News of the Day

Minnesota-Duluth defenseman Jay Rosehill has left the Bulldogs and signed a contract with the Tampa Bay Lightning. The big defenseman only registered five assists as a freshmen and was plagued by the NCAA's crackdown on obstruction last year. Rosehill showed potential, but certainly isn't irreplaceable for the Bulldogs. Plus, I'm willing to bet that anything that results in more ice time for freshmen defenseman Matt Niskanen will be a good thing for Duluth.

Michigan added their third commitment for the class of 2008, in Honeybaked center David Wohlberg. Normally, any time I see the name "Wohl" associated with Michigan, I feel a little queasy, but he looks to be an outstanding two-way player. He's been added to the 2008 recruiting board, that you can find on the linkbar.

There could be greater significance to this commitment though. It seems as though Michigan, and perhaps other schools are being forced to change their recruiting philosophy a bit. The class of 2008 with Wohlberg, Czarnik, and Jenks will be replacing Michigan's 2004 recruiting class of Kevin Porter and Chad Kolarik, meaning Michigan now has three commitments for two scholarships. A lot of things could happen between now and then to correct this overbooking. Michigan Rivals recruiting expert tbarr hinted at the fact that Michigan might not use all of their scholarships for the class of 2006. But it seems that the more likely scenario is that Michigan is counting on the fact that NHL departures will allow them the space necessary to fill all of their offers. This could turn out to be an unfortunate side effect of the NHL's new collective bargaining agreement(which I shared my thoughts on in a recent post.) It doesn't look like coaches will be able to plan on the majority of their recruits staying all four years when trying to map out future recruiting. College hockey recruiting could become an even more muddled mess of late-summer signings, last second deparatures for other schools, and deferments for an extra year of juniors.

Luckily, to help us through this muddled mess, Chris Heisenberg has created a new blog that will follow college hockey recruiting. His list of commitments has served as an extremely helpful starting point for me with this blog, and I'm sure that his blog will be great as well. You can check it out here at http://hockeyrecruits.blogspot.com/ I'll also add it to the list of links on the sidebar.