Midweek Roundup: January 19, 2022
Minnesota Preview, Special Teams Review, and Flowers for GVW and Nolan Moyle
This weekend, the University of Michigan men’s ice hockey team will travel to Minneapolis to take on the Minnesota Golden Gophers this weekend, pitting the Big Ten’s top two teams by points percentage against one another.
Minnesota has played two fewer B1G games this season than the rest of the conference, but its twenty-five points from twelve games (a .694 points percentage) narrowly edges the twenty-nine points from fourteen games (for a .690 points percentage) posted by Michigan.
Given the infinitesimal gap between the two teams in the standings, the import of this impending series is obvious.
When last we met Minnesota…
Michigan and Minnesota exchanged blowout victories in Ann Arbor at the beginning of December, with each team notching a total of seven goals. For Michigan, it was a humbling loss followed by a stirring victory. Along the way, Mark Estapa scored his first collegiate goal. Oh, and, if this isn’t sounding familiar, you may have been distracted by another Big Ten contest going on that weekend.
To relive the weekend in greater detail, return to that weekend’s column from Gulo Gulo below:
What’s new with the Gophers?
In case you haven’t heard, Minnesota watched its star goaltender Jack LaFontaine sign with the Carolina Hurricanes, after the organization underwent a flurry of goaltending injuries. LaFontaine’s NHL debut, a fifteen-minute mop-up duty appearance at the tail end of a blowout loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets, did not go well. He surrendered two goals on three shots, but that disappointing outing doesn’t change the fact that he was a Richter Award winner and the only Gopher goalie to play meaningful minutes at the time he turned pro.
When discussing the challenges facing NCAA athletics during the Omicron surge, I pointed out that college teams, unlike professional ones, have no equivalent of taxi squads, farm systems, or ten-day contracts. As such, I suggested they were unable to “call up” replacement players
On this point, the Gophers proved me wrong by “calling up” commit Owen Bartoszkiewicz, who had been playing for the Youngstown Phantoms in the USHL, last week as a replacement. A Northville, Michigan native, Bartoszkiewicz posted a .889 save percentage in twelve games.
Last weekend, the Gophers split a home series with Alaska-Fairbanks, making up a pair of games that had been originally scheduled for October 2nd and 3rd. The Gophers coasted to a 4-1 win on Friday, before falling 3-2 on Saturday. Reductive though it may be, it’s hard not to point to goaltending as an essential variable.
On Friday, Justen Close, who until that week had served as LaFontaine’s back-up, did his job well, albeit with a light workload. He stopped thirteen of the fourteen Nanook shots he faced.
On Saturday, however, Close was not so steady, surrendering three goals on just twelve shots. It’s hard not to feel as though Minnesota could fairly expect to sweep a series where they surrendered a total of just twenty-six shots. Even surrendering twenty-six shots in one game feels like a solid enough defensive effort to win with a decent night in the offensive zone.
It will be interesting to see whether coach Bob Motzko will turn to Close or Bartoszkiewicz in the crease this weekend.
We don’t wish to throw stones at the Gophers, so out of respect for their phenomenal program, we should also mention some recent good news out of Minneapolis. Three Golden Gophers will be joining Matty Beniers and Brendan Brisson in Beijing with Team USA. Forwards Matthew Knies and Ben Myers, along with defenseman Brock Faber, will all represent the United States in the upcoming Olympics.
Special Teams Review
We wanted to devote a bit of time to a by-the-numbers discussion of Michigan’s special teams. To give us a sense of how things are going lately, we decided to restrict our focus to the months of December and January. Admittedly, this is an entirely arbitrary deadline, but it gives us a decent sample, featuring three conference opponents for two game sets (Minnesota, Ohio State, and Penn State), the UMass series that kicked off the new year, and the undermanned effort against Michigan Tech in the GLI. Conveniently, it also gives us a near equal number of power plays (30) and penalty kills (31).
Let’s start with the power play. Over the nine game stretch we examined, Michigan is four of thirty on the power play, good for a success rate of 13.3%. If you click the link above to revisit the previous Minnesota series (which kicks off this nine-game sample), you’ll note that the series featured a personnel change up on the man advantage.
Prior to that series, the top Michigan unit generally featured Brendan Brisson, Matty Beniers, Owen Power, Thomas Bordeleau, and Kent Johnson. It is as star-studded a list of five as you can construct from a roster known for its elite talent. Of that group, only Bordeleau is NOT a first round NHL draft choice, and Bordeleau was the seventh pick of the second round of the 2020 draft.
Beginning that series, the Wolverines opted to break up that unit to offer two more balanced groups that split ice time more evenly. Given that the group’s success rate on the season (twenty-three goals on ninety opportunities for 25.6%) is nearly double the 13.3% clip that follows this change, it seems as though it might be time to re-stack the deck.
When discussing the power play, head coach Mel Pearson always reminds us that he delegates total control of the power play (both at the level of scheme and personnel) to assistant Brandon Naurato. I say this not to cast blame one way or another but instead to single out the organizational structure at work. I’m sure Pearson and Naurato maintain an open dialogue on player usage, and obviously Pearson has supported Naurato’s choices up to this point. Like with the Gophers’ goaltending situation, it will be interesting to track Michigan’s deployment patterns with the man advantage this weekend, especially given the obvious import of the series’ results.
At the other end of the ice, Michigan’s penalty kill is white hot. As we noted over the weekend, they have successfully killed off twenty-three straight penalties and are operating at a 93.4% kill rate in the nine-game sample we studied. Here, Michigan gets contributions both from its stars (players like Johnson and Bordeleau) and its depth (players like Garrett Van Whye and Nolan Moyle). That is about ten percentage points higher than the season rate of 85.3% (off eighty-one successful kills in ninety-five attempts).
We’ll spend a moment talking about what makes players like Van Whye and Moyle effective in just a moment, but, given how blemish-free Michigan has been while shorthanded of late, I don’t have much for you in terms of editorialization here. Michigan is an aggressive unit while shorthanded, and it paid off just last weekend in the form of a shorthanded goal for Moyle. I love the Wolverines’ willingness to put its stars on the ice while down a man, but I have also grown to appreciate the depth players who comprise the rest of the unit.
For a team this skilled, you’d probably expect a dynamite power play and spotty penalty kill, but Michigan is trending in the other direction. When tournament hockey begins in March, Michigan will want to make its opponents pay whenever they yield a power play. As such, a jolt might be in order sooner rather than later, but, for now, the Wolverines can take solace in a penalty kill in sublime form.
Flowers for GVW and Nolan Moyle
We spend a lot of time here at Gulo Gulo oohing and ahhing at the stars at the top of Michigan’s lineup, so, after doing just that in our power play breakdown, let’s take a moment to offer flowers for two fourth liners: Garrett Van Whye and Nolan Moyle.
Over the course of the season, I’ve come to love both Van Whye and Moyle, and the reason for that is not their skill and production but rather their intelligence and self-awareness. What makes the pair fit in on a roster of players with demonstrably more skill is that both Van Whye and Moyle understand what makes them effective.
Garrett Van Whye doesn’t have the speed or skill of numerous teammates, but he is the oldest player on Michigan’s roster. Even if he can’t wire a wrist shot like Brisson or Beniers, Van Whye is selective with his shooting and knows how to make his release deceptive. His defensive anticipation is brilliant, and he puts heavy pressure on opposing defensemen by knowing where they’re going with the puck before they do. Van Whye knows that he isn’t a player who will make way attacking one-on-one across the rush; instead, he will ladle a carefully placed dump-in into the corner and bury his head in puck pursuit. It is these sorts of subtleties that help Van Whye excel at fives or short handed, even without the elite skill set of his more heralded teammates.
Nolan Moyle, like Van Whye, is a player who knows what he does best: winning battles along the wall. There is a certain glee to the way he will dump the puck in, knowing that his rangy 6’2” frame will come in handy when it’s time to retrieve it. Moyle might not win every battle himself, but, at the worst, he will hold up play until a teammate can arrive on the scene to help. Again, Moyle’s offensive tools don’t stand out on a team loaded with talent, but he knows what he does well and sets himself up to do just that.
Individually, Moyle and Van Whye are intelligent players, who make life difficult for their opponents. In tandem, they are terrors on Michigan’s fourth line.