When describing on Tuesday the elevator pitch for how he likes his St. Cloud State team to play, coach Brett Larson pointed to a pair of wins from last weekend that helped the Huskies become the new No. 1 human-polled team in the country.
A home sweep of third-ranked Denver saw SCSU jump three spaces to the top of the USCHO Division I Men’s Poll. The Huskies scored six of the last seven goals in a 7-3 win Friday, with Jami Krannila scoring twice and then setting up both goals in a 2-0 win Saturday.
Reaching the top of the USCHO poll for the first time since Nov. 2021 involved the Huskies putting in what Larson called the team’s most consistent weekend this season with regards to sticking to the Huskies’ game plan.
“Denver’s certainly one of the best teams we’ve faced, and they created opportunities, but when they did, we got good goaltending and we probably had our best 120 minutes of playing the way we want to play,” Larson said.
“We just did a good job of managing the puck, and we know Denver’s so good off the transition that we wanted to make them play 200 feet. We wanted to try to make their top forwards defend a little bit, and we didn’t want to turn the series into a chance-for-chance track meet. Getting the ground game going a little bit where we could manage the puck, play below the tops of their circles, our guys committed to that throughout the weekend.”
St. Cloud trailed 2-1 coming up on the midway point of Friday’s second period, before Krannila and Jack Rogers scored consecutive goals in a three-minute span. Krannila then put the Huskies ahead for good at 4-2, scoring off an assist from Grant Cruikshank, who started an odd-man rush by jumping out of the penalty box after SCSU killed off a 5-on-3 Denver power play.
Another big three-minute, second-period push provided both of the Huskies’ goals in Saturday’s rematch. Rogers backhanded a shot home at 7:32, and moments later, during a St. Cloud power play, Zach Okabe banged home the rebound from an initial Krannila shot.
Goaltender Jaxon Castor handled the rest, making 19 saves for his second shutout of the season. The first came on Jan. 7, when the Huskies won 3-0 over Minnesota, the only team currently above St. Cloud in the PairWise Rankings, the biggest tool for deciding who gets what come NCAA tournament time.
The Huskies would be a No. 1 regional seed if the tournament started now instead of March. Their wins last weekend were the team’s fifth and sixth this season against teams ranked in the top three.
“I’ve been pleased with how our guys have stepped up in big moments,” Larson said. “When we’ve been faced with a big challenge playing a top team, so far, that has brought out the best in us.”
Sitting atop the polls, though, isn’t something Larson invests thought in. He relayed that to his players during a team meeting Tuesday.
“We talked about just staying in the moment, in the day-to-day development of trying to get better, and preparing for our next opponent, and right now, that’s Minnesota Duluth,” Larson said, pointing to this week’s trip to the Twin Ports area. “It’s always a battle going into Duluth’s rink, and we just talked about limiting outside distractions, and keeping our focus narrow and short-term on what we can control right now.
“The polls at this time of year don’t matter, and every coach will say that the last poll that matters is the last one. Our biggest job is to not think too much about the past or the future, but just focus on right now.”
