As you can see on the front page, St. Cloud State is CHN’s Team of the Week. I had the opportunity to speak with sophomore Mikey Eyssimont yesterday about the Huskies’ weekend sweep of Minnesota — featuring back-to-back dramatic comebacks.

Eyssimont, an LA Kings draft pick, played a big role in each win. Friday, he scored a power play goal to cut Minnesota’s lead to 5-4 with six minutes to play (St. Cloud went on to win, 6-5, in OT), and on Saturday, he picked the top corner over Minnesota goaltender Eric Schierhorn’s left shoulder with a pinpoint wrist shot in the third period — the eventual game-winning goal.

You can read more about the comeback wins in the link above, but I also talked to Eyssimont about St. Cloud’s power play, which proved to be a spark plug for the weekend sweep. The Huskies went 3-for-6 on Friday night (not including the game-tying extra-attacker goal with 73 seconds left in regulation), and Eyssimont’s Saturday night snipe came on the man-advantage as well.

Said Eyssimont, “It’s really important for us. We have a lot of work to do on our penalty killing, but our power play was a good sign. [This weekend vs. Alabama-Huntsville], we’re going to try and keep our power play dialed in, and improve our penalty kill.”

The weekend sweep also gave St. Cloud fans some optimism, after losing so much to graduation and early departures in the offseason.

“It’s a totally new team this year,” Eyssimont acknowledged. “We lost a ton of scoring, and some really good players. But I think the guys who played with them, they learned a lot. I know I learned a lot from guys like [Kalle] Kossila and [Ethan] Prow.

“But it’s not going to be the same team this year. I don’t think that means we can’t put up seven or eight goals in a game. I think we still have a lot of really good offense. But we’re going to find different ways and different players to make that happen.”

Going forward, look for junior Judd Peterson, sophomore Jacob Benson, and freshman Jake Wahlin (who scored Friday night’s sudden-death game-winner), to join Eyssimont in providing much of the scoring this season.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 - 10:58 am | Blogs, NCHC, Notes, Thoughts, Ramblings