It wasn’t a clean weekend for UMD. Yes, the Bulldogs picked up two season-opening wins over Long Island. Yes, UMD scored 11 goals on the weekend with ten different players lighting the lamp. Yes, UMD got a shutout from Carl Axelsson Saturday in his Bulldog debut.
But UMD did not get through the weekend healthy.
There’s news. Let’s get to that before we get to Sioux Falls.
10 THOUGHTS
1. Max Plante is injured. We don’t know for sure when it happened, but he did take a big hit on his first shift Friday and still finished the weekend. UMD coach Scott Sandelin didn’t want to offer a specific answer as to when it happened, so it would be speculative to pour over the tape and try to find it. Sandelin termed it an upper body injury, and said Plante is week to week with it.
Asked about the impact of his loss, Sandelin deferred just a bit.
“We’ll find out,” he said. “Haven’t played yet. Obviously, we know what he is to our team, but we haven’t played a game yet without him. So we’ll find out this weekend.”
The Bulldogs only got one goal from the Plante line over the weekend, as Zam got a one-timer to go late Saturday to make it a 4-0 game before the penalty fest happened (we’ll get to that one).
2. The impact of Max Plante’s loss is obvious, but part of the excitement about the 2026-27 edition of the Bulldogs surrounds what seems to be improved depth. This is not the way anyone would have wanted that theory tested: Not this way and not this early.
“I think if you would have went into the weekend,” Sandelin said, “going ‘We score 11 goals. The Plante line has one.’ Probably shocked by that, but they still played well. It was good to see. It was good to see (Jayson Shaugabay’s) line have a really good weekend. I thought Cal (Arnott) had a really good weekend. I thought (Peyton) Platter’s line (was good) and we had a couple different guys on there. So it was good to see those guys have good starts.”
Let’s also not pretend this isn’t significant. Max Plante still won the Hobey Baker Award last season. Were his linemates (Zam Plante and Shaugabay) a big part of his success? Yes, and Max Plante will be the first person in line to tell you that.
This, however, is a big loss for UMD. It’s one that the Bulldogs will have to rally around, however long Max is out of the lineup.
3. Even if this ends up being a longer-term absence (we don’t know much at this point, as “week to week” is awfully vague), it probably doesn’t make sense to break up Shaugabay’s line after the weekend they just had.
They combined for UMD’s first goal of the season, Shaugabay with the zone entry, then Hunter Anderson the feed to a wide-open Barrett Hall. Then on Saturday, they combined to make history, as they took advantage of Long Island defenseman Trent Powell falling down after retrieving a Ty Hanson dump-in off the opening faceoff. Sandelin said after the game they’d talked about going north right away if they won that draw to start the game, but even he probably didn’t envision Hall scoring nine seconds into the game to establish a new UMD program record for the fastest goal to start a game.
For the weekend, Shaugabay led the team (and the NCHC) with five points, Anderson finished up with four points, and Hall was the only UMD player to score more than one goal on the weekend (he had two).
“We’ve been together for about like three weeks now and just like keep building on our chemistry,” Anderson said. “I feel like we always know where each other are in practice. We have a pretty good team and I think as hard as practice has been like it just makes games easier. I feel like we have more time and space in the games and support each other well.”
4. Is the Shaugabay line sustainable? Not knocking Long Island here, but UMD will face likely better teams than the Sharks starting this weekend at Augustana.
But the line’s success likely starts with Shaugabay. I was pretty open in thinking that Zam Plante deserved more Hobey Baker and All-America consideration than he got, but so did Shaugabay. And now that he’s on his own line, it seems more likely he will get some of that love.
“We want him to be a driver,” Sandelin reiterated this week about Shaugabay. “Last year when those three (Shaugabay with Zam and Max) played together, when they’re all driving, they’re scary. They’re elite as we saw.
“I thought he looked different to me in a really good way. Like he looked like he was that driver, competing hard on pucks. Fighting through checks, making plays, setting up plays. We want him to stay in that mindset.”
In September, Sandelin talked about Shaugabay wanting to take on more of a leadership role. It’s only been one weekend, but that appears to be happening.
5. With Aaron Pionk out of the lineup with a lower-body injury Saturday, UMD inserted junior Adam Kleber into that spot on the second power play unit. Because of how UMD practices, it wasn’t a foreign concept for Kleber.
Sandelin mentioned this last week. Everyone practices special teams. UMD runs three power play units in practice regularly, and Kleber has been a mainstay on that third unit for a while now. When he got the call Saturday, he was stepping into a somewhat familiar spot.
“It’s definitely good not going into it blind,” Kleber said. “In case one guy gets injured, you’re ready to fill in. So it’s a good thing.”
Sandelin said that having three power play groups is something he had wanted to do for some time, and he finally started doing it a couple years ago.
“It helps the way we practice the power play and penalty kill so that everybody gets reps,” he said. Sandelin noted that the third unit has been rotating some so far this year, getting a few different players some looks there.
6. UMD indeed heads to Sioux Falls this weekend, playing regular-season games in South Dakota for the first time ever. It’s the Bulldogs and Augustana Vikings from Midco Arena Friday and Saturday.
The Vikings are opening their season on Friday, having played a single exhibition game up in Grand Forks last Friday (North Dakota won 4-1). Fourth-year Augustana coach Garrett Raboin joked that it would be nice to smooth out some of the edges while winning games like UMD did last weekend, but it was very good to play an exhibition game.
“If you can work out the kinks while you’re winning hockey games, that’s probably the best possible scenario,” he said. “So there’s different ways to do it. We opted to do the exhibition game. We’re going to play some counting games now coming up with North Dakota next year and the year after.”
Raboin also said North Dakota is “awfully good,” but I’m guessing you did not need to be told that.
(We got a question this week on Bulldog Insider about UMD playing an exhibition game before getting into games that counted. I get it, because the Bulldogs were a bit, um, rough around the edges in that opener. But Friday was the first day NCAA men’s teams could play games of any kind, whether they counted or not. Sandelin is part of a group of coaches trying to get some rule changes that would allow for more games in September. Given the sometimes-glacial speed that we get things changed in college hockey, I would not hold my breath.)
Sandelin is well aware of the challenges his team will face this weekend.
“The hill gets steeper,” he said about the upcoming schedule, which includes Minnesota and Bemidji State before NCHC play opens up at Colorado College Halloween weekend.
“They play very structured,” he said of the Vikings. “They don’t give you a lot. It’ll be a really good test for us. It’s good to go on the road. We’ve been at home for a long time.”
7. With Augie’s emergence on the Division I scene, it’s hard not to notice the depth of quality, close-by adversaries Sandelin has to pick from when making non-conference schedules.
“We’re lucky,” Sandelin said. “Down the road, we’re going to start with Mankato again. Even Wisconsin, trying to get them, obviously the Minnesota and Bemidji things are kind of staples a little bit. Yeah, it’s great. St. Thomas was one of those teams too until they joined their league. So it’s nice to have that. Augie’s a really good hockey team. They’re picked to finish near the top of that league. And we played them last year. We had two really, really good games with them.”
“Before I took the job here,” Raboin said, “a lot of the wiser veteran coaches talked about how great of a thing this is going to be and how it’s going to have success in the region. We’ve been able to play the Denver’s, CC’s, Arizona, we’ve played almost every NCHC time team outside of Western and Miami and we’re gonna play Ohio State. We opened with Wisconsin so we’re gonna kind of try to chip away at playing some of these teams. Maybe we’ll play Minnesota. We just like that exposure of showing ourselves off to some of these road crowds in the region and having them come back so our fans at home get to see some of these programs that they’ve maybe cheered for or seen in the past and it’s cool. It’s cool for them to see Augie, this small South Dakota school, play some of these blue blood programs that have been around for years and years.”
8. Week two of the men’s college hockey season sees St. Cloud State open its home schedule against Michigan Tech. The NCHC’s Huskies have a new coach in Nick Oliver, and they lost in overtime Saturday night in Bemidji. The CCHA’s Huskies picked up a two-game home sweep of Minnesota.
Arizona State, with someone coaching, will host Holy Cross to kick off its home slate at Mullett Arena. AD Graham Rossini had indicated last week the Sun Devils intended to hire an interim coach this week, but we’re past the midpoint of this week as of this writing and no interim coach has been hired.
NCHC newcomer St. Thomas opens at home against Air Force. Western Michigan goes home and home with Ferris State, starting Thursday night in Kalamazoo.
North Dakota is home and home with Bemidji State, a series that starts Friday night at Sanford Center.
Off sweeps last weekend, Colorado College (beat UMass twice at home) and Denver (won twice at Anchorage) will take turns hosting the U.S. Under 18 National Team.
9. The UMD women’s hockey team is home this weekend to start WCHA play against St. Thomas. The Bulldogs will play without two key pieces, as junior forward Caitlin Kraemer and senior goalie Eve Gascon are both at a Canadian National Team training camp ahead of next month’s IIHF World Championships.
It’s not ideal scheduling, but the IIHF moved the tournament to November on pretty short notice. This is the first of four years we will see this timing for that event, which is in Denmark this year. Back in September, I asked UMD coach Laura Schuler about the potential of there being a break in the college women’s hockey schedule to accommodate the Worlds, akin to what you see in professional soccer where FIFA schedules international windows and pro leagues around the world go dark for a couple weeks at a time. While she said those conversations are ongoing, the situation is complicated by the fact that these national teams also have training camps before Worlds, so you can schedule around the tournament, but probably not both that and these training camps.
Of course, facing a league opponent without your two best players is also not ideal. But Schuler is excited about the opportunity that lies ahead for some of her younger players.
10. UMD settled for a split last weekend at Vermont, thanks to Josie St. Martin’s walkoff winner in overtime Saturday afternoon.
Friday’s 3-0 loss wasn’t a great day for the Bulldogs, with Schuler lamenting her team’s poor defensive details (“We were so aggressive that we didn’t play well structurally,” she said).
But Saturday was a good response to some early-season adversity.
“I thought our response was excellent on Saturday,” Schuler said, “in particular the first and second period. And then they really brought it to us in the third. And we were able to kind of hold our ground and get it to overtime and did our thing. So I was really happy with that. And not only that, but we came back twice. So we were down 1-0, came back, got down 2-1, came back, tied it again, and then won it in overtime. So I was super proud of them.”
Schuler compared Vermont’s style of play to St. Thomas, so she’s hopeful it was good preparation for this weekend’s 6pm and 3pm games at Amsoil Arena.
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We’ll be heading to Sioux Falls Thursday and bringing you the games this weekend. Coverage at 6:30pm Friday and 5:30pm Saturday from Midco Arena on KDAL.
Back pregame with lines. Enjoy!
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