Sunday Morning Hockey Report: The Man in the Box

So guess what? UAA lost to Fairbanks yesterday 2-1. In fact, the Seawolves have only had one goal in the last two games they have played. Agh!

As someone who likes to solve problems, I have put in some time thinking about what the problem is.

Let's start with what is good. They did do pretty well in keeping up with the Nanooks, and they certainly did not let Fairbanks get an exorbitant number of shots on goal like they did against Vermont. They actually had some passes that weren't awful, although this was still inconsistent. Furthermore, I actually saw then running some sort of an offense during a power play, which was certainly an improvement.

In between the improvements, though, was a huge chasm of ugliness.

The first problem, of course, is that no matter what people say, the best offense is really to have an offense. UAA just doesn't seem to do that -- they just kind of push the puck into the boards and hang around behind the goal waiting for something to happen. Sometimes they would pass it around in a big half-circle, but rarely got it to the guy in the middle who could actually score -- granted, the guy in the middle was usually just standing there in the middle of a bunch of opponents so he wasn't helping as much as he could have. They should do more plays like in the Vermont game, where every once in a while one of the guys on the outside of the half circle would "charge" the center. They should also work on creating an offense that is somewhat effective.

The other horrible thing is, the Seawolves have to figure out how to take advantage on a power play. If I was on the other team, I would just commit penalties in order to get the Seawolves on power plays, since that's the one time you know they won't score!

The third thing that the Seawolves need are anger management classes. They spend a lot of time concentrating on hitting the other team as hard as possible, and there were many times where they forgot the puck. Now granted, when we play thuggishly, we tend to drag teams down to our level, but we also got into some huge penalties and fights because of it. I mean, it was one of those games where there were LOTS of fights -- to me, it's embarrassing.

The coolest thing last night, though was that the NYE remote-controlled blimp that flies in between periods has a new friend! Another guy had a remote-controlled airplane that was doing all these fanstastic acrobatics -- loops, stalls, spins. We were all fascinated -- I could watch it all day.

Sigh. Anyways, they play today at 5...we're going to Tivo the game and see if it comes out any better tonight ;)