (x2) | BGSU vs Miami (x1) |
The last segment that was cut was some miscellaneous content but it mostly stemmed from this twitter string from Mike Eidebles:
I thought it was very fitting that it was recommend this theoretical tournament be called the Maneet Singh Memorial Classic. I’ll leave the notes at that but MTU/WCHA released a couple interesting things this week and we’ll add them here even though they didn’t make the cut in discussion. Well we did talk about Matt Jurusik and the “goaltendind caroseul under Joe Shawhan, we thought that he’s done a great job on mainly playing Jurusik this week. This week the WCHA took it a step further and published a piece on Matt Jurusik titled “Headed In the Right Direction.” It’s a great article on the situation for the Huskies and how Jurusik has taken his opportunity and ran with it. Finally, MTU twitter published some interestingly good stats for some MTU players:
One final note, I’d like to give an extra thank you to the first four patrons that all signed up on Patreon yesterday. Beyond our patron saint Doc McResin, thank yous go out to Steve Buck, Marvin Wilson, Mark Bailey and Alex Slepak for supporting the podcast.
Tim is a 2004 graduate of Michigan Tech. He is a co-founder of both Mitch’s Misfits and Tech Hockey Guide. With recent additions to the staff, Tim is again able to focus on his passion, recruiting. He currently works as an environmental engineer and resides in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Area.
