North Dakota Fighting Hawks
Season record: 29-9-1
How they got to Las Vegas: Won the Sioux Falls Regional, beating Merrimack 3-0 and Quinnipiac 5-0
Top players: F Will Zellers (18-16-34), F Ellis Rickwood (8-28-36), D Abram Wiebe (5-24-29) F Cole Reschny (6-29-35).
Top goalie: Jan Špunar (20-4-1, 1.90 goals-against average, .917 save percentage).
Why they’ll win the national championship: There may not be a hotter team in the field right now than North Dakota. The Fighting Hawks blanked a Merrimack team that surprised so many in winning Hockey
East to make the NCAA tournament, then put Quinnipiac to sleep early in the Sioux Falls Regional final.
Why they won’t win the national championship: Could UND’s dominance in Sioux Falls have been an aberration? Those were effectively home games for the Fighting Hawks, taking a straight shot down I-29, and their most recent game before that saw them get blasted at home by Minnesota Duluth in the NCHC semifinals. Which Fighting Hawks team shows up in Vegas?
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Not that any of this year’s Frozen Four participants are pushovers, but North Dakota might be the toughest team of the four to play against right now.
The Fighting Hawks are fresh off of a pair of exceptional performances at the Sioux Falls regional, blanking both Merrimack and Quinnipiac through solid performances from freshman goaltender Jan
Špunar.
All over the ice, though, UND was the best team there, and so much of what they did was built from the back.
“We kind of find in these big games that there’s not a lot of rush chances,” coach Dane Jackson said. “You have to take what the game gives you, and I thought our guys did a nice job of managing the
puck. When we had a chip entry or had to shoot a puck out of the (defensive) zone, we did that and we had the humility to kind of just play a simple game, but I thought that allowed us to play pretty fast, and
we were playing north.
“We did get some chances because of our kind of simple, direct play, so I think that’s really important that we stick with that, about having that mindset to go north and play fast, and then we always have a check-
to-score mentality,” he added. “We always say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to earn the right to play on offense,’ so you’ve got to be driving your legs, having good sticks, trying to turn pucks over so that we get that opportunity to play on offense, and I thought our guys had a pretty good mindset each night to defend first, but then with our hard work defensively, I thought we transitioned and earned time in the offensive zone with some rush
chances as well.”
Look for Cody Croal to build upon the three goals he has already scored in this NCAA tournament, while Jack Kernan and Dylan James both found the back of the net twice in Sioux Falls. This UND team isn’t
short on weapons, but they also might not need a huge arsenal when Špunar is playing like he did at the regional.
In a Frozen Four field headlined by freshman goaltenders, Špunar seems to be as much the real deal as any of his contemporaries heading to Las Vegas.
“The professionalism and the readiness for those big moments have been kind of groomed over being in hard-fought battles in junior hockey,” Jackson said. “With our guy, with Jan Špunar, he had played two years in Portland (with the WHL’s Winterhawks) and one in Dubuque (with the USHL’s Fighting Saints), so he had a lot of hockey under his belt, so I think the high level of competition and the big moments don’t seem to faze him at all.”