Midweek Roundup 11.23.22
We preview this weekend’s Harvard series, look back on a successful Beehive Showcase, chat with Nar about score effects and finishing games before closing with a word on the Qatari World Cup
After last weekend’s matchup with Minnesota went from what should have been an exciting clash of the Big Ten’s elite to a somber affair thanks to a virus ripping through the Wolverine locker room, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team will return to action this weekend against Harvard.
Though the Gophers handed Michigan consecutive losses, it was difficult to walk away from either contest without being impressed by the short-handed Wolverines. Adam Fantilli, Steven Holtz, T.J. Hughes, Jacob Truscott, Nolan Moyle, and Philippe Lapointe all missed at least one of the two games. Nonetheless, a resilient Michigan team made both affairs competitive in ways its numerous absences should have rendered impossible.
Because the Minnesota series unfolded on Thursday and Friday, Michigan got an extra day of rest as it looks for a more standard week of preparation for Harvard. Brandon Naurato anticipated a “more normal” practice week, but added that the illness leaves a decided uncertainty as to when the full arsenal of talent will be back on the ice and 100% healthy.
Moyle and Truscott both played in Friday’s game, and Adam Fantilli returned for Monday’s practice, while TJ Hughes skated beforehand though he did not participate in the full-team session.
Scouting the Crimson
Harvard will arrive in Ann Arbor this weekend as the sole unbeaten team in Division I men’s hockey. The Crimson are a neat 7-0-0 and tied with Michigan and Western Michigan as the nation’s highest scoring teams at 4.1 goals per game.
Offensively, sophomore forward Matthew Coronato leads the way with five goals and six assists for eleven points in seven games played. Junior Sean Farrell is not far behind with four goals and six assists.
In net, the Crimson have already used three goaltenders, but all three have proven effective. Senior Mitchell Gibson is Harvard’s top option and can claim a 1.24 goals against average and .937 save percentage in four games. Junior Derek Mullaly has a 1.50 GAA and .929 save percentage in two games, while Finnish freshman Aku Koskenvuo conceded two in his one start, running at a .913 save percentage.
If you are curious as to why an unbeaten team with Harvard’s offensive chops isn’t higher than ninth in the latest USCHO poll, the answer lies in its strength of schedule. Because of the ECAC’s unusual scheduling (in which teams seldom play weekend series but instead take on two different opponents from similar locations across the conference’s footprint, e.g. St. Lawrence and Clarkson or Colgate and Cornell), the Crimson have played seven different opponents in their seven games. The highest rated of those opponents in the latest PairWise is Union at thirty-fifth. Meanwhile, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, and Yale all rank fifty-fifth or worse out of Division I’s sixty-two teams.
WoHo Wednesday
On their first “big trip” since before the onset of COVID, the University of Michigan women’s hockey team won two of three at the Beehive Showcase in Salt Lake City.
The Wolverines flew out of the gate with an 18-0 victory over Montana State Friday evening. Michigan outshot the Bobcats 87-5 and divided its eighteen goals evenly across the game’s three periods. Kelsey Swanson and Megan Mathews each scored a hat trick, while Ava Gargiulo netted two goals and pitched in three assists.
On Saturday, Michigan continued its winning ways with a 5-0 victory over their hosts, the University of Utah. The 42-17 shot margin wasn’t quite the differential the Maize and Blue created the night prior, but it once again reflected domination. Mariah Evans scored twice for the visitors.
On Sunday, the Wolverines suffered their lone loss of the weekend, falling 4-1 to UMass-Amherst. When UMass struck in the first period, it ended an astonishing shutout streak for Michigan goaltender Sandrine Ponnath of two-hundred-forty-eight-minutes and thirty-seven seconds. That streak stretched back nearly a month to an October 22nd date with Indiana Tech and encompassed four full games. For the season, Ponnath has a remarkable .951 save percentage and 1.51 goals against average.
Despite the Sunday setback, it’s hard to complain about a Western swing in which the Wolverines outscored their opponents by a combined 24-4 across three games. The team has a bye this weekend, before a huge in-state home-and-home with UM-Dearborn the first weekend of December.
The Art of Finishing Games & the Thorns of Score Effects
Prior to the aberrant Minnesota series, Michigan had squandered a multi-goal lead and ended up in overtime on consecutive Saturdays. Three weeks ago in State College, Adam Fantilli saw the Wolverines through in the extra session, but the weekend before last in South Bend the Maize and Blue were on the wrong end of the overtime period.
In an article for The Athletic earlier this month (paywall), Cam Charron—who has returned to hockey media after nearly a decade working in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ front office—noted that multi-goal comebacks are on the rise across the NHL. As of his November 4th writing, in forty-two of the one-hundred-and-one NHL games played “a team either held a multi-goal lead prior to the third period or blew one that they earned in the third.” That 41.6% rate is a significant increase from everything that preceded it in the advanced stats era (a range encompassing the ‘07-‘08 season through last year).
To get at why we might be seeing an increase in blown leads, Charron decided to dig into the subject of “score effects,” which in broad terms refer to the dynamic in which a team trailing by a significant margin always seems to see an uptick in offense. As Charron explains, “Teams are more likely to take shots when playing from behind than if they’re ahead. Generally, these shots are long-range, desperation efforts, as leading teams focus on protecting the slot and trying not to give up odd-man rushes.”
Charron points to a Bill James-ism—that teams across sports generally benefit from aggressive strategies and that trailing tends to force a team into adopting them. To offer a football parallel, a team that goes down early by several touchdowns has little choice but to throw the ball often for the rest of the game.
He uses two recent examples in exploring how score effects might manifest: an October 30th Bruins comeback over the Penguins and a November 1st Ducks comeback over the Leafs.
In the former, Charron identifies the tendency of a leading team to back off in terms of forechecking and neutral zone pressure, not wanting to be caught out-numbered on a counter attack. While this approach minimizes the risk of conceding odd-man opportunities, it also makes it easier for the chasers to exit their own end and enter the attacking third of the rink. With an increase in controlled entries, the Bruins could then generate more offensive opportunities and claw their way back into the game.
In the Ducks’ comeback over Toronto, Charron emphasizes a different adjustment, one that almost appears more psychological than tactical. He notes that, upon falling behind by multiple goals, the Ducks began to apply much greater pressure on Maple Leaf skaters all over the rink, seeking to force turnovers and capitalize upon them in transition. Here, it seems as though the fuel of desperation born from trailing by multiple goals is as relevant to the comeback as any tactical adjustment.
All of this leads to a question: What exactly does it mean to finish a game?
Is there something qualitatively different about what is required to close out a game? Are teams better served sitting back in a defensive shell to see out a result, or should they push for more goals? Are struggles with finishing out games more of a psychological or tactical problem?
For answers, we turned to Brandon Naurato.
When presented with these questions after Monday’s practice, Naurato first noted that, even with its impressive record, his team still has steps to take in areas that can affect a game at any point but become especially salient when trying to close one out.
“We have to make every individual player better and help them with their situational awareness and pro habits to be a team that fights for something in the end,” Naurato said. “To me, it’s not one thing, and it’s not structure, it’s individuals or a unit of lines doing a job to win the game…You don’t give up major chances because of bad structure. You give up major chances because of poor decisions or poor plays, meaning I’m skating with the puck and I lose it—that’s not structure. It’s me not getting the puck out.”
Naurato also offers the reminder that his team is uniquely dependent on young players. He pointed out that many of Michigan’s youths are young even relative to other collegiate freshmen. Where many players arrive in NCAA hockey at twenty or twenty-one after several USHL seasons, players like Gavin Brindley and Rutger McGroarty are just one year removed from high school and eighteen years old. As such, growing pains on some of the game’s finer points are inevitable.
As Naurato sees it, a veteran player’s experience lends them an intelligence that can often outpace whatever physical decline comes with aging, assuming a minimum threshold of skating ability: “The only thing you lose when you get older is physical capabilities. You don’t lose your brain. That’s why Patrice Bergeron can play with broken ribs, because he’s smart. I joke that I can’t skate, but there’s other things that you can’t measure and that gave me a chance to survive at whatever level. And then you get to a certain level and you just can’t skate well enough and you can’t outthink that. It is what it is.”
As for the idea that trailing does bring out certain advantageous tactics, Naurato turns to a tweak from last Friday’s game against Minnesota. Down three goals entering the third, Naurato and his staff adopted a more aggressive form of defensive zone structure.
“What we did is we just kept [an extra] guy in the neutral zone, so essentially, they would have not covered him,” Naurato explains. “They would have played five-on-four in their zone the whole time. What it did is it pulled up both their D [to the perimeter of the offensive zone], not just one. So both their D are out, now it’s four-on-three [in Michigan’s favor, in the lower parts of the zone], and we’re skating up the ice with crazy speed.”
As Naurato sees it, tweaks like this one can be useful in certain situations when there is a desperate need for offense (i.e. trailing by three in the third) but are likely unsustainable across full games because of the vulnerabilities opened up defensively by adopting them.
“I don’t think you can trade chances like that consistently,” said Naurato. “But it’s like three-on-three overtime. We did a deep dive into this in Detroit and what they found out is it’s not some type of structure that creates, it’s trading chances—your best chances come off giving up a high danger chance.”
One area where Naurato sees improvement that could pay dividends in closing out games is in “shift management,” which he described as a key facet of “managing the game.”
“If I’m thirty-five or forty seconds into a shift, and I try to make a play off the rush, and it goes the other way based on numbers or whatever, now I’m forty seconds in and I’m back checking, and I gotta play twenty [seconds] in my D-zone—you’re surviving. You can make plays early in the shift, and if you don’t get it, you’ve got energy to track back to then steal it and try to go up the ice again. If you’re a D, you need to recognize that the forwards are tired. Don’t try to pass to them and jump up into the rush. All they’re going to do is chip it. We need to get [those forwards] off.”
The first-year head coach then turns to a different hypothetical: “The simple one would be like we’re up two goals with five minutes left, we don’t need to stretch our weak-side winger. We need to get the puck out.”
Naurato adds that Rob Rassey—inspired by the timeless parental wisdom that “nothing good happens after midnight”—has a saying that “nothing good happens after forty seconds,” the implication being that shorter shifts help to improve decision-making and outcomes. As Naurato glosses, “If you go and chase it, that’s where you get in trouble and you get scored on.”
When the Wolverines take on the team Rassey coached as an assistant between 2013 and 2019, we’ll be hoping for plenty of sub-forty-second shifts and two well-closed victories.
Jules Rimet Still Gleaming
In 1996, English comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, with the backing of the band The Lightning Seeds, released “Three Lions,” a serio-comic anthem that gave birth to the phrase “it’s coming home” as a means of describing the hope that England would finally collect its first major international trophy since World Cup 1966, which the Lions lifted on home soil.
The song opens with British television pundits expressing their skepticism: “I think it’s bad news for the English game,” “we’re not creative enough, we’re not positive enough,” “we’ll go on getting bad results” before breaking into the familiar refrain. “It’s coming home / it’s coming home / football’s coming home.”
Though the song is older than I am, it resounds whenever the Euros or World Cup approach. To someone without a rooting interest in the Three Lions, it’s easy for the song’s campy melody to become tedious.
The men’s English national team reminds me of the Toronto Maple Leafs. A team whose massive fan base overlaps with its sport’s media epicenter, and the result is nothing short of mania surrounding matters as trivial as who the third-choice right back will be or the star winger’s pregame meals. Compounding matters, like Leaf fans, the English seem to insist that their team deserves the constant fervor that surrounds it, despite results that it never approaches the hype. That 1966 World Cup win (to date, England’s only major trophy on the men’s side of a sport they are proud to tell you they invented) came one year before the Leafs’ last hoisted the Stanley Cup.
The English men’s most recent flameout was a defeat in the final of Euro 2020 (played, of course, in the summer of 2021) in penalty kicks to Italy before a despondent crowd at London’s Wembley Stadium. The proceedings turned ugly as an upstart England team—defined in many ways by its collection of young Black stars brave enough to disrupt the national discourse with their social activism—became the objects of racist ravings after three of those Black stars missed their kicks in the decisive shootout.
Football wasn’t “coming home”; it was going to Rome. The goodwill Gareth Southgate’s team generated on the way to the final dissipated quickly thanks to the reprehensible reaction of a vocal minority. England were losers (off the pitch, more than on it) again, and “Three Lions” was as trite and irritating as ever to outsiders.
Why then are we writing about a twenty-six-year-old song we ourselves found annoying until around July?
Because last summer, something funny happened. England hosted the women’s Euros. To cut out some exposition, the Lionesses did what the men’s side had made to seem impossible—winning international glory on a Chloe Kelly goal in the 110th minute of extra time in the final. To win a trophy at Wembley—before the biggest crowd to watch any football match, men’s or women’s, of the 2021-22 season—by beating Germany was a veritable English fantasy.
After the match, the victorious Lionesses interrupted their manager Sarina Wiegman’s press conference for a spirited rendition of Baddiel and Skinner’s song.
For the first time, I found myself listening without a shudder at the overtones of British exceptionalism and instead heard a simple yet profound explication of fandom.
“Everyone seems to know the score
They’ve seen it all before
They just know
They’re so sure
That England’s going to throw it away
Gonna blow it away
But I know they can play”
As a lifelong Washington Capitals fan, I recognized at last something fundamental and familiar to my own experience watching sports. It’s easy to throw stones at your own team—to laugh at and dismiss out of hand the possibility that this year might be the year. Cynicism is especially tempting when, as was true of the Ovechkin-era Caps or post-‘66 Lions, your team has given you far more examples of heartbreak than triumph.
However, where there is some sliver of power and pleasure in even the most tortured fandom, it lies in faith.
Faith that even though most teams end the season or tournament disappointed, maybe this once your team might be the lucky one. Faith that whatever moments of joy you did have (for me, Sergei Fedorov’s Game 7 winner against the Rangers in 2009 and the heaps of wondrous Alexander Ovechkin goals or Nicklas Backstrom saucer passes I’d gotten to see over the years) portended something more to come, despite the far more numerous unravelings (Game 7 against the Penguins in 2009. And 2016. And 2017. Oh, and Game 7 against the Rangers in 2015. And the Montreal disaster in 2011. There are more. Whatever. That isn’t the point).
Why does the narrator in “Three Lions” believe?
“‘Cause I remember
Three Lions on a shirt
Jules Rimet still gleaming
Thirty years of hurt
Never stopped me dreaming
So many jokes, so many sneers,
But all those oh-so-nears
Wear you down
Through the years
But I still see that tackle by Moore
And when Lineker scored
Bobby belting the ball
And Nobby dancing”
Despite the “jokes,” “sneers,” and “oh-so-nears,” the narrator can’t help but think of the moments when the joy they believe will return came through in the past. Even after what was already almost a half-century of sorrow, the narrator finds themself visualizing Gary Lineker scoring against Germany in the semifinal of the 1990 World Cup or Nobby Stiles dancing with the famed Jules Rimet Trophy after the great British breakthrough of 1966. Maybe those moments of glory will be back.
This is the grandeur of sports—inviting our blind belief in causes that are probably futile but somehow worthwhile nonetheless. As Baddiel explained to The Guardian in 2021, the song was “about magical thinking, about assuming we are going to lose, reasonably, based on experience, but hoping that somehow we won't.”
I’ve never found the joy that comes from this “magical thinking” anywhere but sports fandom, and no sport does it better than soccer, a game more widespread than any of the globe’s languages or religions. The way that a soccer star—Pele, Maradona, Messi—becomes not just a celebrity but a deity has no corollary in American sports. The way the World Cup captures the faith of nations, not just fan bases, is unlike any other sporting event.
However, we closed this week with a rare foray outside of hockey not just to talk about a cute song we learned to enjoy but because of the myriad controversies surrounding the Qatari World Cup and incumbent complexities for fans.
With FIFA corruption, it’s easy to dismiss this latest offense as just one more in a long line of decisions that showed blatant disrespect for human rights and decency. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association has a long history with authoritarianism, hosting World Cups in Mussolini’s Italy in 1934, Junta-controlled Argentina in 1978, and most recently Putin’s Russia—hardly removed from its initial invasion of Ukraine—in 2018.
Yet, in the process of awarding Qatar the World Cup, FIFA has outdone even itself in depravity. The profiteers at FIFA who oversaw the simultaneous awarding of the event to Russia for 2018 and Qatar in 2022 (a decision reached in 2010) have been credibly linked to bribes and corruption. At least thirty-seven migrant workers were killed in the construction of the stadiums for the event, and that number pales in comparison to the total number of migrant worker deaths in the country since the decision was announced (a figure closer to 6,500). Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, and the country’s laws also feature a “male guardianship” system devastating to women’s rights.
Lineker—once the token of Baddiel, Skinner, and the Lightning Seeds’ idolatry and now covering the World Cup for the BBC—delivered a sobering and succinct monologue sketching the event’s horror before Ecuador and Qatar played its first match Sunday.
With all of this disregard for humanity as context, many soccer fans like myself struggle to get excited for an event that, on the pitch, should be as chaotic and exciting as any international tournament in recent memory.
The optimist in me hopes that this time FIFA’s breach of basic ethics is so great that it will face consequences for its craven behavior at last. Perhaps decisions like Qatar’s last-minute announcement that (alcoholic) beer sales will not happen within stadiums will make it harder for the world to overlook the host’s abuses because of material comfort (as seemed to be the case in Russia four years ago).
Right now, though, it means there will be no prevailing sense of defiant joy in the face of probable heartbreak, an aura that should define any World Cup. I should be fantasizing about the possibility of Lionel Messi finally adding the one piece of silverware that’s eluded him through a brilliant and oddly tragic career. The first ever World Cup played in the Middle East should be cause for celebration.
Instead, it’s hard to think of anything but human rights atrocities. When the tournament ends in Lusail on December 18th, Jules Rimet will still be gleaming, but the rampant abuses that enabled and will be enacted by this tournament will have kept us all from dreaming.
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