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North Dakota seems to have won their most recent round of legal battles with the NCAA, though this victory was more important for the Sioux football team than for the hockey team.

I'm not sure which is more stupid. The NCAA trying to force UND to change their mascot, or the resulting drawn out legal battle. Junior Hockey Blog makes its case for the former by linking to a Star-Trib blog entry that talks about how members of the Sioux Nation are tired of being harassed for not caring about UND's logo.

The NTDP U17 team played in the Four Nations Cup last weekend. The United States came in second place with a record of 2-2, and finished behind first place Russia, who went undefeated. The US actually built up a 4-0 lead on the Russians, but Russia came back with 5 unanswered goals to win in overtime.

The word I got from the tournament is that that is a particularly strong group for the Russians. Russia had 6 out of the top 7 scorers in the tournament. Nikita Filatov was the overall leader with 9 points, including three straight goals in Russia's comeback in the third period.

For the US, Danny Kristo was the leading scorer for the US. Other players that impressed were Vinny Saponari, Pat Gaul, Jordan Schroeder, and David Wohlberg. Everyone seems to think that this is a pretty weak class for defenseman on the NTDP team.

NTDP defenseman Ryan Grimshaw was spotted watching Michigan take on Nebraska-Omaha, at Yost this weekend, by Packer487, who runs The Blog That Yost Built.

Mike Louwerse is excited to play for Mankato .

Traverse City's Spencer Sonneveldt becomes the first '91 birthdate in the NAHL. He likely won't play much this year, since he's behind two pretty good goalies in Stefan Shively and Kyle Jendra, but he should get lots of playing time next season. The link comes via Junior Hockey Blog, who reminds that the last 15 year old goalie in the NAHL was Al Montoya.

Also courtesy of JHB, is this article on the NTDP from the Sporting News website. I know, I cringed too when I saw the name Sporting News, but it's written by Ken McKenna of Hockey's Future, so it's a well-written piece, though it's targeted more at the non-hockey fan, meaning there's probably nothing in there that you didn't already know.

The College Hockey News Blog has a few new blogs that haven't been mentioned here. It's nice to see some more eastern blogs jump into the mix.

About the only entertaining thing to come out this weekend's clutch and grab fest between Minnesota State and Alaska-Anchorage(I'm offering five dollars to referee Jon Campion if he can even spell the word obstruction), was that Chad Brownlee's injury on Saturday forced MSU to finally go with the long awaited Fransen-Friesen defensive pairing. I hope somebody alerts David Letterman to this phenomena.