The same old hockey team from Alaska-Fairbanks will be visiting BG this weekend for two Central Collegiate Hockey Association games.
But the Nanooks have a fresh face behind the bench this season, and in fact it’s a familiar one for BG coach Scott Paluch. Doc DelCastillo was hired this past June to lead a team that finished next to last in the CCHA in 2006-07.
Paluch’s team, of course, did finish in the basement last season.
However, Paluch and Delcastillo, two good coaching friends from the past, have both managed to turn their respective teams around this season. The Falcons, who are 13-13-0 overall and 10-10-0 in the CCHA, currently rest three points up of the Nanooks (7-15-4, 7-12-3) in the league standings.
When the two men coached together a few years back, they led a U.S.A. Hockey Under-18 Select team to a gold medal in Slovakia. This weekend, though, they are unlikely to give much thought to those memories. Rather, their minds will be on the approaching playoff positioning matters at hand.
‘Doc’s teams are always going to play hard,’ Paluch said. ‘We knew last year that this team had a lot of skilled players. It doesn’t surprise me that his team is playing well right now.’
Alaska is looking to finish at or above their current eighth place in the standings, as that would give them home ice advantage in the first round of the CCHA playoffs.
Home ice in Alaska.
Right. Doesn’t sound like a place many CCHA teams fancy.
BG is in the same boat looking to secure a coveted first-round playoff advantage, but they’ll have to stop a few of those talented players that Paluch mentioned.
Dion Knelsen had a solid first season last winter, putting up 22 points as a freshman forward for the Nanooks. He has returned to form in 2007-08 by totaling 24 points in his sophomore year.
Yet Knelsen is only second on his team in points.
First on that list is Tyler Eckford, a junior with 25 points who is arguably one of the top scoring defenseman in the land. Eckford, a prospect of the New Jersey Devils, earned CCHA player of the week honors last season, but he’s hardly the most recent Alaskan player to do so.
In fact, two such Nanooks are coming off weeks in which they garnered attention in the CCHA by helping to sweep Western Michigan. Senior captain T.J. Campbell earned Defensive Player of the Week with a goal, two assists, and a plus-3 rating, while goalie Wylie Rogers was awarded the top weekly goalie nomination for the seventh time in his career.
‘They’re right behind us in the standings,’ said goalie Nick Eno who stopped an obscene number of shots for the Falcons last weekend at Ohio State. ‘All the rest of the games are big for us.’
Eno, a freshman who stands 6 feet 3 inches as the second tallest player on the team, stopped 79 total Buckeye shots while getting both starts last weekend. If he earns both starts in goal again tonight and tomorrow at 7:05 p.m., he will need to come up big for the Falcons to have any chance at putting some distance between themselves and Alaska.
‘It will be interesting,’ said Ryan Hohl of Alaska who transferred out of BG this past semester. ‘We’re coming after them.’
