Midweek Roundup: January 5, 2022
Michigan prepares for a weekend series with defending champs UMass; COVID cancellations abound; the Olympics are on the horizon
For the time being, the schedule says that the reigning National Champion UMass(-Amherst) Minutemen will come to Ann Arbor this weekend for a Friday-Saturday two-game set. Earlier in the week, it appeared as though COVID positives within UMass’ roster may lead to the cancellation of the series. Now (and I cannot emphasize enough the possibility that this reality changes before I even have time to click “post”), the series appears poised to go ahead as scheduled.
Scouting the Minutemen
Like the Wolverines (and everyone else in the world (of college hockey)), UMass is in the midst of a scheduling shake up. Last weekend, they were scheduled to take on Union, only for that game to be canceled and replaced at the last moment with a Monday night home game against Merrimack. The Minutemen earned a 4-3 victory.
On the whole, Greg Carvel’s team is in the midst of a steady if unspectacular title defense, a sentiment Carvel expressed himself in an interview with USCHO in early December. Following an earlier win over Merrimack, Carvel said ““As of right now, we’re in first place, and I’m sour about it. I don’t know what that says about me. (I) don’t want to sound arrogant, but we’re squeaking by. We’re scratching and clawing.” I suspect the notion of a talented team making life harder itself than it ought to or perhaps not quite meeting its self-imposed lofty expectations resonates with Michigan fans.
Now, Carvel and company sit in second place in Hockey East, one point off the pace of in-state rival UMass-Lowell. They are ranked tenth in the most recent USCHO poll.
On the ice, the backbone of Carvel’s team occupies the crease. Senior goaltender Matt Murray is the only player to man the Minuteman net this year, and he has done so with aplomb. Having played sixteen games, Murray has a .925 save percentage, a 2.21 GAA, ten wins, and two shutouts to his name.
Their top returning player is Bobby Trivigno, an undersized but highly productive forward who also serves as team captain. Trivigno is playing at exactly a point-a-game pace this year, with sixteen points in sixteen games.
Though Carvel lost a good chunk of last year’s national championship winning side, a strong recruiting class has helped keep UMass near the top of the Division 1 heap. Connecticut-born defenseman Scott Morrow (a second round selection of the Carolina Hurricanes in last summer’s draft) headlines that freshman class and, despite playing on the blue line, leads the Minutemen in scoring.
With uncertainty surrounding both lineups, it’s hard to know exactly what this two-game set will look like, but, if the two teams do manage to safely pull off the series, it will constitute a valuable measuring stick before Big Ten play resumes the following weekend.
Absences, Ambiguities, and the Olympics
As we discussed over the weekend, NCAA hockey is in disarray, in large part to an absence of effective central leadership.
Michigan’s decision (one the school and Mel Pearson have stated was made by medical staff rather than hockey staff) to cancel the Western Michigan leg of the GLI remains a source of discontent across the sport. The Wolverines dropped from third to sixth in the latest USCHO poll, a fall that seems much better explained by resentment among voters based on the perception (or perhaps possibility) that Michigan “dodged” the Broncos rather than the 0-0 draw against Michigan Tech.
We are entering a period where we must accept the reality of weekly cancellations. This weekend, RPI will not play either of its scheduled games (against Harvard and Dartmouth), and the scheduled UMass-Lowell home-and-home with Bentley has also been put on an indefinite hold. In both cases, no makeup dates have been announced.
Earlier today, two more cancellations were added to that list: the St. Cloud State-Minnesota-Duluth series and a one-off game between St. Lawrence and New Hampshire. Again, there are no plans for a rescheduling at this point.
To reiterate, the toothless organizational structure of the NCAA means that there is no universal standard around cancellations, testing protocols, or rescheduling games. Individual conferences have such standards in place, but inter-conference games (such as UMass-Lowell and Bentley’s) do not abide by any established standard. In other words, there is no fixed threshold at which games MUST be cancelled across the country, inviting the kind of chaos and resentment Michigan found itself mired in over what should have been a pleasant holiday break.
Compounding matters, college teams have no serious pathway toward establishing the kind of “taxi squads” or “ten-day contracts” that have made play possible in leagues like the NHL and NBA. If UMass is short players this weekend, they cannot just call up a few emergency fill-ins from Amherst; instead, they must either play shorthanded or revert to cancellation.
There are two crucial lenses through which we must unpack this reality: quality of competition and player wellbeing.
To begin with the simpler issue, let’s start with the issue of competition. Anyone who has watched an NHL game following the league’s COVID-necessitated extension to its regularly scheduled winter break has seen a product that better resembles a preseason game than a typical January regular season contest.
To even a highly attentive NHL fan, it feels impossible to keep track of which players are available for a given game. The longer that reality persists, the more difficult it becomes to ascribe any sort of meaning to this season’s standings. The games happening right now count, in the official sense, in the league table, but, to anyone who wants to watch them, it’s hard for them to not feel at least slightly farcical, and that is in a league with much firmer standards for the conditions that must be in place to play as well as more legitimate sources for adding replacement players.
In this sense, there can be no separation between quality of competition and player safety. As COVID absences mount, teams are left with two choices: ice a (severely) undermanned lineup or cancel the game in question. To play is to place the players who are available at greater (non-COVID) injury risk. To cancel is to create a backlog of unplayed games that may never be rescheduled and further trim the already small sample size that is the regular season.
And, of course, as if all this weren’t complex enough, the Olympics loom. The Athletic’s Corey Pronman has reported that Owen Power has made Canada’s Olympic team (although there is still a hint of ambiguity as to whether this suggests he has just made the team or that he will definitely go to Beijing).
Again, players are being asked to make an uncomfortable choice: going to Beijing to represent their country at the Olympics or stay at home to continue playing for their college team.
Most important to me in this discourse is that players are the ones who get to make this decision. It may be easy to say from afar that players shouldn’t even want to go to these Games given the viral risks, but it is imperative to recognize that players are not responding to the same incentives that you might.
Let’s say that Power goes on to a good NHL career. He plays ten-plus seasons, posts some nice point totals, and makes a few all-star games. Assuming that future Olympics include NHL players, even an excellent resume like the hypothetical one I just laid out may not be enough to earn a spot on a full-strength Canadian blue line. The same logic could apply for Michigan’s Americans who may receive a similar nod from USA hockey like Matty Beniers or Brendan Brisson.
Even with the risks and the inevitability of missing B1G games, those players should be empowered to make the choice to represent their countries.
Michigan hockey prides itself on the lofty achievements of its alums beyond the realm of NCAA hockey. Walking around the Yost concourse, you will see myriad posters, plaques, and murals honoring the Michigan hockey players who have gone on to success on larger stages.
This Olympic hockey tournament has serious disaster potential and may well not happen at all, but if it does it will be a unique one. If there is any safe way for a Michigan player tapped to represent his country to go to Beijing, it is imperative that Mel Pearson and Michigan afford the player that option.