Dave Hakstol Good Quotations

I feel pretty good about our position as far as the NCAA tournament goes. But every game is an opportunity to improve your position. Every game is an opportunity to improve your overall team play. Hopefully we haven't peaked yet.

He made an awful lot of good saves. That's one factor you can't control in a hockey game -- how the guy wearing the pads at the other end is going to play.

I think the way we played was the most important not necessarily the outcome of the game. We had a poor performance (Friday) night, taking nothing away from Minnesota, because they had a lot to do with that. But we really needed to come out with a good team effort, and that's what we did.

I think it's important to be playing well at this time of year. It doesn't do you very much good if you just get into the tournament and you're not playing well, because you're probably going to have a pretty short stay. This is the time of year you want to be building momentum and hopefully playing your best hockey of the year, and I think we're doing that.

We've got some guys back there who can bring some offensive ability and make some offensive plays. That's part of being a good offensive team. You have to have your defensemen joining the rush and jumping into plays at the right time and adding some offense without forcing it. That's something young guys grow into.

We're not going to expect a guy to jump into the league his first year and lead the WCHA in defenseman scoring. That's not realistic. I think our young guys are doing a good job, but they can continue to get better and continue to add more offense. We want them to do that.

Drew is very important because he plays in all situations. He brings a certain level of calmness and good stability.

The second half of their season, they've been as good as anybody. We fought hard to get home-ice advantage. Now we have to take advantage of it.

We wanted an opportunity to come back to the rink (today) and prepare for another game. That's what our focus was tonight. We had a real tough task against a real good Michigan team. We had leads of two, three and even four goals, but against that team and the weapons that they have, you really never feel comfortable.

The No. 1 thing it says is that what our team is doing offensively maybe gets more of the headlines. But if you take a close look at this team, they're a group of guys who take a lot of pride in good team defense.

All the way through, our forward units did a good job and worked extremely hard down low. Michigan Tech is tough to play against. It was an awfully tight hockey game going into the third period. But the guys continued to do the little things and eventually they were rewarded for it.

We saw some good chemistry with our forward unit. All the goals we scored came after two or three passes.