The Regular Season, Abridged Version
Revisiting BU, Minnesota, Harvard, Ohio State, and Michigan State to reconstruct the narrative arc of a whirling regular season
We are inside of twenty-four hours until the puck drops on playoff hockey in Ann Arbor, Michigan—with the hometown Wolverines hosting the University of Wisconsin Badgers in a best-of-three Big Ten Quarterfinal beginning tonight at Yost Ice Arena. To prepare for the evening’s festivities, it felt appropriate to revisit a regular campaign that lent serious credence to the cliché of season as roller coaster.
10/14/22, vs. Boston University, 9-2
Before a sold out and rabid crowd, in just the third game of the season, the Wolverines offered a statement victory in a 9-2 thrashing of what was then the ninth-ranked team in the country (Jay Pandolfo’s Terriers are currently rated number six by the Pairwise).
It was a win that offered irrefutable signs of promise for college hockey’s youngest team. Michigan entered the season loaded with talent but shrouded in uncertainty. With nine key contributors off to pro hockey and a tumultuous late-summer coaching change, the Wolverines were far from a sure thing to return to the NCAA Tournament as a one seed.
In the blowout, Michigan proved that, even without the likes of Power, Johnson, and Beniers, they belonged in college hockey’s upper echelon. Across nine goals that evening, there were seven different goal scorers, four of whom were freshmen (Gavin Brindley, T.J. Hughes, Seamus Casey, and Rutger McGroarty). Of the three exceptions, all were sophomores (Mackie Samoskevich, Dylan Duke, and Luke Hughes). Freshman phenom Adam Fantilli didn’t find the back of the net, but he did give three assists.
Still, there was something a bit misleading about the avalanche of a result. Gavin Brindley scored the opener not quite six minutes into the first, but a unique power play opportunity broke the game open and saw the Wolverines romp off with an insurmountable lead.
Consecutive check-to-the-head majors on Luke Tuch and Jay O’Brien gave Michigan an astonishing 4:04 seconds at 5-on-3; since both infractions were majors, neither would expire should the Wolverines score. And score they did.
In a span of 1:59, Samoskevich, T.J. Hughes, and Casey stretched the lead to four. Before eleven minutes were played, the game was over.
It’s not that Michigan was lucky to take such a lead. The Wolverines took advantage of a favorable game state that they helped to create with their speed and skill. BU arrived in Ann Arbor intent on taking command of the game and neutralizing the Wolverines with physicality. Instead, the Terriers’ aggression put their penalty kill in an untenable position, and Michigan capitalized with its youth and skill at center stage.
Still, the crooked scoreline by game’s end perhaps established expectations the young team was not quite ready to meet, based on a once-in-a-career power play opportunity. It was a deserved blowout victory—a testament to the Wolverines’ skill and Terriers’ misguided aggression—but it would be a stretch to expect Michigan to be a touchdown and extra point better than BU every time they collided, as a subsequent 3-2 defeat two days later would prove.
In brief, Michigan 9, BU 2 signaled that the Wolverines’ title aspirations hadn’t gone with the mass exodus to the pros in the prior spring, even if there was something a bit too good true about the final score.
11/17/22, vs. Minnesota, 2-5
Minnesota’s November trip to Ann Arbor should have been cause for celebration: a clash of the loaded Big Ten’s twin behemoths. Dueling freshman sensations (Fantilli and Logan Cooley), sophomore superstars (Luke Hughes and Matthew Knies), and veteran goalkeepers (Erik Portillo and Justen Close).
Instead, the week of November 14th brought about the emotional nadir of the season, with the Wolverines’ roster stricken by illness that would eventually be identified as adenovirus.
Steven Holtz, Nolan Moyle, Adam Fantilli, Jacob Truscott, T.J. Hughes, Brendan Miles, and Philippe Lapointe all missed at least one of the weekend’s two games with illness. Holtz suffered at least two seizures and spent several days in a medically induced coma. A top-ten match-up between college hockey blue bloods suddenly didn’t seem so important.
“We didn’t talk about hockey at all [this week],” Brandon Naurato said after the eventual Thursday night defeat. “It’s calling parents [who are] driving from other countries and states, finding out that their kids are in the emergency room and getting on flights and making sure everyone’s good. We didn’t watch video. We didn’t talk about the power play [and] penalty kill. Did we pre-scout them? Yeah we pre-scouted and got a plan, but it puts things in perspective and what’s important. We know what type of character and resilience our guys have, and we’re super proud of them.”
Despite being severely undermanned, Michigan played a more competitive game than the final score indicated, with an unfortunate delay of game minor for arriving late to the third period turning into a Gopher 5-on-3 goal for Cooley (who had injured Eric Ciccolini with a reckless check from behind earlier in the game but escaped ejection), which threw cold water on a comeback bid.
No player better encapsulated the Wolverines’ resilience than Dylan Duke, who scored both goals Thursday and added two more the following evening. The performance suggested that no matter what went wrong, on or off the ice for Michigan, the team’s rugged Ohioan winger could be counted on to bang in goals around the crease.
After the game, Duke showed a degree of leadership that was even more impressive than his on-ice reliability, stating that while he and his available teammates’ thoughts never left their ill brethren, they never doubted that they could win either:
“No matter who’s playing, no matter who’s going, I think everyone believes in each other. We think we can win with any lineup,” he said. “Those guys [out sick] are always in the back of our minds—our brothers, our teammates. We love them. We’re always thinking about them, and we’re playing for them.”
It was a week of Wolverine hockey that teetered perilously close to tragedy, which had a not so funny way of putting the setback in the Big Ten standings in perspective. That Michigan could hang with the Gophers without numerous regulars offered the first indicator the ‘22-23 Wolverines were much more than just a collection of future NHL talent.
The week also brought about a level of adversity no team should ever have to confront, but, once the worst was over, the conclusion that the ordeal brought the team together was inescapable.
As Rob Rassey would explain a week and a half later, “It’s something that—I don’t know if you want to say re-centers or humbles or just kind of makes you think differently. That was definitely a tough week for us, and I think it was great to see how everybody handled it—the maturity, the persistence, the resilience. As a coach, you don’t necessarily prepare for weeks like that, and to see how everybody came together, I thought it was great…I always try to find the positives in it, and we really came together as a team and hopefully we can use that to our advantage going forward.”
11/25/22, vs. Harvard, 4-4
Michigan’s 4-4 draw then 4-1 win over Harvard may not have been the results commanding the bulk of the Maize and Blue faithful’s attention over Thanksgiving weekend, what with a certain football game in Columbus going on.
Still, the Wolverines’ performance against Harvard was perhaps the clearest preview of what the Wolverines might become under first-year coach Brandon Naurato.
In the twenty-five years since Michigan’s last national title in 1998, the Wolverines earned a reputation for ushering elite talent through Ann Arbor but never quite converting formidable rosters into postseason success.
Naurato adopted the mission of providing his alma mater with a more cohesive and sustainable offensive identity than the longstanding formula of feasting on the power play and off the rush—two sources that always seemed to dry up at the worst moments. The plan was to develop a possession-heavy system, inspired by renown soccer manager Pep Guardiola, aimed at offering a talented team better control in each game and expressing that surplus of talent with greater consistency.
Against the Crimson, an opponent with more NHL draft choices than any other in the sport, Naurato’s Wolverines authored their most convincing proof of this concept from the first half of the season.
After falling behind 3-1, Michigan tilted the ice in its favor through commanding possession play. The Wolverines built play with patience from their own zone, prioritizing puck control rather than flipping it to the neutral zone at the slightest pressure. When they arrived in the offensive zone, they didn’t force plays that weren’t there but rather created chaos through a steady stream of attack, retrieve, release.
The cohesion of the five Wolverines on the ice at any given time left the Crimson in a state of utter desperation and while it would only produce a tie that evening, the 4-1 victory the following evening further illustrated the potential of the new-look Wolverines.
At an individual level, the Harvard series also marked a major inflection point in Gavin Brindley’s freshman campaign. The Estero, Florida native began the season hot, but the points dried up for most of October and November. Every night, he was visible in his quicksilver, high-intensity way, but he hadn’t scored a point in the nine games preceding the Crimson’s trip to Ann Arbor.
Against Harvard, Brindley gave three assists, but evaluating his performance purely on output would miss the command he showed across the two games. Brindley was physical and engaged in all three zones. His skating put one of the nation’s most talented teams under heavy pressure. His persistence and creativity in the final third paid off.
It was a breakout performance that would set the stage for a second half in which Brindley would show a similar level of dominance night in and night out. As he put it earlier this week, “I think our line has done a great job of it, and individually I feel like I’ve been one of the best players in college hockey” since the holiday break.
In brief, the draw against Harvard (and victory a night later) offered a clear picture of Brandon Naurato’s vision for his newly inherited program and a preview of an offensive explosion to come from Gavin Brindley.
1/13/23, vs. Ohio State, 2-7
The Wolverines returned from their holiday break in high spirits. Brandon Naurato spoke about an excellent run of practices once the team returned from its break, six Wolverines competed at the World Juniors and all medaled, and a delightful and temporary position change for Seamus Casey overshadowed moments of sloppiness in a 7-6 exhibition victory over the USNTDP.
In the first official game of their second half, however, Michigan fell flat on its face. The Wolverines escaped the first period tied at one (with Dylan Duke, unsurprisingly, providing the one for Michigan), but the 23-7 OSU lead in shots offered a hint of what was to come. In the second period, the wheels fell off, the Buckeyes ran amok, and the Wolverines couldn’t stop the bleeding. By period’s end, Ohio State led 6-2.
After the game, alternate captain Jacob Truscott summated Michigan’s emotional state: “It’s unacceptable. It’s embarrassing honestly. We’re gonna have to look ourselves in the mirror and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Fortunately for Wolverines fans, the Maize and Blue followed Truscott’s vision and won eight of their next nine games, including consecutive sweeps of Penn State, Wisconsin, and Michigan State.
When asked about how he conceives of that blowout defeat at several weeks’ remove, Naurato offered a lengthy response, reflecting more on his team’s cohesion and mentality than on its on-ice performance:
“We have talented players but they’re motivated because they care and the hockey we played against Harvard when we were down or Michigan State that second game the first two periods [a 2-1 win at Yost in the final game before the holiday break], or last weekend in the second and the third, when we have desperation and urgency something bad may actually happen.
“Even after the game Saturday, do we need more pain to go into the playoffs and play the right way? Are we going to take Wisconsin lightly? We aren’t talking about that. We’re talking about how they’re a good team. They can beat you, and they have good players.
“But if we’re just super hard and put pucks in the right spot and your line changes and your faceoffs and all the details, we can be so good, and it’s just because they’re tight.”
The 7-2 loss at the hands of the hated Buckeyes was humbling, humiliating even, but it seems to have provided the kind of pain Naurato sees as an often necessary step toward greater success.
2/11/23, vs. Michigan State, Duel in the D, 4-3 (OT)
On February 11th in Detroit, Michigan won its sixth consecutive Duel in the D thanks to a Luke Hughes overtime buzzer beater.
Adam Fantilli, Jacob Truscott, and Seamus Casey were all unavailable that evening at Little Caesars Arena—Fantilli due to a disqualification the night prior in a heated affair in East Lansing, and the latter two nursing injuries. Yet even without its talismanic freshman and two of its top four defenseman, Michigan found a way to flourish in front of the largest indoor crowd to take in a college hockey game this season.
Throughout the second half, Michigan’s results have made it easy to lose sight of the numerous injuries on the blue line the team has endured, and that evening in Detroit put that reality into stark relief.
However, there was some good injury news as well. The contest afforded the platform for a Frank Nazar III breakout performance, scoring his first career goal in just his second game, having made his season debut the night prior after offseason surgery.
In overtime, the Wolverines showed, as has seemed the case throughout the season, that the suffering is necessary.
A Dylan Duke tripping minor gave the Spartans a 4-on-3 power play that promised to reverse the Spartans fortunates in the annual battle for the Iron D. Instead, heroic shorthanded effort from Brindley, Jay Keranen, Ethan Edwards and more—along with a few timely saves from Erik Portillo—helped Michigan see out.
Then, just as Naurato was preparing to decide on who to tap for a shootout, Luke Hughes—the most shimmering star on a team resplendent with them—called game as the clock read 0:00.
Wolverine fans will hope the triumph in Detroit was indeed a simulacrum of the season in miniature: injuries and absences overcome, star power under bright lights, and in the end, overtime victory as the final horn sounds and a trophy as a reward.
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