Pro Blue Ascension
On the Spring professional debuts of Thomas Bordeleau, Matty Beniers, Owen Power, Brendan Brisson, Nick Blankenburg, and Kent Johnson
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On April 17th, hours prior to his NHL Debut against the Minnesota Wild, new San Jose Shark Thomas Bordeleau fielded questions from the assembled press in St. Paul. The Athletic’s Corey Masisak asked him about watching his Michigan teammates take their first strides in the NHL. Bordeleau grinned.
“It’s been all smiles really, just seeing them. I think I’ve had three games on at the same time—on my laptop, on the TV, on my iPad—just watching them. Obviously Matty scored last night, Owen’s been playing incredible, Blanky’s been incredible, and Kent has also been really good. Briss is doing some really good things in the A. It’s really fun. We spent 24/7 with them, living in the same house, doing everything together, and seeing all the boys having fun and perform at the next level. It’s definitely special.”
(skip to ~1:50)
Ten days prior, Bordeleau, Matty Beniers, Owen Power, Nick Blankenburg, Kent Johnson, and Brendan Brisson had seen their collegiate careers end in overtime to the eventual National Champion Denver Pioneers.
In the intervening time, they dispersed across the country and ascended to the highest level of professional hockey. Bordeleau’s journey began with two games for the Sharks’ AHL affiliate, the San Jose Barracuda, before joining the big club in Minnesota. Beniers ventured northwest to Seattle, bringing an instant spark to what had been a lugubrious inaugural season for the Kraken. Power joined the Buffalo Sabres, the number one overall pick arriving to the delight of a fanbase starved of joy for longer than Power himself has followed the NHL. Blankenburg and Johnson made a short trip south to Columbus, continuing Michigan’s unlikely takeover of Ohio’s NHL franchise. Brisson—one more victim of the Golden Knights’ drunken relationship to the salary cap—remained with the AHL’s Henderson Silver Knights.
If you kept up as it was happening, you can empathize with Bordeleau’s need for myriad screens to keep tabs on their exploits. Power and Beniers made their professional debuts on April twelfth, the other four did so the following day.
None of the six joined playoff-bound teams. Four of them had already spent their February in Beijing—representing their nations at the Olympics. Beniers’ audition was the longest, and even it was just the last ten legs of an eighty-two game season.
Their arrival came at what tends to be a dull portion of the NHL schedule. Contenders have solidified their playoff spots with a greater emphasis on maintaining fitness than winning board battles, while cellar dwellers ride out a few more games before they can put their disappointment behind them and embrace an offseason refresh.
Instead of standing by as the last dregs of their teams’ seasons drained away, instead of succumbing to the malaise of late stage regular season NHL hockey, Michigan’s anointed six made an immediate and commanding impact. In their play, the collective statement was obvious if implicit—the Six weren’t in the pros as passengers; they’d arrived to take command.
A few hours after he gave the interview described above, Bordeleau skated 13:14 in his first NHL game, giving an assist and winning four faceoffs. On the assist, Bordeleau flashed the balance and vision that distinguish him, spinning away from a Wild checker to deliver a pass to the open defenseman at the point. It was far from the most spectacular play we’ve seen from Bordeleau, but it left little doubt that the elusiveness we saw so often at Michigan would translate to the show.
By the end of the year, Bordeleau would accrue five assists and a shootout goal that ended the rival Golden Knights’ season.
After that win in Vegas, Sharks coach Bob Boughner told the press “He has that pizzazz to him. He plays comfortable out there…To come into [T-Mobile Arena]…good for him. You can see the skill, and you can’t teach that stuff.” To anyone who saw him in maize and blue, it came as no surprise.
To belabor the theme, Michigan’s anointed six wouldn’t arrive quietly; instead, they announced themselves with flair. It was the same story for Beniers with the Kraken. On night one in the world’s most competitive hockey league, visiting the Saddledome in Calgary, Beniers earned his first professional point with a cross-ice, no-look pass, a play he set up earlier in the shift with his hustle to win a puck battle.
By his home debut a game later, Beniers had graduated to juggled, flipped passes to himself to set up a scoring chance. Across his first ten games as a pro, the Massachusetts-born pivot registered three goals and six assists, falling just shy of a point-per-game pace.
At Kent Johnson and Nick Blankenburg’s joint debut, the story was more sentimental, with numerous Wolverine teammates making the drive south to Columbus to watch the pair’s first professional game. Each would finish the season with three points.
To Johnson’s astonishment, Blankenburg brought homework with him on his first bus ride as a pro.
Of course, Johnson somehow managed to minimize his own NHL achievements before even playing a full season when he scored the golden goal a few months later at August’s bizarro World Juniors.
Meanwhile, Power showed the same composure and command Michigan fans grew accustomed to over his two seasons in Ann Arbor by his first NHL game, despite being tasked with defending the league’s eventual MVP in Auston Matthews.
Brisson was the only one of the six held out of the NHL, though that decision seems to have less to do with his performance in AHL Henderson than the Golden Knights’ long-standing feud with the NHL’s salary cap. In seven appearances for the Silver Knights, Brisson posted three goals and five assists.
In celebrating the above tally (a first-time shot along the right wing, which Michigan fans may have seen once or twice from him), Brisson reinforced the point once more: the Wolverines arrived with a flourish.
With their stylish announcement, Power, Beniers, Brisson, Johnson, Blankenburg, and Bordeleau marked a moment in American hockey time. Their ascension comprises one part of a wider movement, of a generation seeing no need to wait more than one game to try juggling the puck during live play.
It is Trevor Zegras and Troy Terry—their talent derided as “skilling it up” by opposing broadcasts—divining new and sorcerous ways to torment defenses.
It is Cale Makar scoring a goal in his NHL debut, which didn’t come until postseason play since he was busy winning the Hobey Baker and guiding UMass to the Frozen Four during the league’s regular year.
Yes, this is a story about hockey in the United States, about USA Hockey embracing speed and skill from the youth levels on up and about the development opportunity afforded ambitious hockey prospects by college hockey.
Yes, we know none of Power, Johnson, or Makar are American, but all three played college hockey. The presence of Canadian prospects of their caliber illustrates just how far the American game has come on the development side. Collegiate hockey prioritizes practice and development in a way that the Canadian junior game can’t match.
Years ago, since-retired Dartmouth head coach Bob Gaudet pointed out this advantage of the collegiate game to me. He noted that a junior player (the presumptive path for any acclaimed Canadian prospect not even a generation ago with occasional exceptions) takes a hit in development because of how packed the schedule is with games.
“The amount of practice time you have to hone your abilities is a lot less [in junior hockey],” Gaudet said. “A lot of your practice is just maintenance type things because you’re getting ready to play again. With us, there’s real development. We’ll do skill work. We’ll have weight training that will be meaningful with a high-caliber strength and conditioning coach. The NCAA and Division I hockey is a great development model.”
Gaudet pointed out the way NCAA hockey’s extra opportunities set young prospects up to thrive in the modern game.
“I see the game as being better now than it was a couple years ago at the pro level,” he said. “The speed, the creativity, for a little bit it was getting bogged down with so much shot blocking, and there’s quite a bit of that now, but the skill level, the creativity, and the speed of the game right now is just fabulous. Enhancements in coaching and training have really improved the game. Our kids are practicing more than they’re playing, and that’s a really good developmental model. We [are around] a 3-to-1 practices to games ratio, so our kids are working on skills, conditioning and injury prevention through stretching and nutrition. The speed of the game is increasing, and our kids have been able to keep up with that.”
So what does all of this have to do with Michigan’s six? Simple really. It’s that the Wolverines’ arrival and immediate impact on pro hockey might just be the ultimate realization of Gaudet’s vision.
The epicenter of this movement may be the USNTDP a few miles down the road in Plymouth, but it’s nearest, most vital evolution is in Ann Arbor, where Michigan hockey has established itself as the premier finishing school for prospects who wish to sharpen their skills a bit further, pursue B1G and national championships, and then leap into a starring NHL role.
With Brandon Naurato installed as head coach, the focus is even clearer. From the moment of Naurato’s appointment, an oft-repeated two-word objective has been hammered home: player development.
The new head coach just spoke to the Michigan Daily about the creation of a “learning environment,” in which data, tactics, and skills instruction promote day-to-day improvement across the water. Naurato did this work with the Detroit Red Wings. He began it last year as an assistant with the Wolverines, and now as (interim) head man, he can continue the project in earnest.
As Naurato explained it at Tuesday’s Media Day, “All coaches are teachers, and there are many forms of development with skills being one of them.”
What is the end game in all this player development? It’s exactly what you saw from Bordeleau, Beniers, Power, Brisson, Blankenburg, and Johnson. It’s the instillation of the confidence and know-how necessary to make an immediate impression at the next level. It’s feeling no compunction about arriving in the world’s best hockey league with the knowledge that you belong and will flourish. But perhaps more than any of that, it’s firing up three screens at once to marvel at the group that already made that leap.
For Naurato, it can be as simple as getting a young player prepared via film study. In his words, “I’ve done video analysis with a lot of NHL guys, and when you break down the film and I watch [Adam Fantilli, for example] on the flank on the power play, I can let him know what his options are going to be versus Ohio State, so now we can get those touches so that he feels comfortable going into that game.”
Crucially, Naurato’s approach emphasizes individual growth for the kind of young and gifted prospects that arrive in Ann Arbor as freshman that simultaneously facilitates success for his team and the achievement of those players’ longer-term objectives. “[The kind of talented players Michigan attracts] aren’t just thinking about points, but it’s not just about scoring. What’s their scorecard for a great game? What’s their B-Game if they’re not putting up numbers offensively? That’s what keeps you in the league, but that’s what allows Michigan to win, these kids to win individually, and for them to have future success.”
When we spoke earlier about Kent Johnson’s World Junior achievements, we neglected to mention the other time he commanded the eyes of the entire hockey world in August, this time requiring a higher degree of difficulty since it was only a group stage game.
We never got a chance to see KJ hit a “Michigan” in maize and blue, but maybe it’s fitting that he waited until he was a Wolverine emeritus to realize that ambition. After all, it’s not like we were starved for highlight reel plays from him in Ann Arbor.
What we can say for certain is that it feels appropriate for the golden goose of in-game NHL skills to bear the name of the university Johnson and the rest of the Six represented so well. You have to hand it to Mike Legg: the man was ahead of his time.
It’s difficult to talk about Michigan hockey without being bogged down in tradition, and for good reason. But let’s be honest, Brandon Naurato arrives into a head coaching gig, that—gilded though it is—commands a cultural reset, a fresh start. A full examination of what that means is a different conversation—one for another day.
But even as that new culture must correct the misdeeds of the incoming coach’s predecessor, why not allow it to flow from what we knew to be great about Michigan hockey a year ago: its ridiculous crop of players, whom we watched flourish in the Frozen Four, Olympics, World Juniors, and then National Hockey League. The task for Naurato is to build on the Six’s legacy and to continue to usher in a new generation of hockey players, equal parts skilled and fearless, toward realizing their professional potential.