B1G Champs, Again: “You gotta have really good players, and then you gotta be tight”
Michigan prevails in a back-and-forth B1G title game, topping Minnesota with a performance that shows its togetherness as much as its skill
Rutger McGroarty, the game’s first star, entered first. He wore a backward Big Ten Champions baseball cap, the tag still attached in testament to its novelty. Then came Adam Fantilli, who expressed mild concern at the potential damage the platform from which the team’s postgame presser would unfold might inflict on his skate blades. Last came Brandon Naurato, the lapels of his suit jacket askew and a towel across his lap to help insulate him from the effects of a post-game Gatorade shower. All three were jubilant, and it wasn’t hard to see why.
For the second year in a row, against the same opponent, by the same scoreline, in the same building, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team won the Big Ten Tournament. Before a raucous 3M Arena at Mariucci, the Wolverines outlasted top-ranked Minnesota 4-3 to claim the title. Fantilli and McGroarty’s line delivered two of those goals, and Naurato’s season as interim head coach produced its first serious silverware (No disrespect to the Iron D, captured in February in Detroit).
When asked to describe their formula for success, all three circled around the same two sources: veteran leadership and togetherness.
“Learning from [Michigan’s upperclassmen], listening to every word they say and trying to soak it all in is the biggest thing we could do as freshmen,” said Fantilli.
“Those guys gained our trust the very first week we were on campus,” offered McGroarty. “Those guys have treated us with nothing but respect and brought us in as a family, and I love those guys.”
“You gotta have really good players, and then you gotta be tight, and there’s got to be mutual respect,” contended Naurato. “We have young players, and they may be on the score sheet, but the Moyles, the Pehrsons, the Keranens, the Granowiczs…That’s a big part of the success.”
Minnesota tested the Wolverines’ shared trust during a first period in which Michigan was “very average” according to its head coach, while their hosts found their skating legs firmly beneath them.
Throughout the opening period, Minnesota found offensive life by capitalizing on Michigan turnovers and hunting in transition. Brody Lamb’s opening goal encapsulated the Gophers’ early success. After blocking a Luke Hughes point shot, Minnesota pounced on an opportunity to counterattack. Logan Cooley led the quicksilver rush, eventually leaving Lamb with a wide-open net to shoot at. 1-0 Minnesota after six minutes and fifty-two seconds of hockey.
With his team needing to reset in the locker room at the first intermission, Brandon Naurato offered a familiar message: “We just told them to be predictable and create chaos. [In the first,] we didn’t get any pucks low to high, we didn’t pull up off our entries…we just talked about getting to the net and feeding our O-zone.”
It was his top line of Fantilli, McGroarty, and Gavin Brindley that seemed to heed that message first. In the fourth minute of the period, McGroarty whacked the rebound off an Ethan Edwards shot past Gopher netminder Justen Close.
Thirty-four seconds later, he pulled the same trick again, this time taking a Keaton Pehrson rebound from the end boards and depositing it past Close.
McGroarty smiled when asked how he was able to find open ice in such premium areas of the offensive zone, then quipped “A lot of video with Coach Nar.” Fantilli noted that “we’re a line of freshmen, so we learn a lot as we go.” It seemed the lessons of the first intermission were so familiar to Fantilli, McGroarty, and Brindley they could be absorbed and implemented before the second period was four-minutes old.
Of course, Minnesota is the rare team that can match, rather than defer to and defend, the Wolverines when it comes to top-end talent. As such it came as no surprise, when the Gophers top line countered just past the period’s midpoint—Matthew Knies working a loose puck up to Jimmy Snuggerud and Logan Cooley for a 2-on-0, which Cooley converted.
“That’s a good line. Like a really, really, really good line,” said Naurato, chuckling now that the danger was gone, at least for the evening. “Every time they’re on the ice, it’s scary.”
Though it would end tied at two, Michigan turned the game into its own during the second. The familiar spells of mesmerizing, destabilizing offensive zone possession began to replace the Gophers’ counterattacks. However, not quite two minutes into the game’s final stanza, Rhett Pitlick reversed that trend with a dazzling display of stickhandling before beating Portillo. 3M Arena erupted again.
The Wolverines were unfazed. “We’ve been really good this year at—even when we go up 4-3 or when they went up [3-2]—just talking about next shift mentality,” said Naurato, and it would take just four minutes and two seconds for Seamus Casey to reset the game to even terms.
Once again, the goal was a triumph of the Wolverines’ efficacy in creating within the offensive zone: McGroarty and Ethan Edwards sowed chaos at the net front, hustle from Brindley kept the play alive, Casey’s poise and precision from the point beat Close to tie the game at three.
Six minutes later, Dylan Duke propelled Michigan to a 4-3 lead in quintessential Dylan Duke fashion—crashing the net in the most literal sense, sprawling across a defender, and tucking a backhand past Close from the top of the crease. From his knees, Duke lifted his arms in celebration, pausing for a moment as if to take in the scene before rising back to his skates. “That’s Duker,” said McGroarty after the game.“He gets greasy ones, and we love him for it.”
The clock read 8:14, and another Gopher charge felt inevitable, but Naurato’s men stuck to their script. Michigan’s possession play kept the puck out of danger for long stretches, and the clock bled away. Minnesota did induce one sequence of netfront chaos with two minutes to play but, beyond that, mustered precious little. As the final seconds ticked away, the puck was deep in the Gophers’ zone, some 180 feet from Erik Portillo and harmless.
Michigan stood atop the Big Ten again.
Whenever Minnesota and Michigan get together, there is a sense of looking in a mirror for each team. These programs represent flagship universities in two of America’s preeminent hockey states; they share a rich heritage of success and sit at the sport’s head table in their current incarnations, rosters resplendent with future NHLers.
So what distinguished the Wolverines from the Gophers on this occasion?
Perhaps, it was as simple as shared belief, as a confidence that they could win and a knowledge of how.
Michigan lacked neither talent nor confidence on its freshmen-laden roster when the season began, but those ingredients had meant little on their own in postseasons past. Success required layers—layers of attack, layers of style, layers across games. The symphonic skill of Mackie Samoskevich or T.J. Hughes would mean little without the support of Mark Estapa and Nolan Moyle’s heavy metal ruggedness. Winning required much more than a thirty-four second eruption of joy from Rutger McGroarty; it took the steady defending of Keaton Pehrson and Jay Keranen to see out sixty chaotic minutes against a team that proved itself the conference and nation’s best over the course of the regular season.
“We had a couple big conversations as a team,” explained McGroarty, the seriousness in his voice a marked difference from the general levity of Fantilli’s, Naurato’s, and his press conference. “Where we said “hey, we can really do this, but we got to fix a couple of things. We gotta turn a couple things around. We gotta dial in.’ And it starts with our leadership core…I wouldn’t want to learn from anyone else.”
After his team’s defeat, Gopher head coach Bob Motzko said “our whole game plan was to limit our mistakes.” This mindset made Brandon Naurato’s message—“be predictable and create chaos—stand out for the positivity of its vision. Where Minnesota sat back, defended, and looked to counter, the Wolverines’ interim head coach instructed his team to occupy the role of protagonists—asking questions of its foes rather than deferring and hoping to minimize the damage, creating problems for the Gophers by playing on the front foot and trapping Minnesota in its own end. That vision worked so well Naurato won’t need that extra word in his title much longer.
So who are the 2022-23 Michigan Wolverines? We knew before the year they would be young and talented. What we know now is that their youth and talent drew inspiration from a group of upperclassmen that, even if under-manned, could offer first-hand experience as to what it takes to win a Big Ten championship. What we know now is that the Wolverines' head coach system would bring together those two constituencies—talented youths and playoff-hardened veterans—to maximize the strengths of all involved. What we know now is that they are Big Ten champions.
As for the Wolverines’ next stop? As Naurato laid it out, it will be a Sunday afternoon flight home from the Twin Cities, a group Mr. Spots order, and getting together to watch the NCAA Tournament’s selection show.
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