Midweek Roundup 2.22.23
A CCWHA Tournament preview, preparing for Notre Dame and the postseason, and a closer look at Michigan’s most recent third line: Hallum, Nazar, and Ciccolini
Fresh off a disappointing trip to Ohio (as trips to Ohio tend to be), the University of Michigan men’s hockey team has just one weekend remaining in its regular season journey. The Wolverines host Notre Dame at Yost this Friday and Saturday.
Last weekend, with shootout then regulation losses, Michigan saw its momentum stalled and a seven-game win streak snapped. To be sure, there were areas of concern to emerge over the weekend (most notably, an 0-12 effort from the power play across the two games), but, by and large, a dropped shootout and defeat in an outdoor game on a dubious ice sheet do not strike me as cause to throw cold water on the excitement the Wolverines generated over their recent spell of strong form.
At a few days remove from the festivities in Cleveland, head coach Brandon Naurato believes his team performed admirably across its two games in Ohio, but needs to clean up its special teams moving forward:
“That ice was bad, and that’s not an excuse. Both teams played on the ice, but when that ice is that bad, our whole game plan is to create more chaos like we’ve talked about and deliver more pucks, and we didn’t. And we still had more O-zone time than them, our expected goals was almost a goal higher than them, they had like six shots in the scoring square on net, that’s nothing.
“So it’s 2–1 them, we get two power plays in a row, on the second one, they score a shorty. They score two power play goals and a shorty, but we’re a goal better at five-on-five. We should have won both games; our power play was 0-for. I’m not putting it on the power play, but that’s the difference. What’s the stat? If you win the special teams game, you win like 70% of the games.”
Despite the disappointment at the results, Naurato still holds the occasion itself as a special one, saying “I thought the event was awesome. We’re so blessed and lucky to be a part of it. Does the outcome stink? Sure, but we could have won both those games.”
Moving forward, the disappointing results in Columbus and Cleveland leave Michigan with plenty to play for this weekend against Notre Dame. The Maize and Blue enters the weekend on level terms with OSU for the second seed in the Big Ten (and the accompanying home-ice advantage for the first two rounds of the conference tournament). Thanks to its edge in the season series, Ohio State would claim the tiebreaker ahead of Michigan should the two teams remain tied after the coming weekend.
The Buckeyes conclude their regular season in Minneapolis, against regular season conference champ Minnesota. Though the Gophers have nothing on the line in terms of the upcoming Big Ten Tournament, they will want to close their regular season strong before their first-round bye and maintain their stranglehold on the top spot in the Pairwise.
Given Minnesota’s quality, four points would probably do the job for Michigan, but a clean six against Notre Dame would of course be optimal. Meanwhile, the Irish (and potentially Penn State, pending its results against Wisconsin) could surpass Michigan with a sweep.
For a full breakdown of postseason scenarios, I’d recommend perusing this thread from friend of the newsletter Connor Earegood of the Michigan Daily:
WoHo Wednesday: Regular Season Conclusion, CCWHA Playoffs, and a New Women’s Rink at OSU
The University of Michigan women’s hockey team concluded its regular season last Sunday with a 2-1 home loss to Michigan State in overtime.
Erin Proctor opened the scoring with her eighth goal of the season off an Annabel Levinson assist, but State’s Kathryn Novell equalized before the end of the first period and eventually notched the OT winner as well. With Michigan outshooting their guests 44-39, it was a higher event game than the final scoreline might indicate.
Despite the defeat, the conclusion of the regular season carries with it a sense of excitement for Jenna Trubiano’s team. With nineteen wins in twenty-six games, the Wolverines nearly doubled last season’s win total of ten.
Meanwhile, forward Julia Lindahl (the team’s leading scorer) rounded out the regular season with twenty five points. Her seventeen goals put her seventeenth in the ACHA as just a true freshman.
In net, Sandrine Ponnath finished with the second best save percentage among ACHA goalies who played more than ten times, just one percentage point off of Indiana Tech’s Mackenzie Addley (.950 to .951), with Addley playing eight fewer games.
Though the Wolverines’ broader ambition is ACHA Nationals, first come the CCWHA playoffs. Michigan finished second in the CCWHA’s eastern pod, and thus qualifies for the postseason conference tournament.
That tournament affords the winner of each pod a first-round bye, while the second seed from the East playing the third seed from the West and vice versa. In the second round, if the winners of each first round game come from different pods, they will play the opposite pod’s winner. If both first round winners come from the same pod, the lower-seeded first round winner will play the highest overall seed. It will take place from Friday through Sunday at Burton’s Crystal Fieldhouse.
From the CCWHA website:
For Michigan, that means a first-round match-up with Grand Valley State and potential second-round date with Indiana Tech, regardless of what happens in the other first round game between Michigan State and Miami (Oh.). Because Michigan is the two seed in the division with the number one overall seed (undefeated Adrian), it will play the opposite pod winner (Indiana Tech) regardless of the result between MSU and Miami.
The Wolverines are fresh off of beating Grand Valley 4-1 and then 5-2 in a home-and-home at the beginning of the month. While Indiana Tech would be a formidable second-round opponent, Michigan did hand the Warriors their lone conference loss of the season back in October.
If you aren’t able to make it out to Burton, Arbor Broadcasting will have you covered to stream the games, per usual.
The winner of the ACHA tournament receives an automatic bid to ACHA Nationals, which could be especially significant to the Wolverines, who slipped from sixth to ninth in the most recent rankings. Still, a strong showing should be enough to secure passage into Nationals with an at-large bid, even without wining the CCWHA Tournament.
Before wrapping this week’s WoHo Wednesday, I wanted to take a moment to discuss a different story from the world of women’s hockey. Last week, Ohio State announced that its trustees approved a $2.7 million proposal to design a new rink on campus.
According to The Athletic’s Aaron Portzline (paywall), OSU AD Gene Smith is looking into a rink of between 1,500 and 3,000 seats. It would serve as a practice rink for the men’s and women’s hockey team, a full-time home for women’s games, and, if it ends up on the higher end of that spectrum, the Buckeyes would use it for a subset of men’s games as well.
Smith told Portzline, “If we were able to get into that 3,000-seat area, there are some contests the men play where they could play in the new rink. But the larger ones — the games against that team up north [Michigan] or Penn State, for instance — we’d go to the [Schottenstein Center].”
Per Portzline, the school plans to raise $40-42 million for the new rink. By comparison, Penn State spent $88 million in 2010 to build Pegula Arena, which houses its men’s and women’s teams.
Nadine Muzzerall—head coach of the OSU women’s team, reigning national champions and current national number one—said of the project:
“We’ve won with, let’s be honest, the ugliest rink in collegiate hockey and we still won a national championship. I’ll recruit the kid that doesn’t care about that and that’s not externally driven, because I want that blue-collar kid who never had that growing up anyway. But I would always embrace a new hockey rink. And I gotta give a lot of credit to Gene Smith and his team, as that’s his mission ... that is what he said he’s gonna leave behind before he retires. We are his final mission, so I feel very confident that he will get this done with his team.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s try to go piece-by-piece. To begin by echoing Muzzerall, it’s great news that Ohio State is working to provide its women’s team with a facility more appropriate for the team’s lofty station in the sport.
Then, there’s the idea of the men’s team playing some home games at the new rink and some at its current home, which, to me, makes very little sense. It would seem to signal to the team and fan base a hierarchy of importance of games that would not benefit anybody. That Smith includes Penn State in his two-team list of the B1G’s elite is perhaps illustrative of the amount of time he spends thinking about hockey.
It also strikes me as a bit short-sighted to not adopt a more ambitious project comparable to the ~6,000 seat Pegula Arena, but, as that arena’s name suggests, PSU’s illustrious home was made possible by a single dedicated benefactor (the Pegula family, owners of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres), which evidently the Buckeyes lack at this time. Still, the project is a worthwhile comparison point for the University of Michigan, which has pointed to facilities availability as a key sticking point in the school’s inability to adopt varsity women’s hockey.
With the caveat that I don’t know anything about construction and the costs thereof, that $40ish million figure (roughly equal to the cost of The Big House’s ongoing video board renovation) strikes me as low in two different ways. On the one hand, I suspect the final bill will run past that figure by some margin (though to be fair, Smith’s wording to Portzline is about money to be raised, so perhaps some of the cost will come from within the athletic department already). Still, as the video board project suggests, we are talking about an approximate sum of money that is well within reach for U-M, should the University decide such a project is worthwhile.
Regardless of the final dollar total, the continuance of the project will be worth monitoring for Michigan women’s hockey fans.
Playoff Hockey & the Challenge of Notre Dame
With a 14-14-4 record (9-10-3 in conference play), conceding 2.7 goals-per-game and scoring just 2.3, Notre Dame travels to Ann Arbor this week in the throes of a disappointing season.
However, Jeff Jackson’s Irish sit sixteenth in the Pairwise and will be fighting for their playoff lives with the knowledge they need to be within that top sixteen and in possession of a winning record to qualify for the NCAA Tournament.
In response to a question about combatting the Irish’s desperation, Naurato responded “We’re desperate too. We want to get second place. We want to have the best path to the Big Ten championship game and the NCAA Tournament, and we want to continue to build belief in ourselves as a group.”
Even if Notre Dame had nothing to play for, they wouldn’t be a fun team to go up against. The Irish were off last weekend, but the one prior they took five of six points off Ohio State in South Bend. Jackson’s trademark 1-1-3 neutral zone trap has been a vexation to Michigan for years. Among the most memorable parts of the Wolverines’ trip to South Bend earlier in the season was Jackson’s deployment of senior forward Jesse Lansdell, who man-marked Adam Fantilli up and down the ice all weekend.
With that said, the Irish’s return trip to Ann Arbor seems to come at an appropriate time, as there is a distinct parallel between their style under Jackson and the nature of postseason hockey: Physical, defensive, lacking in available time and space.
Though it might be more pronounced against Notre Dame and then once the postseason formally begins, Naurato believes his team has been preparing for that challenge all season.
“I feel like teams do that to us every weekend,” the head coach said. “It’s just whether—it’s not even as a team as much as individuals—some guys handle it better certain nights than other.”
He continues: “The Big Ten is so deep this year that every game we play feels like a playoff atmosphere, and it will again this weekend…You know the Penn State comeback, Notre Dame when we played them Friday night, the fights and all that stuff, the Michigan State game, it’s like every game for us is crazy like that.”
To Naurato, the tumultuous journey to this point in the season leaves Michigan prepared for what’s to come. “I think the best part—we’ve talked about going through pain before—is that throughout this season, we’ve been through a lot of that, when you say adversity that’s it.”
Third Line Focus: On Hallum, Nazar, and Ciccolini
As we alluded to over the weekend, Brandon Naurato’s latest iteration of the third line unites three players with some unique common threads. Most obviously, Jackson Hallum, Frank Nazar, and Eric Ciccolini are all formidable skaters, forwards who thrive on putting defensemen into discomfort with their foot speed off the rush.
Over the weekend, they provided proof of concept of their ability to combine in transition, with Hallum and Nazar working their way up the left wing, before Ciccolini batted home the rebound off a Hallum shot.
Beyond their fleetness of foot though, the triumvirate share a common sense of discovery in their respective games.
For Ciccolini, it’s discovering a consistent run of good health and form for what promises to be the longest season of his career. Thanks to various injuries, in this his senior season, the Vaughn, Ontario native has played more games than he did the year prior for the first time as a Wolverine.
As a freshman, he scored a goal and added ten assists in twenty-six games; as a sophomore, he managed twelve points on seven goals in twenty-four; last year, he didn’t register a point in just four appearances. Should Michigan enjoy the kind of robust B1G and NCAA postseason it intends to, Ciccolini—who has six goals and four assists in twenty-two games this season—will surpass his career best in games played.
For Hallum, discovery means learning to translate his blistering speed into consistent offense. Even on a team full of excellent skaters, Jackson Hallum stands out.
“He might be one of the fastest guys in the NHL when he winds it up. He’s elite,” explains Naurato. “But because of a major strength, it’s not that people have other weaknesses, but the kid that’s super fast and twelve-years old, he just goes wide by everybody. When you’re older, guys can pivot and skate even though they’re 6’4”, 230 just as fast as you can skate, so if you don’t learn to control skate or get off the wall or attack middle ice, you’re not going to have success.”
All season, Hallum has been able to blister past defenders to gain the offensive zone, but he hasn’t always managed to convert those entries into quality chances.
Still, Naurato has lofty expectations for the Minnesotan freshman: “He’s gonna be a really good player. He wants to learn. He’s a good kid. He probably thinks I’m nuts once in a while, but I know what he can be, that’s what I’m working with him.”
Meanwhile, Nazar has played just four games as a freshman, following a major offseason surgery, and thus is in the process of discovering his game post-injury and at the collegiate level. I wrote about Nazar’s recovery this morning, so I won’t belabor the point here, but the nineteen-year-old has already shown himself to be a born goalscorer.
As Naurato pointed out the freshman’s natural nose for the net it last week, saying “The five-man offense is allowing them to be predictable to make their lives easier, but then Frankie Nazar—their guy skates into the ref, he picks up the puck, he’s burying it, because it’s Frankie, and he knows how to score.”
This season, Hallum and Ciccolini are converting on a commendable share of their offensive chances, but they haven’t necessarily had as many of those looks as they’d hope. Hallum has scored five goals on thirty-eight shots for a shooting percentage of 13.2%; Ciccolini’s six goals have come on just twenty-three shots, giving him a team-high 26.1% shooting percentage.
With Nazar’s help in transition and his scoring touch, Hallum and Ciccolini should get more opportunities to deploy what they’ve shown to be effective shots. Even if both regress a bit with a greater number of chances, the increase in volume should portend good things for Michigan’s fastest line, a potential matchup trump card as the Wolverines enter the postseason.
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