Statement Victory and Same Old Problems 1.24.24

The season's first in-state rivalry weekend has come and gone. What did we learn? Plus, the return of WoHo Wednesday!

Friday, January 19, Munn Ice Arena, East Lansing: “We Hushed Them Up Pretty Good Tonight”

By the end of the night, there was no need for braggadocio.  The sixty minutes of hockey provided an outcome definitive enough for talk to not just be cheap but unnecessary.  

The University of Michigan hockey team rode into East Lansing in an unfamiliar position against a familiar opponent—having more to prove than their in-state rivals who began the weekend atop the Big Ten.  

When the time came to load up the bus for the return trip to Ann Arbor, the Wolverines had earned a 7-1 victory over hosts Michigan State, and while there could be no closing the Pairwise or Big Ten gap in a single night, the magnitude of the victory required little explanation.

“We’re super excited tonight and proud of the guys,” said Brandon Naurato.  “Obviously, it’s a huge win on the road against a really good team.  We just have to reset tomorrow and then do it again.”

“It’s a big win for us,” summated Dylan Duke.  “We’re gonna enjoy it right now, and then when we get on that bus, preparation for tomorrow starts as we head back to Ann Arbor.”

“It was a lot of fun,” offered Jake Barczewski, the graduate transfer having just experienced his first taste of the rivalry.  “Crowd really got into it.  Student section chirpin’ me all game.  That kept it pretty fun out there for me…We hushed them up pretty good tonight.  That felt good too.”

For forty minutes, Michigan played composed, mature hockey, a feat that hasn’t always come easily for the Wolverines this season.  They built a 4-0 lead on two five-on-five goals, a short-handed marker, and a power play goal.  

Through the game’s opening three or four shifts, it was the Spartans who—much to the delight of a sold out Munn Ice Arena crowd—had all of the puck and the better of the chances.  But after no more than four minutes, that crowd had precious little to cheer about.

The game swung after about three-and-a-half minutes, when T.J. Hughes stripped a Spartan looking to find his way out of the defensive zone to set himself up with a slot shot.  Augustine made the save, but from that moment forward, the game felt different, and the premium chances belonged to Michigan.  Even when Frank Nazar was sent to the box and MSU had the game’s first power play, it was Kienan Draper who had the best look at goal, slipping behind the Spartans for a breakaway bid that Augustine turned aside.

The first goal wouldn’t come for twelve minutes—Tyler Duke splitting the State defense with a stretch pass that sent in Rutger McGroarty, who beat his World Junior teammate Trey Augustine with ease, but it was a goal the Wolverines had been steadily building toward.

“It just shows how prepared we were,” said Duke of Michigan’s response to the strong State start. “Obviously, games have up and downs.  They came out and won a couple of the first couple shifts, and we just responded and stuck to our game plan that we came here with.”

By the end of the first, Draper would beat Augustine, with a short-handed goal from a crafty Nazar set up, and Dylan Duke picked up a power play goal with 2:31 remaining in the first to give the Wolverines a 3-0 edge, which Duke would extend to four with his second PPG of the night in the second period.

In the final twenty minutes, hockey devolved into professional wrestling, but still it was Michigan who had the advantage—extending its cushion to 7-1 before the final horn sounded, to the relief of what remained of that sold out crowd and to the officials, who no longer had to play peacekeeper between two teams who had all but given up the pretense of hockey.

The third period featured 66 penalty minutes for Michigan and 85 for State with the high-water mark of the hostilities coming in the aftermath of the Spartans’ lone goal, when the home team took exception to Marshall Warren’s unsuccessful attempts at rebuffing Nico Muller (which it perceived as having continued too long after the whistle).

That fracas featured Steven Holtz (Michigan’s erudite defenseman, the rare engineering major in the world of college hockey) earning a WWE-style takedown on Artyom Levshunov (whom NHL Central Scouting had just named as North America’s second best available skater for the 2024 Draft).  It yielded seven ten-minute misconducts and, coming with 8:40 left on the clock, it meant the end of the night for Josh Eernisse, Warren, Holtz, Draper, Patrick Geary, Jeremy Davidson, and Levshunov.  There would be three more misconducts before the game ended.

After the game, Naurato declined to get into the specifics of the escalating rivalry tensions, instead deferring to the importance of ending the night with “everyone healthy and eligible to play” in the following evening’s contest.

Throughout the season, Michigan’s self-confidence (or at least its outward projection of that confidence) has never wavered, and on Friday, it showed why.  The Wolverines dominated all sides of the puck and won in all phases of play.  

The team Twitter account posted a graphic with SportLogiq’s data from the affair, which showed Michigan’s supremacy in rush chances, forecheck chances, slot shots, passes to the slot, cycle chances, and quality chances—providing a numerical backing for what was obvious to anyone at Munn Friday night.

Both Michigan special teams were integral to the victory, with the power play scoring four times and the embattled penalty killing going a perfect four-for-four.  Naurato referred to the “best part” of the PP success as the fact that both units found the back of the net, saying “it’s not one player, one guy, one unit” then adding that he was “so proud of the penalty kill,” which had been a sore spot during the third-period collapses that proved too frequent in the Wolverines’ first half of the season.

It was Michigan who entered the night needing a successful weekend far more than their hosts, and, for about fifty-six-and-a-half minutes Friday, it was Michigan who played that way. 

Saturday, January 20, Ann Arbor, Yost Ice Arena: “We Managed the Game Very Well for 110 out of 120 minutes on the Weekend, and You Just See What Happens When You Don’t”

Twenty-four hours after an overwhelming victory on enemy ice, it seemed a certainty that Michigan would be in for a tougher test in the second leg of its rivalry home-and-home, but for the game’s opening twenty minutes, it didn’t look that way.

The Wolverines outshot State 19-7 in the first period, dominating possession and exposing the relative weakness of the Spartan blue line.  MSU defenders looked unable to complete a breakout pass, and Michigan attacked in waves—exerting a territorial advantage that bordered on the preposterous.

However, when the horn sounded on the first, the score was tied at 1-1.  T.J. Hughes found the game’s first goal 9:38 into the action, bringing Yost to eruption and threatening to begin another Wolverine onslaught. However, Artyom Levshunov answered Hughes’ goal with a power play strike with four minutes left in the period—slipping a shot through heavy traffic to beat Barczewski.

When the second began, Michigan wasted little time returning to the game it showed in the first—once again applying heavy pressure to the Spartan net.  Hughes scored again within four minutes, then Rutger McGroarty added one at even strength to make it 3-1, before scoring a second on the power play to make it 4-1 at the 10:13 mark.

To the 5,800 fans assembled at Yost, the rout was on, and the cruise to a rivalry sweep was underway, the only thing left to attend to maintaining health and eligibility through what threatened to be another fiery finish with the score out of reach.

The visiting Spartans had other ideas.  It started with a Wolverine D to D pass that forced Michigan out of the offensive zone.  When Michigan’s attempt at recovering that loose puck in the neutral zone was a bit too casual, Isaac Howard launched a break in the other direction, and he didn’t squander the chance—firing a puck over Barczewski’s shoulder to make it 4-2.

It was a pattern (unforced turnover, failed recovery, decisive finishing from State) that would account for four more Spartan goals before the end of the night.  Howard’s goal kick-started a six minute and fifty-eight second run of four MSU goals (the penultimate the culmination of an extended O zone sequence, the other three all fitting the pattern Howard set out) to flip the score from 4-1 Michigan to 5-4 State by the end of the second.

“The whole game is races and battles, and we won a lot of them,” said Naurato.  “But when you don’t win the first one, you need somebody to win the second one, and it just kind of stacked.  They’re a really good team, and we’ve got a lot of respect for them, and they’ve got guys that can score, and they just scored.”

In the third, the Wolverines re-grouped and resumed applying pressure, but they struggled to create the same quality of offense that they had in the first half of the game.  Then, not long before the midpoint of the third period, Nico Muller pounced on yet another U-M turnover, descending on then beating Barczewski to give the Spartans a two-goal cushion at 6-4 and making a comeback that much more difficult.

With the clock showing 3:18 to play, Joey Larson hit the empty net to all but clinch the game, and while Dylan Duke (once more able to thrive as everything falls apart around him) clawed one goal back, the game would end at 7-5, and the Wolverines were left searching for answers after one more example of an old, familiar problem: game management and blown leads.

In the Michigan State net, Trey Augustine delivered what has to be one of the best performances ever by a goalie who conceded five goals, making forty-three saves and earning an unlikely victory.  In the first period in particular, Augustine was exemplary to hold Michigan to a single goal.

It was a difficult evening to digest for any number of reasons: the inevitable thoughts of what a sweep might have meant as the Wolverines look to begin another second half surge, the familiarity of the problems that cropped up, the simple fact that the loss didn’t come to just anybody, not even just any Big Ten foe but to this in-state rival.

“I think all the right things were said on the bench,” said Marshall Warren, attempting to process in real time what he’d just seen.  “I think guys wanna win obviously, and guys have the right mindset.  Just sometimes, you gotta be harder and get pucks out in certain situations, and for ten minutes, we didn’t do that, and it obviously cost us the game…Sometimes when the storm hits, you gotta be even-keeled, you know?  Don’t be too high, don’t be too low.”

“I don’t think we crumbled,” said Brandon Naurato.  It’s just when we made a mistake, it was in the back of our net.  And we managed the game very well for 110 out of 120 minutes on the weekend, and you just see what happens when you don’t.”

Unfortunately for Michigan, it’s far from the first time the Wolverines have had a first-hand look at just how quickly a hard-earned and well-deserved lead can slip away.

What Did We Learn?

Going into the weekend, it felt as though the B1G-leading Spartans had little to prove, while Michigan had much to gain—both in a pragmatic sense (points toward the Big Ten standings and the Pairwise) and in an emotional one (the boost that would’ve surely come from a rivalry sweep).

The trouble with attempting to parse the weekend’s results is their familiarity.  What more can be said about a trend that we’ve seen since the first weekend of the season?  We know this Michigan team to be capable of hitting ridiculous heights.  We know it is likely to be in command of every game it plays.  We also know it is vulnerable to the exact sort of lapse we saw Saturday.

In trying to make sense of this latest example, I find myself returning to the confidence that this Michigan team hasn’t seemed to lose even through a season of mixed results. 

“I feel like we don't have to really prove to anyone how good we are because we know we’re good in the locker room,” sophomore center T.J. Hughes said after Saturday’s defeat. “But…it’s the second half now: We gotta start sweeping.”

While that might scan as hubris given that these Wolverines aren’t converting that confidence into the on-ice results they’re after at the moment, I would argue it is justified in the sense that throughout this season’s tribulations, they continue to show the ability to dictate the terms of the games that they play.

Saturday night is a perfect example.  Michigan State is a great team; they’ve shown it throughout the season.  But even against a great team, it was Michigan that consistently exerted its style on the game—extending possession, owning the puck in the offensive zone, and dominating the shot chart.

The issue for the Wolverines is that on any given night, playing on your terms (or not) doesn’t have all that much to do with the outcome.  The logic behind the Pep Guardiola-inspired style preferred by Naurato is the control it affords.  If you are in possession, you’re the only team that can score, and by extension, you’re the one in command of the game’s action.

However, hockey is fickle, and goals happen fast.  When they do happen, they often re-structure the game that produced them—particularly in the context of the heightened emotions of a collegiate in-state rivalry.  On a night in and night out basis, goaltending and special teams are more likely to determine a game’s outcome than which side produced the better or the greater volume of chances.

On Saturday, each side struck once on the power play, and the Spartans had a clear advantage in goaltending.  That was enough for a win, despite a generally dominant performance from the home side.

So what is the value of that control if it doesn’t correlate all that clearly to winning?  

For one thing, it provides the Wolverines’ talented crop of skaters with a framework through which they can most consistently and collectively express that talent.  For another, it instills a sense of confidence in the way that Michigan dictates a game’s terms rather than waiting for opportunities to pop up.  Driving a higher volume of offensive opportunities also puts less pressure on converting any single chance.

What does any of that mean going forward?  In practical terms, this weekend means the Wolverines need to find a way to do a better job of closing out these games that they control, because another split has further trimmed the team’s margin for error with respect to the NCAA Tournament.

At this point, a one seed may already be out of reach, as much because of the strength of the other candidates as anything to do with Michigan.  However, Michigan’s difficult schedule to close out the year means that, should the Wolverines take care of business, they shouldn’t have to worry about getting into the dance at all.

For better or worse, it’s also worth noting that the warts we’ve seen from recent Wolverine teams in the regular season have had little to do with their postseason undoings.  For the past two years, Michigan has shown similar issues to this year, perhaps all of which fit into the broad bucket of “game management”: excessive penalty minutes, issues with blown leads or adapting to the different rhythms of a given game.

However, in the last two postseason defeats, it’s been a different problem: Denver and Quinnipiac both denied the Wolverines the ability to play to their style for prolonged stretches of their national semifinal victories over Michigan.

So, if the Wolverines can get back to the dance (certainly not a given at this stage, though well within their ability and reach), their fate upon getting there may have more to do with their ability to assert their style in the inevitably strenuous matchups they will face there than with the stumbling blocks we’ve seen to date.

WoHo Wednesday

It was a busy weekend for the University of Michigan women’s hockey team, first taking on UM-Dearborn on the road then traveling to Centre Ice Arena for the Traverse City Showcase and games against Michigan State and Aquinas College.

The weekend got off to a good start in the form of a 3-1 win over Dearborn Friday night.  After a scoreless first period, Samantha Carr put the (Ann Arbor) Wolverines ahead early in the second, then added another 4:57 into the third.  Dearborn’s Andi Evers cut that margin to 2-1 just past the midpoint of the period, but Julia Lindahl answered that goal to restore the visitor’s cushion.

Saturday was less kind to the Wolverines, with the team suffering its first loss of the season at the hands of MSU.  The two sides traded power play goals in the first (with Carr striking again for Michigan).  Then, Shayna Menzer put the Spartans up 2-1 just 27 seconds into the second.  While Lucy Hanson answered that goal within five minutes, Menzer struck again late in the period to put MSU up by a 3-2 scoreline that would hold through the end of the game.

In its first opportunity to bounce back from a loss of the season, Michigan responded with aplomb—knocking off Aquinas 5-0 on Sunday in the rare blow out that isn’t even as close as the score indicates.  The Wolverines outshot Aquinas 51-9, with the Saints never putting more than four shots on net in a single period.

Hanson scored the lone goal of the first, before Carr delivered a natural hat trick to begin the second (two at even strength, the third on the power play).  Megan Matthews would make it 5-0 before the second expired.

Sunday’s game provided freshman goaltender Emma Johns with her first game action of the new year.  It wasn’t a busy night for Johns, but she stopped all nine shots she faced for her first career ACHA shutout.  On the season, Johns is now 4-0-0 with a .950 save percentage and 1.25 goals against average, both excellent marks.

As impressive as those figures are, somehow starter Sandrine Ponnath has been even better in her ten appearances this season.  She is 8-1-1 with a .963 SV% and 1.19 GAA.  Their mutual success also reflects well on the soundness of the Wolverines’ defense.

This weekend will be a pivotal one for Jenna Trubiano’s team, with just eight games remaining in the regular season.  Michigan will play a home and home with Adrian College.

By points percentage, the Wolverines are the best team in the CCHWA at .893.  However, in raw standings points, Michigan (25) trails Dearborn (37), Indiana Tech (35), and Adrian (33), but those schools have played a minimum of seven games more than the Wolverines.  This weekend’s games will offer the opportunity to begin eating into that gap.

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