It's Friday, I'm in Love

Monday, you can hold your head
Tuesday, Wednesday stay in bed
Or Thursday - watch the walls instead
It's Friday, I'm in love

Badger Men v. minnesota, Fri/Sat Oct 24/25 @ 7 PM CT

First, I feel that I have no choice but to reference a couple of quotes from Gandalf's biography of Alex Kangas yesterday. After all, Gandalf tells me that it's important to know your opponent.

At this point I showed the zoo keeper the picture to the left [you know the photo we're talking about . . . classic Frazee], and inquired if Alex was capable of making such a play w/ his kangaroo skills. He laughed and replied, "what the f*ck is that! Alex is a kangaroo not some drunk idiot wasted on long island ice teas. I've seen a sieve in my day, but nothing like that

So, it appears that Kangas is a sieve, but not quite as bad as Frazee. Good to know.

The zoo keeper recounted his final conversation w/ Alex before he departed for the land of 10,000 lakes. "I asked him why he would leave us here in San Diego and head way up north. He looked me straight in the eye and told me he liked the color of their jerseys, it reminded him of what it looked like when he would crap on my boots. Then he thought he was awfully funny and left me a nice parting gift right there on my new Red Wings."

Not much to learn from this; but being easily amused, I just thought it was funny.

I also thing we can learn from Gandalf's WCHA preview of minnesota, so feel free to refer to that at your convenience.

Now, let's get to business, here. If you can't make it to the KC, here's how you can follow the game:

TV: FSN (Friday), Big Ten Network (Saturday)
Radio: WIBA 131o
Audio stream: Yahoo Sports ($4.95/mo)
Stats: uwbadgers LiveStats
Game blog: I don't expect Milewski to live blog this weekend (away games only, I think), but he should have pre- and post-game entries.

Here are the Badgers' projected lines as of Thursday evening, per Todd:

Mitchell - Geoffrion - Murray
P. Johnson - Thurber - Stepan
Davies - Dolan - Grotting
Bohmbach - Turnbull - Gorowsky

Smith - McBain
McDonagh - Goloubef
Gardiner - Springer

Connelley
Gudmandson

Here are today's articles:

uwbadgers: Game notes (PDF)
gophersports: Series preview, Game notes (PDF)
Baggot (Badger blog): Helping you feel better
Storlie (Daily Cardinal): UW ready for border battle with Golden Gophers
Bleach (Badger Herald): Wisconsin finally hits home ice

And here are some additional articles that I posted yesterday:

Milewski (TCT): Men's hockey v. Minnesota
Milewski (TCT): Quality shots strain Badger goaltenders
Milewski (Icehouse): Early day for UW
Baggot (WSJ): Gardiner's play bright spot in slow start
Milewski (TCT): Minnesota banks on experience
Uwbadgers: Wisconsin honors 1983 NCAA Championship Team (includes a bunch of links!)
Uwbadgers: PB's thoughts on the 1982-83 season

Also, a couple of the Usual Suspects have posted their WCHA/NCAA notebooks:

INCH - Oct 23, Oct 21
USCHO - This Week in the WCHA (Oct 23), Tuesday Morning Quarterback (Oct 22)

If you want a brief review of what's going on in the WCHA review this weekend, please refer to Gandalf's Around the WCHA post from yesterday. You might also be interested in checking out Puck Swami's profile of Denver's opponent for the weekend -- Ohio State.

Now, before I move on to the Badger Women's series v. minnesota, let me leave you with this, courtesy of Gandalf:

I brought up the fact that reports say Alex is 1/8 human and 7/8 kangaroo. W/ a furrowed brow the zoo keeper replied, "I don't know anything about that, maybe 1/16 human at best."

Badger Women v. minnesota, Fri/Sun Oct 24/26 @ 2PM CT

Due to the all of the stuff going on Saturday (men's hockey, football homecoming), this series is an odd Fri-Sun series.

If you can't make it to the Kohl Center, you can watch the live video webstream or follow Live Stats, both on uwbadgers.

Press releases
uwbadgers: series preview, game notes (PDF)
WCHA website: short release, full release (PDF) -- full release has great team notebooks!

Articles
Baggot (WSJ): No question Knight can play
NCAA Blogs: The Meghan Duggan Blog
Autrey (Daily Cardinal): Women's hockey to play Gophers in No. 1 v. No 2 series
Mosgaller (Badger Herald): WCHA's best teams face off in Border Battle series
Donohue (Badger Herald): Top-ranked Wisconsin awaits No. 2 Minnesota