A Sense of Occasion, then of Disappointment but not Despair: On the Faceoff on the Lake
Michigan falls 4-2 to Ohio State at Cleveland’s FirstEnergy Stadium in the Faceoff on the Lake
Saturday afternoon at Cleveland’s FirstEnergy Stadium, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team fell 4-2 to Ohio State—sub-optimal ice conditions, dominant Buckeye special teams, and a strong Jakub Dobes performance in the OSU crease culminating in a Wolverine defeat.
With the loss, Michigan leaves Cleveland with raised stakes for its final series of the regular season next weekend against Notre Dame and a memorable if not quite ideal experience under mostly blue skies on the shores of Lake Erie.
A disjointed first period—defined by three power plays each way—set an uncertain tone for the game to follow. Both sides generated significant zone time but failed to pose a serious threat to the opposing net. The dearth of five-on-five play left the game’s opening twenty minutes devoid of texture.
Just past the midpoint of the second, play was halted for the first major bout of ice maintenance, with a chunk breaking loose in the zone at the western end of the rink. During an extended delay in the action, a combination of officials and the ice crew tended to the wounded playing surface, before play resumed.
“It is what it is,” said Wolverines head coach Brandon Naurato when asked about the playing conditions after the game. “It’s an outdoor game, and we knew coming in that there might be some stuff like that, but it’s a hockey game, and there’s different things that come up…We just have to fight through that.”
Three-and-a-half minutes after that initial repair, Buckeye defenseman Cole McWard converted on a 2-on-1 counter attack to open the scoring.
In 2:50 of game time (and closer to a half hour of real time, after further ice maintenance necessitated an early end to the period and then a third period that opened with the last five minutes of the second, before the sides switched ends), Jake Wise would add another, making the OSU lead 2-0 with a power play goal.
With just over a minute-and-a-half left in the second, Gavin Brindley got the Wolverines on the board, wiring a shot off the post and past Dobes after a clean Adam Fantilli faceoff win.
When talismanic OSU defenseman Mason Lohrei went to the box for holding thirty seconds after Brindley’s marker, Michigan appeared poised to retake control. Instead, a Tyler Duke short-handed goal (forty-six seconds after Brindley’s) restored the Buckeyes’ two-goal margin. The sequence was an encapsulation of Michigan’s afternoon: glimmers of promise erased by Ohio State’s decisiveness on special teams.
The Buckeye PK’s 90.0% success rate is number one in the nation, as are their ten short-handed goals. When looking for a differentiating factor in the back-and-forth, often muddled affair, the obvious answer was special teams. Michigan’s power play never converted in seven tries, while conceding the shorthanded tally to Duke; Ohio State scored twice on six power play chances.
“We had some chances [on the power play], their goalie made some saves. Maybe didn’t execute as much as we wanted, but credit to their PK. We can’t go 0 for 7 and expect to win games,” said Naurato.
8:46 into the third period, senior forward Eric Ciccolini—batting a rebound from mid-air past Dobes—again pulled Michigan close, but, for the second time, the Wolverines’ joy was short-lived as Ohio State answered within a minute. This time, it was Stephen Halliday, fifty-four seconds after Ciccolini, bringing the scoreline to 4-2.
Despite the ensuing disappointment, Ciccolini’s goal did provide the greatest reason for optimism to emerge from the weekend. The goal—born of a strong passage of combination play in transition from freshmen Jackson Hallum and Frank Nazar III signaled the potential for the kind of credible third-line scoring threat Michigan has sought for much of the season.
In Hallum and Nazar, Naurato has two blazing skaters with a burgeoning chemistry. The former has been working to refine his ridiculous pace in service of chance creation, while the latter is in the process of recovering his own speed in just his fourth game back from offseason surgery.
For a team that has found most of its offensive success (whether on the power play or at even-strength) from its in-zone attack, the emergence of a rush-based third line would provide an invaluable change-of-pace for the Wolverine attack.
Meanwhile, the goal provided Ciccolini—a senior who has seen much of his collegiate career marred by serious injury—with a rare opportunity to assume the spot light: Knocking a puck from mid-air to score before 45, 532 fans at an NFL stadium. Ciccolini hasn’t caught many breaks in his Michigan career, but he authored a signature moment on what was literally the biggest stage he will assume as a Wolverine.
Unfortunately, thanks to Halliday’s rebuttal, Michigan found itself in too deep a hole to climb out of, even with a furious three-minute-and-forty-three second push at 6-on-5 to end the game.
In the end, it was a game in which Michigan’s five-on-five possession game never seemed to take hold, thanks in large part to Ohio State’s success in the neutral zone.
Buckeye head coach Steve Rohlik explained after the game that his team knew it had to be relentless in the neutral zone to combat Michigan’s elite talent:
“When you go up against a team that has that much talent, that much speed, they want time and space, so for us, we work a lot on our neutral zone. We just tried to have numbers, try to clog it up, and hope at the end of the day to force them to dump some more pucks than they want to, otherwise you’re holding on for dear life.”
To be sure, more teams will adopt similar tactics against the Wolverines come the postseason, but Naurato saw his team’s struggles more as a failure of enactment than an indicator of a fatal flaw. The interim head coach in fact saw his team’s inability to find success at even strength as a symptom of dumping too few pucks rather than too many.
“The biggest thing [in combatting a neutral zone trap] is getting pucks behind versus trying to carry it through, and whether you’re on an outdoor rink or at Yost, you gotta get pucks behind guys and get to work on the forecheck,” he contended after the game, before adding “I think it’s just all about execution.”
The response was quintessential Naurato: realistic, emphasizing the path forward, and reflecting a supreme confidence in his team’s ability to play and win on its terms.
The defeat (following a shootout loss in Columbus two days prior) leaves Michigan in a dead heat with the Buckeyes for second in the Big Ten by points percentage. Ohio State will close its regular season next weekend in Minneapolis, while the Wolverines will host Notre Dame back under a roof at Yost. In other words, the most direct consequence of the weekend is an added intensity for the one to follow.
Even in defeat, Naurato couldn’t help but leave Cleveland with an air of excitement. “I thought it was awesome,” he said. “We’re very fortunate and happy to be a part of it.”
For Dylan Duke, a proud Strongsville, Ohio native and brother of Buckeye defenseman Tyler, it was an especially memorable affair:
“I think it was a lot of fun for my grandparents and family and friends in the area to see me and Tyler on the ice at the same time back here in Cleveland, so it’s definitely a really cool experience, something that me and Tyler will be able to talk about for the rest of our lives.”
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