Sports

Eagan Boys Hockey Looks to 'Get Dirty' for Sections

After being dominant for most of the year, Wildcats look to regain balance after a couple of late-season stumbles to return to the state tournament.

If Eagan boys hockey Head Coach Mike Taylor has his way, the Wildcats will be getting a little dirty during their defense of their Section 3AA crown.

The fifth-ranked Wildcats finished their regular season last week with a 21-3-1 record en route to winning the South Suburban Conference and hope to improve on their third-place state finish of last season. With a bevy of veteran players returning from last year’s roster, Taylor had high hopes for this year’s squad heading into the season.

“I thought we’d be a pretty good team, possibly an elite team,” said Taylor. “We’re at where I thought we’d be at this point, but we’ve gone through our ups and downs.”

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Taylor was speaking after a particularly disappointing 3-2 loss to Burnsville last week in a game where the Wildcats found themselves down 2-0 early in the game. The loss was significant in the grand scheme of things, but it didn’t sit well with Taylor or the players, especially since it came on the heels of a 6-6 tie with Bloomington Jefferson the week before. 

“They’re mad, they’re not happy,” Taylor said of his squad’s mood in the locker room following the Burnsville loss.

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Prior Lake bore the brunt of that anger with a 9-1 drubbing at the hands of the Wildcats in their final tune-up before what they hope will be a swift run through Section 3AA to earn a return trip to the state tournament.

“Our main challenge (in sections) is to show up and play 51 minutes,” said Taylor. “That’s what we need to focus on, that’s what we need to do. Our other main challenge is to run our stuff and everybody being disciplined in running it.”

Taylor said he’d like the team to focus more on grinding out ‘dirty’ goals around the net on the offensive side of the puck as well as tightening up on defense when the puck is in their own zone.

“We need to get better at scoring dirty goals,” said Taylor. “We try to be too cute, and we’ve gotten away with it a lot, but not at this time of the year. We’ve got to get dirty.”

Scoring goals hasn’t typically been elusive for Eagan during the regular season. The Wildcats have average almost six goals per game this year, including scoring nine or more goals on nine separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Eagan defense has surrendered goals at a rate of less than two per game, including four shutouts.

Those numbers would be something to boast about for many teams. But when you’re trying to win a state championship and be known as an elite team, a 6-6 tie and a 3-2 loss to conference opponents as you’re preparing for a post-season run, they, too, become meaningless.

If there is such a thing as a ‘good’ loss, perhaps the Burnsville game was it. 

“It doesn’t hurt us,” said Taylor after that game. “Better now than next week.”

Taylor hopes the loss serves as a wake-up heading into Section 3AA play and that his team will find the sense of urgency that helped them battle back against Burnsville in the third period. It was a different Eagan team during the third period of that game. And a different Eagan team that handed Prior Lake a 9-1 defeat a few days later.

Now they just need to carry that momentum all the way to the Xcel Energy Center.

“They’re competitive kids,” said Taylor. “They don’t like losing.”


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