Midweek Roundup 2.8.23
An MSU preview, Recapping a GVSU Sweep and Senior Night on the women’s side, and Exploring the Nature of Sound Defense with Brandon Naurato
With three weekends to play in the regular season, the University of Michigan men’s ice hockey team has entered the business end of its schedule. Beyond the temporal pressure of the season’s conclusion, Michigan will be tested by three consecutive rivalrous opponents in Michigan State, Ohio State, and then Notre Dame. Beginning this weekend with the Spartans, it is impossible not to feel an added vigor to the Wolverines’ stretch run.
“I can give you the lines of ‘every game’s important,’ and that’s true, but I think playing there on the road on Friday and then the Duel in the D [at Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena Saturday], it’s worth way more, so there should be some more intensity,” said head coach Brandon Naurato
When asked to compare the rivalries with Michigan State and Ohio State, Naurato explained that their comparative importance is “situational.”
“You always want to beat both teams,” he noted. “It’s almost year-to-year, or if something has happened. I think the Michigan State one will pick up more. Ohio State—I feel like last year when we were there that Saturday night, and we had major injuries, and it was right before the break and the penalties and all that stuff—that made us not like them too much, so then we really had something to prove when they came back here, and that was just the timing of the year, it meant way more.”
Though Jacob Truscott and Seamus Casey missed last weekend’s Wisconsin series, the return and immediate impact of Mackie Samoskevich illustrates what Naurato sees as a perhaps counterintuitive benefit to players missing time due to injury.
For Naurato, Michigan’s hot start to the new year cannot be reduced to any “one thing.” Instead, the interim head coach sees “every individual player getting better from the seniors to the freshmen, and then I think when you’re not hurt all year, you have more healthy competition. Samoskevich misses a weekend, Brindley and Fantilli’s line lights up, [Samoskevich] wants to come back and contribute. So it’s not about Brindley scoring and he’s upset about it, he wants to score as well, and now if they’re both scoring that’s great.”
Naurato continues: “When players are starting to come back into the lineup, other guys get a little more serious, a little more dialed for whatever reason, it’s just human nature, they turn it up, and because they want to stay in or they want to say on the power play, they want to stay out at the end of the game, so you have to perform.”
As a result, Naurato sees it as imperative to avoid another season with reduced options on the outer reaches of his roster, saying “The biggest takeaway for me this year is we will have so much competition to be in the lineup and play on specific lines in the future. We will be very, very deep with our recruiting.”
Scouting the Spartans
Michigan State enters the weekend fresh off an enormous home sweep over Notre Dame in East Lansing. The triumph was so momentous because of the way it seemed to steady the ship following a taxing month of January, which was bookended by getting swept 9-1 on aggregate by Ohio State in Columbus and 14-3 on aggregate against Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Thanks to those crooked score lines, MSU is last in the Big Ten with 2.1 goals-per-game and 3.9 goals against-per-game in 2023. Still, the Spartans have yet to lose on home ice in the new year, and their 3-4-1 record is not as calamitous as those per-game figures might suggest.
Though there have been some obvious stumbles of late, Adam Nightingale’s team remains in the thick of the race for second place in the Big Ten, tied on raw points with Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State (though with two more games played than the former two).
Freshman Karsen Dorwart and senior Nico Muller are tied for the team lead in scoring, with twenty-five points in thirty games played. Meanwhile, Dylan St. Cyr (whose heroics between the pipes helped MSU steal a Friday matchup in East Lansing when last these two sides collided) remains in strong form with a .917 save percentage and 2.74 GAA through twenty-nine games played.
For Naurato, there is a decided joy to be derived from the challenge of preparing for an opponent the second time through the Big Ten schedule. When asked about his power play unit heating up over the new year, Naurato said “The one thing we have done [lately] is we will have certain sets that you can roll into several different sets in one, so it should be harder to pre-scout. Michigan State, they can pre-scout nine power plays after last weekend, they won’t see what they saw last weekend, so I think that’s what helped us against Penn State is constantly changing it up, now they’re not ready for it.”
With a sheepish grin, the head coach added, “That part I love about it. I love Saturday watching what they did Friday and having tweaks for it. And then playing the second time, and they’re watching what we did last time, it’s gonna be completely different. I’m wasting their whole week of pre-scout.”
WoHo Wednesday
Over the weekend, the University of Michigan women’s hockey team returned to its winning ways with a home-and-home sweep over Grand Valley State.
On Saturday night at Griff’s Georgetown Ice Arena in Hudsonville, the Wolverines earned a 4-1 victory over their hosts on the strength of their depth scoring. Mariah Evans got the ball rolling late in the first after Michigan had conceded the opener, before a pair of Ava Gargiulo goals put the Wolverines in control in the second. Erin Proctor would then ice the game for the visitors with a third period power play marker.
The following afternoon, Michigan completed the sweep with a 5-2 result back home at Yost, with top liners Julia Lindahl and Kelsey Swanson returning to their familiar places on the scoresheet.
Swanson opened the scoring with her tenth goal of the year in the first period, before Lindahl’s fifteenth and sixteenth goals of the season as well as another from Gargiulo made it 4-0 in the second. Jessica Simmer would add a further insurance tally in the third.
Over the weekend, Sandrine Ponnath stopped forty-nine of the fifty-two Laker shots that came her way in yet another dominant display of goaltending.
Before completing the sweep on Sunday, Michigan honored its eight seniors: Annabel Levinson, Jordan Eliason, Sophie Williams, Proctor, captain Miki Rubin, Jamie McCarthy, Evans, and Lydia Forhan.
Seemingly entrenched in the sixth slot in the ACHA polls, the Wolverines are down to just two games remaining in their regular season. This Sunday, Jenna Trubiano’s team will host Concordia at Yost, then a week from Sunday, it will close out the year by hosting MSU.
What is Good Defense? On the Relationship Between Attacking and Defending with Brandon Naurato
With the postseason drawing nearer, it feels like a good moment to devote some time to the defensive side of the puck.
As much as we love talking about rondos, possession-based attack, and goal-scoring, it would seem a grievous error not to give some consideration to the defensive work necessary for playoff success. Specifically, I wanted to explore what it means to play sound defense, especially when publicly available data to measure defensive efficacy at an individual level is scant.
The modern push toward a more analytic-based understanding of the game has forced a reevaluation of what few traditional statistics for measuring defense did exist—stats like hits or shot blocks. With the shift to Corsi, Fenwick, and then Expected Goals (which track shot volume and location to serve as a rough proxy for puck-possession or shot quality), it became clear that evaluating defensive success through hits or blocks was a fool’s errand.
Those counting stats did not reflect how well a player defends but rather how much time that player spends in their own end and without the puck. As such, racking up hits is just as liable to reveal a player who spends all their time chasing the play as it is a player who is an exemplary defender.
In other words, an analytic understanding of the game pushed hockey fans toward the inversion of an age-old aphorism: The best defense is a good offense. In other words, to be good defensively means to play as little defense because you are too busy attacking.
This logic rings true to me, but it presents a different problem. Conceiving of defense as something best avoided (which may well be true) makes it seem as though defense just sort of happens while the opponent is attacking, denying agency to the work defensive players do and failing to identify the gifts that might distinguish them.
To help get to the bottom of what it means to play good defense with the caveat that you probably don’t want to play too much of it, we turned to Wolverines head coach Brandon Naurato.
When asked which habits he perceives as essential to sound defense, Naurato offered three: “Being between your man and the net, being physical, and any defensive situation where the big thing would be to outnumber, if you outnumber and don’t kill the play, that means somebody’s open.”
To Naurato, understanding good defense requires a shift in mindset. Based on his video and data analysis, the interim coach believes that defending is not just remaining in sound structure according to a game plan but instead requires assertiveness to retake control:
“Everything offensively that I see, it’s not defensive breakdowns. When we score, it’s guys making plays. So defensively, making a play is killing the play, stealing the puck, finishing your guy. We’re not giving up chances because they’re beating us. Most teams give up chances because you make the other team make a mistake. If you look at our [goals allowed], there’s some type of turnover one second or five seconds before the chances. It’s not them making multiple positive plays.”
In other words, playing good defense necessitates that players perceive themselves as playmakers in much the same way they would on the offensive end of the rink. With this mentality, players can then go out and halt an opponent’s attack in progress to set up the chance for more offense of their own.
As Naurato puts it, “Offensively, [stringing together multiple positive plays] is what we’re trying to do when we have the puck. That’s why we have the support and possession versus attacking, and then when we’re on the forecheck, or even in our defensive zone, we’re trying to kill plays so that we can go the other way.”
Accomplishing this objective boils down to a simple task. “Defense is taking away their time and space,” Naurato explains. “So to take away someone’s time and space, you have to be a great skater. You have to be aware away from the puck of where the puck’s going next, and you have to be physical in between your net and your check.”
Beyond these attributes of effective defenders, Naurato sees defense as a means to an end: Spending more time on the attack:
“We need to manage the puck. If we have the puck, they can’t score, so that’s how I see it versus just defending. That takes so much energy out to just defend the whole night versus to play offense. And you hope you wear them down, and then they cheat, and then you can go.”
In that sentiment, Naurato expresses one of the Cruyffian ideals we previously ascribed to his possession-based system, perhaps its most fundamental: Whoever controls the puck (or ball in Cruyff’s case) controls the game. You cannot be scored on while in possession. If your first emphasis is on playing defense, you will end up spending an entire game on your heels absorbing pressure (which brings us back to the fallacy of using stats like shot blocks to measure defensive acumen).
By shifting focus to playing for possession and game control as a means of building pressure, the imperative for defenders is to get out of the defensive phase of play as quickly as possible. With that in mind, defenders must be decisive in killing plays to get back to offense.
For Naurato, this approach is simple: Trailing teams, desperate to claw back into games, attempt to do so with aggressive tactics to boost their odds at discovering some offense. Naurato’s goal is to manufacture that pressure all game long:
“When you press, usually that’s when you score, so why not press strategically the whole game? So you have to have guys that can skate, compete, and they can think.”
So as the Wolverines seek to continue building momentum as the regular season pushes toward its conclusion, don’t expect the transition to postseason play to correspond with a sudden adoption of the neutral zone trap or a newfound prioritization of defense.
Defense is central to success, but, for Brandon Naurato, that still doesn’t mean you want to spend a whole game doing it. Instead, good defense is a question of decisiveness and playmaking to get back to and sustain the possession game that defines Naurato’s Wolverines.
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