Midweek Roundup 10.5.22
In the first Midweek Roundup of the season, we preview Lindenwood, consider new head coach Brandon Naurato’s approach, and then offer a brief word on Mel Pearson’s appearance last weekend
It’s Wednesday, and, to our utter delight, we are just two sleeps away from the return of regular season Michigan men’s ice hockey. On Friday night, the Wolverines will officially begin their 2022-23 campaign with a two-game home set against Lindenwood University.
With regular season hockey in the air, it’s time for the return of the Midweek Roundup, which we will run on Wednesdays throughout the season. The roundup will be a medley of whatever stories we find most relevant from around the world of Michigan hockey, and it will always feature a preview of the weekend’s upcoming games.
This week, we have a scouting report on Lindenwood, some musings on Brandon Naurato’s style and approach as his first season at the helm gets underway, and a brief word on the presence of Mel Pearson at last weekend’s exhibition game.
Scouting the Lions
When evaluating Lindenwood as a Division I men’s hockey opponent, there is a minuscule sample size to turn to. That is, of course, because the Lions have played just two DI games—both last weekend and both losses to Minnesota.
Say what you will about the Lions, they certainly aren’t easing into Division I hockey—instead spending their first two weekends in the sport taking on two of last season’s Frozen Four.
Lindenwood is a small college twenty-four miles northwest of St. Louis, with a student population of about seven thousand. The school pioneered its men’s club hockey team in 2003 and achieved almost immediate success, winning twenty-five of their twenty-nine games in the Lions’ inaugural season under head coach Derek Schaub.
Schaub would go on to lead Lindenwood to back-to-back ACHA Titles in 2009 and 2010, before handing the program’s reins over to Rick Zombo, who holds the post of head coach to this day.
If Lindenwood’s ascension to DI hockey on the men’s side sounds like a story of instant success to you, it is actually glacial by the standard of their women’s team. Like on the men’s side, Lindenwood introduced women’s club hockey in 2003. That team went on to win ACHA titles in 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2010 before making the leap to Division I for the 2011-12 season.
The Lions’ first foray into the DI game on the men’s side, which came Saturday night at Minnesota, wasn’t the most inspiring performance. Lindenwood managed just sixteen shots, none of which beat Gopher goaltender Justen Close, while Minnesota racked up thirty-four shots at the other end of the rink.
Meanwhile, number three overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft Logan Cooley introduced himself to the world of college hockey with two goals and an assist in his NCAA debut.
Before laughing off the Lions as a cakewalk for Michigan though, consider the scare they gave Minnesota on Sunday night. The Gophers would eventually pull out a 6-4 victory and again outshot Lindenwood by a healthy margin (45-31), but the Lions had Minnesota in a competitive game late.
Freshman Kyle Jeffers earned the first NCAA goal in program history in the first period, sandwiched between a pair of Gopher tallies to give Minnesota a 2-1 lead at the first intermission.
However, a pair of Lions goals to open the second vaulted them into their first ever Division I lead, and they managed the feat on the road against the second-ranked team in the country.
Minnesota would answer both second-period Lions goals to carry a one-goal lead into the third, only for Lindenwood to pull even within the first minute of the game’s final frame. Power play goals from Bryce Brodzinski and Mike Koster for Minnesota eventually sealed the game for the Gophers.
In the end, it was just a scare and nothing more for Minnesota, but Michigan would be ill-advised to look past the Lions, who just spent their first weekend as a Division I team proving they can hang with one of the sport’s giants.
Naurato’s Approach, or Hockey in the Age of the Skills Coach
As we transition from an exhibition game with Windsor to the regular season opener this coming weekend, we wanted to devote a bit more time to discussing the program’s transition to interim head coach Brandon Naurato.
We’ve noted before that the two words that always seem attached to the new head man are “player development.” An alternate buzz word might be “skills coach.” We wrote last week about the unparalleled abilities of the average young player entering the NHL today. That uptick in talent is in many ways attributable to what has become known as “the skills coach.”
In the days of yore, hockey players’ offseason workouts might entail fishing or a round of golf. At some point, players determined they would be better served arriving at training camp in shape, rather than using camp to get back in game condition. Then, some time in the early 21st century, players recognized the possibility of utilizing the offseason to improve their toolkit—fine tuning their skating stride, making their release quicker or more deceptive, improving their backhand. Much of that progress is due to skills coaches, who can help players identify and redevelop deficiencies.
On his website, Darryl Belfry (the most famous of these skills coaches for his work with NHL stars like Auston Matthews, Nathan MacKinnon, and Sidney Crosby) describes the process as follows: “When you watch games as a fan, you view the games in their totality. But, when you watch one player in a game, then watch another player from that same game, it’s like two totally different games are being played. Your view transforms from totality to a singular person and that translates into my coaching. When I first start with a player, they’re teaching me the entire time. My job is to figure out what makes an individual the player they are, find areas of opportunities inside what’s being done, and plug in the skill that’s missing.”
In other words, by directing individual attention toward a player (attention they are unlikely to receive during an in-season practice from a coaching staff focused on the upcoming opponent) a skills coach can improve that player at a granular level.
Naurato, for his part, isn’t crazy about the label skills coach, telling us at media day “I’m joking with this, but I don’t like the term ‘skills coach;’ development coach would be better. All coaches are teachers, and there are many forms of development with skills being one of them.”
Technical skills—like a skating stride or release—are a starting point, rather than an end-game for Naurato, who went on to explain that the purpose of “skills” instruction is to build out toward effective and cohesive team play.
The first-time head coach wants “to work with the players on the ice and work on technical skills, but also work with the coaching staff on some tactical adjustments and pre-scouts going into the following game. Just building it out from an individual to a five-man unit to a team identity. That’s kind of my passion or my bread-and-butter.”
For Naurato, that process of blending his team’s identity with observed vulnerabilities in an opponent is one of the joys of coaching: “I like the tactical adjustments of going in to play Ohio State or Notre Dame on the road and filtering into our identity and how we want to play, but more importantly how we can tweak our identity to counteract what they’re trying to do. At the end of the day, we’re worried about us, but if we’re prepared in the pre-scout of what they do, we put our best foot forward.”
At media day, Naurato also described the ways he has leaned on lessons from his time with the Detroit Red Wings in establishing his own coaching philosophy.
“I really did get a PhD in hockey. I learned a lot from [members of the Red Wings organization including Steve Yzerman, Dan Cleary, Kris Draper, Shawn Horcoff, and Jeff Blashill]. They were great mentors to me and kinda treated me like the little brother. Maybe Horcoff and Clearly early. They’ve been awesome. Those are guys that once you earn their respect, you’re kind of never go back, but it takes some time to earn their respect, so I’m proud of that.”
Those lessons can help Naurato as he acclimates to the increased demands of being a head coach for the first time. Being in charge of a program carries with it increased demands, particularly when it comes to matters away from the ice. For Naurato, it’s been important to assemble a staff that allows him to focus on his favorite part of the gig: the on-ice work.
In describing this dynamic, Naurato told Gulo Gulo Hockey “I will never give up the on-ice stuff, so I’m trying to find ways to empower other people to do the other stuff, but still be involved. I bring our staff into everything. I’ve got a vision of what I want to do, but I respect the opinions of everybody here and just try to keep them involved with every decision I make. It has to be all of us. That goes into over-communicating with the staff, something as simple as every Monday morning we have a round-table staff meeting. Anything that comes up we handle it together. My goal for this year at the end of the day is to support and spend time with our players and our staff.”
Naurato recognizes that a cultural reset is in order, given the circumstances surrounding his appointment as head coach, but that doesn’t mean he wants to undo everything. “It’s not that the culture was broken before. There are so many great things going on at Michigan, and I’m not reinventing the wheel. It’s not just going to be because of me turning the culture around. It’s a community; it’s a group of people; it’s all of us. So we have to be on the same page on what our messaging is and what our vision is.”
Bearing in mind the way WilmerHale’s report exposed a toxic work environment, specifically for women within the program, it is refreshing to hear the genuine admiration Naurato feels for the staff that help his new program function and the evident value he believes they provide.
On the ice, we referred a few paragraphs ago to the identity Naurato wants his team to make manifest. As he explains it, that identity can boil down into a simple acronym:
“Our whole offensive philosophy is CPR. Creativity, predictability, and responsibility. Creativity, at Michigan especially, we want these guys to be themselves; we want them to do what they do well. We want to be predictable to each other, so that when you’re getting outnumbered or you’re getting pressured, they know the routes that they can run to support their teammates to break that pressure. We want to be responsible to each other, so we want to be ultra-aggressive and to do that, we need to make the right decisions—when to jump, when to pinch. So we need the responsibility of F3 [the third forward into the offensive zone, who must assume the position of a defenseman who has activated deep into the offensive zone] or other players on the ice to allow guys to be aggressive, so that we don’t have to sit back.”
For Naurato, this philosophy aims to provide players with a framework to facilitate a high-paced attacking game that maximizes their talent while building in a safeguard against an opponent’s counterpunches.
If you’re wondering how this might sound to a young and talented player, freshman defenseman Seamus Casey said after Monday’s practice “it’s a lot of fun to play in the offensive zone with this team.” While we cannot speak to that, we can say Naurato’s approach is a delight to watch.
Casey went on to add that “you would never know this was [Naurato’s] first [head-]coaching job” from watching the command and enthusiasm he brings to practice.
When you speak to Brandon Naurato, you hear someone who is at once humble and confident, so we’ll close this brief profile with something we loved from his media night comments:
“People come up to me all the time and are like ‘Oh you must be so busy.’ I don’t know. I think everyone with a wife and kids and a full-time job is busy. Everyone in this world is busy. My busy is just a little newer. Going forward, when I template a lot of this stuff out, it’ll just be fine tuning and tweaks and we’ll just keep finding ways to get better.”
The Pearson Problem
We must admit we hoped coverage of former Michigan coach Mel Pearson wouldn’t bleed into the new season, but, with Pearson insisting on continuing to attach himself to the program and giving interviews riddled with demonstrably false claims, we fear we cannot realize that aspiration, though we will try to keep this brief.
Let’s tackle the two issues here individually: first you have the issue of Pearson continuing to show up to U-M events, then you have the interview the fired coach gave to the Rink Live.
To begin with the first issue, Pearson has, since his firing, continued to command a visible presence on social media and in attending Michigan athletic events.
I recognize that some readers may believe that the former head coach has every right to attend a U-M event as a fan, and while I can understand this perspective, it must be pointed out in response that Pearson’s presence, along with that of Rick Bancroft, contributed to an environment of day-to-day fear and insecurity for numerous Michigan employees.
Per the Michigan Daily’s Connor Earegood, Pearson also attended a recent Michigan practice uninvited and contacted all of the team’s freshmen prior to their arrival on campus. In other words, Pearson has made repeated attempts to remain a visible presence within the program, despite being fired for his mismanagement of it.
There is a reason that Pearson no longer has a job at the University, and, unfortunately for him, that reason would also seem like a fairly obvious case as to why he does not belong in association with this program any longer, even as an unofficial specter.
This argument only gains credence when Pearson gives interviews in which he seeks to portray himself as a victim, rather than the architect of a toxic workplace that saw employees on his staff existing in a perpetual state of fear.
I am not going to link to the Rink Live’s interview with Pearson (though it wouldn’t be hard to find if you want to seek it out), because of its overt errors. Earegood offered a thorough takedown of its myriad inaccuracies (and to be blunt, irresponsibilities) for the Daily.
To be clear, I do believe Pearson is well within his right to try to explain his past conduct, and I understand why an outlet like the Rink Live would deem those explanations newsworthy. However, there is an obvious problem when you run an interview with a coach fired over workplace culture and make no attempt to question the factual inaccuracies proffered by that coach. Pearson expresses no contrition; he offers no statement of what he might do differently if he ran another program some day; instead, he continues to inhabit a fictional world of his own making.
I don’t want to punch down when it comes to a coach who already squandered the opportunity to serve in an incredibly privileged role, but when that coach insists on doubling down on the falsehoods he offered to WilmerHale, I feel obligated to point this out. We aren’t talking about a coach who was fired for not winning enough hockey games; we are talking about a coach who was fired for the environment he cultivated within his program. Someone in that position does not belong in any association with this program moving forward.
This is a problem that needs to end up on the desk of athletic director Warde Manuel. Manuel, who we remind you was according to John U. Bacon the last person in power to concede that Pearson needed to be dismissed, has offered one six-sentence statement on the former head coach’s situation. That statement announced Pearson’s firing in the passive voice—“It has been determined that Mel Pearson will not return as our ice hockey coach.”
By not offering a more thorough rebuke of Pearson’s conduct, by declining to answer questions on the topic, by standing idly by as Pearson feigns attachment to the program, Warde Manuel is doing a profound disservice to his current head hockey coach.
In discussing Pearson’s dismissal at Media Day, Naurato treaded lightly and emphasized the future. He spoke about his faith in the culture within the locker room (e.g. the culture that existed outside the previous head coach), and he spoke about the esteem in which he holds the entire hockey staff (an obvious contradiction to the circumstances outlined by WilmerHale under the previous administration).
It might have been nice to hear a more direct condemnation of Pearson’s leadership, but it’s not hard to understand why Naurato was reluctant to bash his former boss, whom his current boss evidently wanted to keep in place until the bitter end. After all, Naurato is an interim coach, and, as such, his own position is a fundamentally vulnerable one.
Where Naurato has had to answer questions on the topic of Pearson’s dismissal and program culture repeatedly throughout his young tenure, Manuel remains mum. While it is Naurato’s job to ensure that the workplace issues of Pearson’s reign are corrected, it shouldn’t be up to Brandon Naurato to explain the need for change, nor why the previous head coach does not belong near this program today. Warde Manuel, as the leader who oversaw this entire ordeal, needs to hold himself to account for the messy outcomes of what was always a messy process.
Hopefully, we do not need to return to this story any time soon.