The Michigan Wolverines men’s ice hockey team will open the season on October 2nd somewhere between a bang and a whimper.
The bang is quite obvious. For the first time ever, one of college hockey’s most rabid fan bases will have the chance to watch one of the greatest recruiting classes in the history of the sport play live. That class, now sophomores, features seven NHL draft picks, including number one, two, and five overall from last summer’s entry draft. Combine it with another six NHL selections elsewhere across the roster (including the number four pick in last summer’s draft), and we are talking about a group with the potential to be the most fearsome college hockey has ever seen.
The whimper perhaps a bit subtler: it is after all only an exhibition game against Bowling Green. The games won’t become official until six days later when the Lakers of Lake Superior State come to town. The conference season will not commence until a few weeks after that, with the defending B1G champion Wisconsin Badgers paying a visit to Ann Arbor. Exciting though it will be to watch this Wolverine supergroup assemble and to experience a crowd in Yost Ice Arena for the first time since March of 2020, the game itself will mean little within a week, much less a few months.
This, of course, is because we are talking about the manifestation of something hockey fans have greeted with a sublime combination of awe and fear on those rare occasions they’ve encountered it: a super team. Once derided by the “please like my sport” hockey crowd for taking the suspense out of the NBA seasons, super teams now occupy a different place in hockey fans’ collective imagination.
Where once fans lauded the parity and unpredictability brought about by the NHL’s salary cap, now they clamor for teams to follow the Vegas Golden Knights’ model of forgoing traditional hockey pillars like continuity and loyalty for the pursuit of superstars, wherever they might be available.
It seems somewhere along the line hockey fans tired of their old rules and sought out novel excitement. Now, younger fans yearn for teams like Vegas or the Colorado Avalanche to hop into the footsteps of recent dynastic NBA champions and assemble a hockey super team that could go toe-to-toe with Curry and Durant’s Warriors.
The 2021-22 Michigan Wolverines will meet this ideal in a way no NHL team has since the comically elite 2002 Detroit Red Wings. The only difference is that the Wolverines are composed entirely of ascending stars rather than a Red Wing lineup featuring, Pavel Datsyuk excepted, players beyond their peaks.
Well, that, and the simple fact that hockey games simply aren’t as predictable as basketball contests. A 2017 Vox video featuring Michael Mauboussin, author of The Success Equation, details hockey’s tendency toward chaos. According to Mauboussin’s research, skill accounts for less than one half of the NHL’s regular season standings. Mauboussin stresses that this is not to say that hockey players are less skilled than other athletes but rather that hockey is less effective at measuring players’ skill than other sports.
Thanks to factors like the small number of events that determine the outcomes of games or the comparatively high distribution of opportunities among a large number of players, hockey games are unlikely to tell us much about which team is actually better at hockey.
Here, it is worth noting that Mauboussin’s research focuses on professional hockey, and by shifting our emphasis to the collegiate game, the results are only more chaotic. The collegiate regular season cuts the NHL’s sample size in half, and the NCAA Tournament is single elimination, rather than four rounds of best-of-seven series.
All of this brings us to the privileged yet precarious position of Head Coach Mel Pearson.
Pearson finds himself in an unusual spot. He had the unenviable task of succeeding the man who defined Michigan’s program. Red Berenson, a kid who grew up playing on the frozen ponds of Saskatchewan amidst 40-mile-per-hour winds, arrived in Ann Arbor in 1959. He scored a goal on his first shift and hardly slowed down from there, notching 43 in 28 games in his third and final season.
Following a sojourn playing and coaching in the NHL, Berenson returned to the University for another thirty-three years as head coach, guiding his alma mater to eleven Frozen Fours and a pair of National Championships. Enthusiastic readers of this insufferable newsletter might be interested to learn that “Red Baron’s Barn” was on the shortlist of names for the production.
With all this in mind, you would be forgiven for assuming Pearson could at best hope to live up to Berenson’s record of consistent and sustained excellence. Instead, Pearson has added his own flavor to Michigan’s tried and true recipe.
In basic terms, Pearson has turned an already flourishing program into an unparalleled NHL factory, a feat culminating in unassailable dominance when current or soon-to-be Wolverines represented four of the top five picks in July’s draft.
Despite the dizzying quality of recruiting, Pearson’s team made its only appearance in the NCAA tournament during his debut season, when it was knocked out in a national semifinal by a last second Notre Dame goal.
Of course, this stat is more than a little misleading. His 19-20 outfit saw its season end with life as we knew it when COVID-19 struck on the heels of a quarterfinal victory over Michigan State in the Big Ten tournament. In 20-21, his band of supremely talented freshmen earned a place in the NCAA tournament, only to forfeit their opening game after a COVID outbreak struck the locker room.
This summer, the three top five picks from the 2020 NHL Draft that played for that team (I realize I’ve mentioned this point several times now, but I hope you can understand why I might think it merits repetition) confirmed that they would return for their sophomore campaign. Owen Power, Matty Beniers, and Kent Johnson may well play two more years after this one, but I wouldn’t count on it.
The triumvirate are sure to have prospects to play meaningful NHL minutes come next October, so what we have now is a peculiar version of “The Last Dance.” Pearson’s bunch arrive with a feeling most reminiscent of a Calipari or late-stage Kryzweski team in that it’s upcoming campaign will be its first and last opportunity to leave a meaningful legacy.
Yet we must also keep the NBA analogue at hand. Pearson’s Wolverines embody an annual NBA playoff narrative unfamiliar to the NHL’s cap era, the (seemingly) unstoppable force up against a series of inferior but desperate challengers. We won’t get an answer on whether this bunch really will be unstoppable until April, but we can certainly relish the tumultuous journey sure to ensue between now and then.
The cast of characters
This being our opening salvo into this season, we thought it might be worth taking a moment to run through a list of the principal characters whose journey we will observe. Without further ado, our leading men.
Pearson:
Described above. Captain of the ship.
Owen Power:
The number one overall pick in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft to the Buffalo Sabres. A towering defenseman sending scouts into fever dreams of a more fluid Victor Hedman.
Matty Beniers:
The number two overall pick in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft and first ever draft selection of the Seattle Kraken. The quintessential 200-foot forward, a relentless pursuer of the puck with more than enough skill to punish his opponents for giving it to him.
Kent Johnson:
The number five overall pick in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft to the Columbus Blue Jackets. A player who has, without doubt, been told at every level that his awe-inspiring puck skills couldn’t possibly translate to the next level of competitive hockey, only to prove those doubters incorrect.
Brendan Brisson:
A 2020 first round pick of the Vegas Golden Knights and the son of NHL superagent Pat Brisson. Offers a formidable one-timer from the top of the right circle. Tied with Beniers, led the Wolverines with ten goals last season.
Luke Hughes:
The number four overall pick in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft to the New Jersey Devils. Younger brother to Michigan legend and current Vancouver Canuck Quinn as well as former number one overall pick and future NHL teammate Jack. Said to boast the same breathtaking edgework as his eldest brother.
Erik Portillo:
Sophomore goaltender and future Buffalo Sabre expected to take over the starting duties from the graduated Strauss Mann. Perhaps the one man more likely than Pearson to become a scapegoat should the season go awry.