By the time the puck drops for the Gophers at 7:32 p.m. Thursday in their NCAA men’s hockey Fargo Regional semifinal against Massachusetts, they will have gone 18 days between games.
It’s not the way coach Bob Motzko would have drawn it up, but it’s the reality the Gophers face after their first-round ouster against Notre Dame in the Big Ten tournament.
“From start of the year, we’ve had a great group, and they’ve been getting after it, and they’ve been motivated to push each other,” Motzko said Monday. “It’s all we could do is push each other in practice. We did have an exhibition game down in Rochester [on March 15], and that had some benefit to it, but last week, we had to push, and it had to come internally.”
Motzko is wary of a sluggish start by the second-seeded Gophers (25-10-4) against No. 3 seed UMass (20-13-5) given the long break, but he believes he has a team that can weather that storm.
“We just can’t shoot ourselves in the foot early in the game — that’s the big thing," Motzko said. “We’ll get traction as the game goes on.”
The winner of the Gophers-Minutemen semifinal will face the winner of Thursday’s 4 p.m. semifinal between top-seeded Western Michigan and No. 4 seed Minnesota State Mankato in Saturday’s regional final at Scheels Arena. The Gophers still have all their primary goals in front of them — a return to the Frozen Four and a national championship — and believe they can achieve them.
“It’s been our goal since beginning of summer coming in,” sophomore defenseman Sam Rinzel said of the NCAA title. “So, the whole group knows it, and the whole group has the same kind of plan. We want to go achieve it.”
The time off enabled the Gophers to heal bumps and bruises, but it wasn’t long enough for senior center Aaron Huglen, who suffered a knee injury in the finale against Notre Dame and will miss the entire NCAA tournament. Freshman forward August Falloon is out 2-3 weeks because of an undisclosed injury, Motzko said.
