Start of Second Half Primer 1.15.24
Doubling down on strengths to start the second half, debriefing a golden WJC, checking in with T.J. Hughes, and WoHo starts '24 how it ended '23: perfectly
Simply put, the ‘23 portion of the University of Michigan men’s hockey team’s 2023-24 season was a disappointment—an 8-7-3 record and 3-5-2 mark in Big Ten play. A slew of injuries provided relevant context, but expectations are set to a championship level around Yost Ice Arena, and the results are the results.
However, as the team returned to campus, the mood around the team facility was nothing short of ebullient. When Michigan held its first open practice of the new year last Tuesday, four Wolverines had just collected gold medals at the World Junior, and the night prior, the football team earned its first national championship since 1997 in drubbing Washington—one final lesson in a season-long masterclass of blocking and tackling.
“[The locker room] is super positive and pretty rowdy at times,” said T.J. Hughes. “All the guys are excited to be back. World Junior guys, nice to have them back…The game yesterday just adds more energy to the room.”
Though he acknowledges the need for improvement in the second half to secure its B1G standing and NCAA tournament seeding, coach Brandon Naurato says simply, “our record isn’t who we are”—pointing to the way the team repeatedly needed to play with just ten forwards late in its first half because of injuries to the likes of Rutger McGroarty and Mark Estapa, as well as the fact that Ethan Edwards was unavailable throughout the first half after offseason shoulder surgery.
Thus far, albeit against modest competition, 2024 has looked good on Naurato’s Wolverines. On January 6th, at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, they played a tune-up exhibition with the National Team Development Program’s U18 side, cruising to a commanding 5-1 victory that was filled with skirmishes far more hotly contested than the game’s outcome.
Edwards scored twice in that game, and that was far from the only contribution he made to his team’s win. Edwards looked poised and confident, in utter command against a U18 opponent, even one as talented as the NTDP. The performance offered an early indication that he returns to the Michigan lineup as every bit the player he was a year ago: physical, fast, and a true two-way defender—equally at home clearing the crease or jumping into the attack.
“Shoulder’s kind of funny because you feel good and you feel able to play or practice earlier than you really can just due to the risk of re-injuring it,” Edwards said after his season debut. “So I think that’s the hardest part of it is just mental. As a hockey player, you want to be out on the ice as much as possible. Not being able to do that, it sucks, and it kills a hockey player, but you just gotta battle through that and you got to listen to your doctors as well. Can’t be doing anything too extravagant. You just gotta make sure you’re ready to come back.”
Last weekend back at Yost, Michigan beat winless Stonehill twice by a combined score of 19-5. Without wishing to disrespect the Skyhawks (now 0-21 for the year), it was not exactly a series worth dwelling on. Friday night, on the strength of a four-goal Gavin Brindley performance, the Wolverines led 10-1 through forty minutes in a game that finished 12-4. Stonehill opened the scoring Saturday and held the game at 1-1 through the first period. However, Michigan opened up the offensive faucet in the closing two periods to secure a 7-1 victory via five power play goals.
Michigan enjoyed a month off between its final game of the first half (a December 2nd 2-1 win in South Bend over Notre Dame) and returning to practice prior to the NTDP exhibition. That has produced something along the lines of an in-season training camp as the Wolverines ramp back up to a pivotal home-and-home series this weekend with in-state rivals and B1G leaders Michigan State.
As Michigan builds to those weekends, the focus has been, in the words of Naurato, on the “overall fundamentals of what makes us great.” With the benefit of the time off, Naurato says, “My brain feels good again. I feel like I’ll never have it all figured out, but after a year and a half [as a head coach] of everything outside of hockey—the injuries, the illness, everything else…the answer is whatever you’re gonna do, be great at it, and work on it all the time.”
In other words, despite disappointing results in the first half, Naurato aims to chart the path forward by doubling down on the Wolverines’ strengths—an aggressive, possession-based style of hockey—rather than fixating on whatever deficiencies did crop up in an underwhelming start to the season.
That is not to suggest that there haven’t been adjustments. “I want to find better ways to do it or teach it or add things,” the coach says. One such tweak is “making sure more people are above [the puck] and back for support” in the offensive zone and neutral zone forecheck. “Our aggressive style is good, but you can’t play that way the whole game,” he offers as explanation.
Those adjustments have made easy work of the NTDP and Stonehill, but the challenge will grow considerably when this weekend arrives.
World Junior Review
For Gavin Brindley, Frank Nazar, Seamus Casey, and Rutger McGroarty, the holiday break was an abbreviated one, but there was plenty of reason for merriment in the form of a gold medal-winning campaign in Sweden at the World Junior Championship.
All four proved instrumental in the victory. Brindley and Nazar played on a line together, with Michigan State’s Isaac Howard, and that trio proved in many ways Team USA’s engine, playing a ferocious forechecking game that set a standard for a team that dominated throughout the tournament. Brindley finished with six goals, four assists, and a +7 rating, while Nazar didn’t score but gave eight assists and was +9.
Nazar revealed that he didn’t see a ton of Gothenburg on the trip, because he was there for business. In his words, “I wasn’t really an explorer. I was just making sure I got the job done.” He was, however, perturbed by the early Scandinavian sunsets—“It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s 3PM, and the sun is down.”
Rutger McGroarty—returning from a frightening injury that put his availability in serious doubt—played on the U.S.’s top line beside Boston College’s Cutter Gauthier and Minnesota’s Jimmy Snuggerud. Not only did he lead the Americans as captain but also he chipped in five goals and four assists, while finishing the event at +8. For McGroarty to quite literally dance his way to a gold medal as a central figure for the Americans after what he’d gone through barely a month prior was an all-time great WJC performance.
Brindley noted that McGroarty’s leadership was central in bringing the team together and helping it achieve supreme confidence in a crowded WJC field. “Everyone was bought in, everyone was on the same page, and it’s tough to have a full team having everyone bought in like that in such a short amount of time,” he explained. “I think the leadership group did a great job. Rutger did a great job. Coaches were great.”
Seamus Casey finished the tournament with six assists and a +8 rating. To get the U.S. on the board in the gold medal game against the host Swedes, he delivered a quintessentially Casey deke——toying with the Swede who dared try to dispossess him in the neutral zone by showing the puck then dragging it away—to set up the entry that would yield (after an outstanding cross-ice pass from McGroarty) a tap-in for Gabe Perreault of BC.
“You still watch them like you’re the coach of them,” said Naurato of the experience of watching his players in a different context than the one to which he is accustomed. “When they do things well, you feel really good, and when you don’t, you wanna help them.”
“Just as a fan or almost like a big brother or—I’d say big brother more than father,” he continues, smiling. “Just want them to do well and happy for their success, knowing that if it didn’t go that way, you’ve gotta pick them back up and help them believe in themselves. I’m just super proud of them.”
When asked what stood out to him most about this golden American side, besides just the team’s talent, he replied, “from afar and our guys spoke really highly about their coaching staff, I thought [David Carle and his staff] did a good job of letting them be who they are and giving a little bit of structure, but letting them be creative and letting them play their game.”
Both Brindley and Nazar revealed that their medals are presently hanging in their rooms. With a smile, Brindley said he “wore it a couple times when I got back, but it’s done now, it’s retired, had its fun.”
Though it is presently in the same place, Nazar has a different view of his medal’s future: “I think I’m gonna put it in a nice cabinet or something, [so] you can always take it out and show it or something…I want to be able to touch it again, same with the jersey. Might as well get the use out of it instead of just hanging it up and never touching it again and just looking at it.” He added, “it took until I left to go back to Michigan to take it off. I was sleeping in it for five days straight.”
Finally, as one closing thought on the event, though he has spoken many times about the benefits of using the December break, noted that he would make an exception one of these years if he had the chance to coach Team USA. “That’d be a dream—to represent the country and be a part of that staff,” he said.
Checking In with T.J. Hughes
T.J. Hughes—a natural scorer from the moment he took the ice as a Wolverine—opened up his 2024 with a casual four-point weekend, giving two assists Friday and scoring a pair Saturday.
For Hughes, Michigan’s “mobility man,” the time off in December afforded a chance to take a step back from hockey but not so much from his commitment to taking care of his body. “Personally, I love working out and stuff, so I don’t take much time off from working out, but from skating, I actually like the break,” he said last Tuesday. “I only skated probably three times over two weeks, just kinda to feel a little ready when I get back.”
Speaking the day after Michigan’s title clinching win over Washington, Hughes admits that as a Canadian, he’s still acclimating to the mania that surrounds American college football.
“It’s actually nuts,” he said. “At university in Canada, football games—maybe you get a couple hundred people there, and then I came here, and the first game in the Big House last year was incredible.”
Meanwhile, Hughes gave a beautiful answer when asked what the biggest change from his freshman to sophomore year was: “Having more of a leadership role and helping the new guys on the ice and off the ice, just helping them with whatever they need. Whenever they reach out to me, I feel like that really makes me happy because I know I’m helping someone.”
With eleven goals and fifteen assists for twenty-six points, Hughes is second among the Wolverines in scoring (trailing only Casey with twenty-eight points), so he’s also had plenty of chances to help his teammates out on the ice as well by chipping in offense.
WoHo Opens ‘24 with Rout of Rhode Island at Yost
For the University of Michigan women’s hockey team, the first game of the new year was a continuation of where it left off in 2023. Jenna Trubiano’s team returned to action Sunday afternoon at Yost, where it completed a perfect weekend of Wolverine hockey against the University of Rhode Island.
Ava Heung got Michigan on the board early—scoring the game’s first goal after just two minutes and two seconds of hockey. The Rams answered just past the period’s midpoint, only for Samantha Carr to ensure that the Wolverines led after one thanks to a goal with 3:53 to play in the first.
After Carr restored the Michigan lead, the Wolverines’ advantage snowballed over the closing 40 minutes. In the second period, Emily Maliszewski made it 3-1, before captain Katie German made it four with a power play strike in the final minute of the frame to leave the score 4-1.
In the third, Carr and Heung each scored again, then Julia Lindahl added two more of her own, and Michigan secured an 8-1 victory. The Wolverines were good value for that crooked scoreline, outshooting their guests 49-25, with Sandrine Ponnath making 24 stops in the Michigan net.
The Wolverines have now played eleven games this season, winning ten of them in regulation and the eleventh in a shootout (officially a tie in the ACHA standings). After a dominant first half, Michigan set a lofty standard for itself entering the stretch run toward ACHA Nationals.
With yesterday’s rout of Rhode Island, the Wolverines began 2024 with a statement victory.
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