Losing isn’t usually the norm for a Bob Daniels-coached team.
The Ferris State head coach has been behind the bench for 29 seasons. He’s guided his Bulldogs teams to three conference titles, four NCAA tournament appearances and one Frozen Four in that time frame. The usual expectation for the Bulldogs is to be competitive at the very least.
The last few seasons have been rough, but nobody could have predicted quite what happened in 2020-21.
The Bulldogs won just one game, against Division III Trine. They lost 23 others. The other bright spot was a shootout win over Bemidji State, which was their only source of WCHA conference points.
Overall it was the worst season in Ferris State’s 25-plus years playing hockey.
“It was rough,” Daniels said Wednesday morning.
Daniels is an optimist, though, and this season his team has given him a reason to look up. The Bulldogs, with a 4-6-0 overall record, have already quadrupled their win total, and have doubled their CCHA points total. Last weekend represented perhaps the biggest win the team has achieved in the past five years, beating No. 2-ranked Minnesota State 2-1 on Friday night. It was their first victory over the Mavericks since 2016.
“We’re a superior team from what we were a year ago,” Daniels said. “We’ve got pretty good depth, especially up front in the forward positions. A lot of the games a year ago we were losing by a goal or losing in overtime, we’re now getting half of those games.”
Daniels said that last season was so difficult in part because the Bulldogs were so young — they had 10 freshmen in the lineup regularly — and those young players didn’t get a chance to have a full offseason of training due to the pandemic.
“I know everybody went through that but we had so many young kids who really needed a full summer, fall of training to get into Division 1 conditioning and we didn’t really have that,” he said. “It was no one’s fault. I think teams that had more veterans, more underclassmen were able to absorb the COVID situation more from a physical standpoint.
“We weren’t quite a beer league team but we weren’t far from it.”
The place the Bulldogs felt their inexperience the most last season was on defense, when all of their usual rotation players were either freshmen or sophomores. That may explain why they gave up a league-worst 4.21 goals a game.
But those youngsters are now a year older, and with the addition of graduate transfer Brendon Michaelian from Robert Morris, Daniels says the difference is night and day.
He also singled out the play of sophomore goaltender Logan Stein as much improved. He played 12 games as a freshman last season and was the first Bulldog to make the Team USA World Junior team. Daniels said the offseason conditioning — which he wasn’t able to do much of last season due to COVID — has made a huge difference.
“He looks like he’s a completely different person,” Daniels said. “A year ago we couldn’t play him back-to-back, and now we have no problems with it. He’s looking very sharp late in games.”
The key for the Bulldogs going forward, Daniels said, is learning how to hold on and win games. He pointed to two games in particular — a 7-4 loss to Miami in the season opener and a 4-3 loss to Western Michigan a week later — as ones they could or even should have won. Against Miami the Bulldogs twice had a two-goal lead but the Redhawks scored five goals in a row to earn the win. And against Western, Ferris scored the go-ahead goal with less than 10 minutes left but allowed the Broncos to score twice in the final five minutes and earn the sweep.
“When you’re used to losing, it’s hard to transition to winning,” Daniels said. “The teams we had when we were winning a lot, from maybe 2010 to 2-16, there are games we won on sheer repetition. Games where we didn’t necessarily play that well, but the guys rose up at the right time and we won the game. I think the opposite is also true.”
The Bulldogs were able to do exactly that against Minnesota State, as FSU took a 2-0 lead in the second period, allowed the Mavericks to get one back on the power play minutes later but held on in the third period.
“I’m optimistic as we’re starting to chip away and get some more wins so that we can correct this,” Daniels said. “It’s not like we were protecting a whole lot of 1-goal leads last year, but this year we are finding ourselves in that situation a lot.”
The Bulldogs have a home-and-home series against instate rivals Michigan State starting Thursday at Ewigleben Arena in Big Rapids. It’s a chance for them to keep improving on their late-game defense and position themselves for the rest of the CCHA conference season.
“I think we have a chance to be a pretty good team between now and the end of the year,” Daniels said. “It’s a work in progress still though, and we’re certainly not ready-made, but we’re closer. I think we’ll be right in the middle of things in our conference. I like the possibility that this team has.”
