End-of-Week Roundup 3.31.23: “We have an environment of treating people with respect… and then these guys have just bonded through that”
How confidence, togetherness, and communication have paved the way for Michigan’s success. Plus, a word on winning defensive games, the field in Tampa, and a review of last year’s Q’Pac tilt
Brandon Naurato said it after his team beat Penn State to advance to the Frozen Four. He repeated it at Tuesday’s Zoom press conference for the four remaining head coaches. Gavin Brindley echoed it after Thursday’s practice. The teams that win titles aren’t the most talented ones but rather the closest.
The prevailing wisdom about these Wolverines is that their differentiator is talent. As Quinnipiac head coach Rand Pecknold put it at the same Zoom presser, “in the end, what they’re best at is high-end players.”
But they were just this talented in the first half of the season, when they were unable to sweep a Big Ten series and their inconsistency suggested a team with little hope of stringing together the four consecutive wins necessary to collect a national title.
So what changed from a first half that bordered on the maddening in its oscillations from promise to despair that sent this team on its way to a second consecutive Big Ten Tournament title and Frozen Four berth?
The team came together—disparate and promising parts meshing together through a shared vision, honest communication, and a commitment to self-improvement.
“I know we were kind of knocked as an immature team at the start,” said Brindley. “And I think we proved we could play a really good game for sixty minutes and be mature, and we got a lot of guys in that room who are gonna go on to play hockey at high levels. So we all just gelled together, and it’s coming together for us.”
After dropping four straight to close the regular season, Michigan has now won six in a row. Their longest streak of the season was seven consecutive wins from late January into February. To claim a tenth national title for the program, these Wolverines will need to match that season-long streak, then eclipse it. If you talk to anyone around Yost Ice Arena, there is no doubt that they can, as long as they stick to the script that’s taken them this far.
“I think the confidence comes from how tight the group is,” said Naurato. “We've had some success, but just the preparation every day, everybody works hard. What we're doing every day in our way, they believe that that prepares them to give them a chance. And when you believe that you can do it and have a chance, that's confidence.”
When asked how he’s seen this group grow tighter, he added “Everything that’s positive is not just one thing if that makes sense. It’s a lot of little things, and we have a great leadership group. There’s mutual respect. We talked about ‘Good Dudes Only,’ and you can make up whatever slogan you want, but we have an environment of treating people with respect and doing it the right way, and then these guys have just bonded through that. I think when everything’s wide open and there’s honesty versus…the wrong type of things going on and people aren’t themselves because they’re upset or frustrated, and then that may be taken out on someone else. I’m just talking out loud, but it’s like any relationship, if there’s clear communication, easy or hard conversations, that builds trust and then everyone’s on the same page.”
Sophomore forward Dylan Duke credits that kind of honesty for creating a culture in which everyone can thrive: “We talk about it a lot as a team, about what we need to be doing to have success, what’s going to help us win on the weekends, and I think that starts with the coaching staff having an honest, open door policy with us. It makes everyone feel comfortable at the rink and creates a really safe and just good environment overall.”
Within that environment, Michigan’s well-documented elite talent (because of course, none of this is to suggest the Wolverines aren’t gifted) has found the space for in-season growth. There’s not a college hockey program in the country that doesn’t tout its development-oriented approach, yet one senses something unique about the way that commitment manifests at Naurato’s Michigan.
When asked how his team would spend its week off before traveling to Tampa, Naurato said the Wolverines would focus on tactics and skill development, before resuming their customary game-week routine next week.
To freshman defenseman Seamus Casey, Naurato’s specialty is blending individual and collective growth. “Something Nar does a great job of is mixing team and personal skill development,” he explains. “So we do plenty of scouting on what the other teams are gonna do and pre-scouts and working on little tweaks off what they’re going to do, but he also says ‘if we can make each individual player better, obviously the team is going to get better,’ and there’s nothing better than that. If each guy gets better at the little skills—wall work, breaking the puck out, and stuff, that’s going to just be huge for us. So I think mixing that and what the team needs and what each guy needs, I think it’s the best recipe to have your team grow throughout the year. You don’t want to be good at the beginning of the year; you want to be good at the end of the year. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’re so focused on the team, a lot of little individual skills and habits can diminish, so the more you can work on it towards the end of the year, the better you’ll be for your team.” Individual skill development isn’t selfish, nor does it require sacrificing team success for long-term player growth; instead, the paths toward the two objectives overlap.
“Not all talented players or NHL Draft picks or first rounders are doing what our kids are doing: They're getting better,” contended Naurato via Zoom. “There's first-round draft picks that are graduating from college and not signing after two years. There's first-round draft picks in the NCAA with only five goals. So just because you have talent doesn't mean that you have success as a team or individually. And that's a credit to our kids. That's not about me. That's a credit to our culture, and these guys just wanting to do it for their teammates, for Michigan. Kids are getting better every single day, and that doesn't mean just skills. That means they're becoming better people on and off the ice.”
He highlights Brindley as one of the players he’s seen take the greatest strides this season, before adding “I could sit here all day and talk about examples of every single guy and how an individual meeting that may have been difficult or a video session or consistent video sessions or changing their curve or their stick or giving them a hug has bred confidence and success, and they’re all getting better.”
So, yes, once again, these Wolverines are talented, but they got to this stage—to Tampa and to a second straight Frozen Four—with togetherness, honesty, and a drive for self-perfection.
As Brindley put it, “You gotta enjoy being with each other. I think that’s the biggest thing. We have a week left of our season. This is gonna be the last time we’re probably ever gonna have this group together, so we have to enjoy it. Practice [today], I felt like it was more fun than all the other practices we had all year just because we know there’s one week left and we have to enjoy it.”
Odds & Ends
A First Look at the Field in Tampa
Michigan will set its sights on National Semifinal redemption Thursday night in the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Amalie Arena at 8:00 against Quinnipiac, top-seeded champions of the Bridgeport Regional and holders of the Cleary Cup as ECAC regular season victors.
“We played them last year, so we know them well,” said Naurato Wednesday afternoon. “They’re very structured, very good defensively, and they’re bought into their style of play. They have people at their program that are there to play for Quinnipiac. They’ve had success for a long time now.”
The Bobcats are unique in the Tampan field in that they are the only one of the Frozen Four who can’t claim blue blood status. To be clear, Quinnipiac has been one of the top programs in the nation in the 21st century, but their success all permeates from Pecknold’s appointment as head coach in 1994.
All nine of the Bobcats’ appearances in the men’s NCAA Tournament came under Pecknold’s leadership. Those have yielded three Frozen Four appearances, the prior two of which culminated in defeat in the national title game (in 2013 to Yale, a rival just fifteen minutes on Whitney Avenue from the school’s Hamden, CT campus, and in 2016 via a rout at the hands of North Dakota at Amalie Arena).
Pecknold’s teams are known for sound and structured defense, strong goaltending, and efficient penalty killing. To wit, they are led by Yaniv Perets, a sophomore netminder from the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux. Perets’ 1.46 goals against average, and .932 save percentage are made even more remarkable by the fact that they constitute a regression from last year’s 1.17 and .939.
Over Zoom, Pecknold expressed his confusion as to why anyone would underrate Perets and described him as having an “ elite goalie IQ—that's probably the thing that he does best. He just reads the play well and understands where the where the scoring chances are coming from.”
In sophomore forward Collin Graf, a Union transfer, Pecknold has the kind of scorer that even his best teams have seemed to want for in the final stages of the NCAA Tournament. Pecknold said of Graf, “He's become a much better defensive hockey player. And when you do that, and you hunt pucks better, you get to play more offense. I think he just he's had a lot of confidence right now he's, obviously, one of the best players in the country and we feel really fortunate to have him.” Graf has twenty goals and thirty-six assists in thirty-nine games, and his fifty-six points are seventeen ahead of his next highest scoring teammates (Sam Lipkin and Ethan de Jong, tied at thirty-nine).
At this year’s World Junior, Pecknold coached Duke, Casey, Brindley, Rutger McGroarty, and Luke Hughes to a bronze medal with Team USA. The connection left Pecknold faced with doubts from his own family as to whether Michigan would be at an advantage because of those five Wolverines’ familiarity with his systems. “That's a great question,” he said when asked about the subject. “You know, my daughter last night, my sixteen-year-old daughter was was very worried that they would know our plays, and now we have some new new things up our sleeve. But, at the end of the day, you still gotta be still gonna play the game. I think [those five] do know kind of a little bit about how we how we want to play but I mean, you know, Michigan, their coaches, are gonna figure it out too.”
Three hours before Michigan and Quinnipiac get together, Boston University and Minnesota will get together in the opposite semifinal, rekindling a rivalry made famous to American hockey fans by the film Miracle.
First-year Terriers head coach Jay Pandolfo, who played for the program from 1992-1996, downplayed the idea that the rivalry depicted in the movie rages on, but expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of two of the sport’s elite colliding.
“I know the BU-Minnesota rivalry in the seventies was huge,” Pandolfo said Tuesday. “And a lot of those guys played together on the ‘80 Olympic team, but I don't remember that being a huge rival with us when I played, and I was fortunate to be on the winning side of games against them, but I don’t remember it being a huge rivalry. It is two incredible programs, tradition, it should be a lot of fun.”
Pandolfo arrived this offseason to a program in need of revitalization after the uninspiring results of Albie O’Connell’s tenure. This season has provided BU’s first NCAA Tournament wins since the 2017-18 campaign (David Quinn’s last year before taking the New York Rangers’ job).
When asked how he has been able to build at once toward the future and succeed this season, Pandolfo said “For me taking over this job, I tried to look back at my experience at BU, and I wanted to try to get the culture right that I felt it was like when I was here—just the competitiveness of the players, the team-first mentality, all these little things that you want to continue to grow. I think the other part of it is, I think BU and a lot of these schools, you've had kids that are maybe only here one or two years. I think it's tough to build a program that way, and I think it was important this year—we have eleven seniors. That's unheard of at BU, so that's part of it and hopefully that continues moving forward that guys aren't in such a rush to to move on. And with certain players, they're ready, they have nothing else to prove at the college level. And if it's time for them to go, it’s time for them to go. But I think for the most part, you have guys that want to stay and build the culture and keep the program and tradition going.”
This year’s Terriers did the Hockey East double, taking home the conference’s regular season and tournament crowns. Freshman defenseman Lane Hutson is Pandolfo’s star, leading the team with forty-eight points in thirty-eight games. Hutson won the Hockey East’s tournament MVP and regular season Rookie of the Year, while also being named first team all-conference. His deceptive game built around stickhandling and crisp edges resembles that of Casey. Senior defenseman Dominick Fensore has also provided a steady presence on the blue line. Meanwhile, veteran forwards Matt Brown, Jay O’Brien, and Wilmer Skoog (all seniors) have helped to carry the offensive freight.
Of this year’s Gophers, Pandolfo said “I've watched them over the course of this year, and they're a heck of a team—obviously a high-powered offense. I don't think we want to get into a track meet with them the way they play in transition. And you know, we certainly have to be aware of the top line they have, but they have a ton of depth below that as well. Their d corps is excellent. So you know, we know they're a great team that there's a reason they've been number one in the country all year long.”
Bob Motzko’s team, the Big Ten’s regular season champions, is the most familiar foe to Michigan amongst the Frozen Four field. Their ability to transition from sound defensive structure to counter-attacking offense has helped them spend the bulk of the season atop the national polls and Pairwise. That defense corps Pandolfo alluded to is led by junior captain Brock Faber, who helped them hold opponents to just 2.24 goals-per-game.
Offensively, the Gophers top line of Matthew Knies, Logan Cooley, and Jimmy Snuggerud (the latter two of whom are Hobey Baker nominees) lead the way. Knies, who is heavily linked with joining the Toronto Maple Leafs at season’s end, is an overwhelming physical force. Cooley is a dynamic skater and puck handler, described by his coach (who also joked that at eighteen Cooley doesn’t even yet shave) as an “ornery tough competitor” and “a young fireball that is so fun.” I suspect Michigan fans might use different descriptors. Meanwhile, Snuggerud’s gift is the lethal release that has yielded twenty-one goals to date.
Between the echoes of a historical rivalry and the abundance of future NHL talent, it should be an entertaining opener for the Wolverines’ clash with Quinnipiac.
From Penn State to Quinnipiac: Prevailing Amidst a Defensive Struggle
Even throughout the Wolverines’ scorching second half, Michigan never managed to win a game while scoring fewer than four goals until last Sunday’s 2-1 triumph against Penn State. On some level, this should come as no shock; it would seem quite logical that a team will win more when it scores more. Still, Naurao’s Wolverines showed a different side to their game against Penn State.
“It’s nice to see that we can have a low scoring game and pull it out,” said Casey. ‘Michigan isn’t known for playing 2-1 hockey games, but we can do it. It’s not the Michigan team that everyone kind of sees—like it’s all offense. We’re a defensive team, and we’ve got a lot of guys who can score, but we’ve got, I’d say, more guys who can defend. Quinnipiac, they’re just a really connected team, great defense. I wouldn’t underestimate their offensive ability either. It’s just going to be sticking to our game plan and our identity. Nothing really changes, just keep playing our game.”
Though it took fifty-plus minutes to beat Liam Souliere for the first time, Michigan’s offense imposed its style on the Nittany Lions from the first period. Its defensive intensity—sensing danger, backchecking, denying second chances—was as sharp as it had been all season. The Wolverines believed even after a late second period Connor MacEachern goal that their game would prevail.
“You just got to stay with it no matter what,” said Brindley Thursday. “I think it’s tough to play with our speed and how we play for sixty minutes. So I think eventually teams break down and that’s where we can expose them. You have to play your game and you can’t get away from it at any moment, because if that happens, you’re gonna get scored on.”
We’ve compared Michigan’s style to that of Pep Guardiola, which transformed European soccer from F.C. Barcelona on out. What we’ve neglected to mention is the way that style can redefine what it means to be hard to play against. In a hockey context, that phrase tends to refer to physicality, but Michigan’s identity wears on opponents through the physical and mental exhaustion of chasing the Wolverines—their crisp passing and manipulation of space eventually proving too much even for a stout defensive team like Guy Gadowsky’s Penn State to withstand—for sixty minutes.
As alluded to above, Quinnipiac will want to lure Michigan into another defensive struggle; Pecknold said as much Tuesday—“we want to make them defend.” In response to a question about the Team USA five’s familiarity with Pecknold, Naurato said “I think everyone, with the video and technology now, how can you not know what the other team’s game plan is or their systems?…We know what they’re gonna do, they should have an idea of how we play, and I think it’s more about who executes their style of play or their identity better. That’s just playoff hockey in general.”
For Michigan, that might make for a tense evening, but, per Casey, success will come from staying together (there it is again, togetherness): “When pucks aren’t going in, it’s naturally hard for people to stay on the same page and not go rogue. That’s just human nature, but that was a constant message in between periods and on the bench—just stick with it, don’t change anything. It’s going to go, and if worst case scenario, if something didn’t go, at least we’d know we stuck with our game plan and gave it everything we had, but the last thing you want is guys going on different pages, but I think that’s what makes our team special—guys stick to the plan, the identity of the team.”
As Naurato put it, now is the time to “enjoy the ride, enjoy the process, and let’s just make the most of the opportunity.”
QU 2022 in Review
Michigan has played Quinnipiac five times all-time and won all five contests. The most recent was a year ago at the Allentown Regional Final. Michigan prevailed 7-4 in a game that was far more chaotic than its opening forty minutes would have led you to believe.
The Wolverines dominated through two periods and built a 4-0 lead on the strength of three fourth-line goals and a glorious power play passing sequence capped by a Thomas Bordeleau tap-in.
However, a seven-minute, three-goal spell from the Bobcats cut U-M’s lead to three in the third period. Then Michigan netted two empty netters and another power play goal, while yielding an academic fourth marker to Quinnipiac, to see out the game.
When asked for his memory of the game, Duke emphasized the vulnerability to which his team succepted itself by taking its foot off the gas, saying “I remember they were a hard team to play against. They fought til the game was over. I think they made a really good push back up at us in the third period, and that’s probably the biggest takeaway from them. We had a pretty comfortable lead going into the third, and they made a huge push, and we kind of let it slip away, and it got a little scary there, but ended up getting it done.”
In describing what made Michigan a challenge for his defense, Pecknold said “Just you know, high end high end NHL talent. I mean, they're not just going to be NHL players, they're going to be high end NHL players. They make plays at pace. They can all skate and they think the game so well…We’ve got to defend them in layers.”
With the caveat that Pecknold has no incentive to offer too thorough an analysis to the press and with deference to his acumen as a coach, this assessment leaves a fair bit out of the picture. Namely, that it was Michigan’s veteran fourth line of Jimmy Lambert, Garrett Van Wyhe, and Nolan Moyle that led the way.
In fairness to Pecknold, Michigan’s elite talent was on display in Allentown. The passing sequences on display for the two power play markers were almost comic in their incisiveness—Bordeleau’s pass for Brisson’s one-timer on the second nothing short of sorcerous.
Still, it was Lambert, Van Wyhe, and Moyle who set the tone with two goals in the first period, added a shorty in the second, then helped ice the game with one of the two empty-netters.
Michigan’s power play and vaunted skill were a luxury item in last year’s fixture, providing a degree of firepower Pecknold is right to note that the Bobcats couldn’t match. Nonetheless, what put Michigan in the position to win the game was its fourth line with its rugged simplicity and heavy metal possession.
This year’s Bobcats are probably better than the team Michigan beat in Allentown last year. To pull the same feat next Thursday, the Wolverines will need the same formula—a steady diet of chaos-sowing offensive zone passion punctuated by the expression of talent that’s not just high-end but honed and sharpened.
Hastings in at Wisconsin
We’ll close this week by stepping outside Michigan and the Frozen four altogether. Yesterday afternoon, Wisconsin announced the hiring of Mike Hastings, erstwhile of Minnesota State, as its new men’s head coach.
Hastings had been in Mankato since the 2012-13 season and won eight conference regular season titles and five tournament crowns over that span (the Mavericks moved from the WCHA to the CCHA after the ‘20-21 season). Before this season, Hastings had taken the Mavericks to two straight Frozen Fours, making it as far as a third-period lead against Denver in last year’s title game. Perhaps more striking is the universal praise generated by the move, even amongst Mankato fans who had been ostensibly spurned.
Under Hastings’ stewardship, Mankato has been one of the top programs in the nation over the last decade. While the Big Ten will represent a step up in quality of competition, he may well inherit a more talented roster than he ever had at Minnesota State in year one (after all, Tony Granato’s issue was never recruiting). It will be worth monitoring whether any Mavericks join Hastings in Madison via the transfer portal, an exodus I suspect might drain some of the goodwill that currently exists from MSU fans toward their outgoing coach.
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