"The Traditional Pressure"

On Michigan's path to a championship in a perceived down year, discipline, and defensive brains from Michael Hage on down

Last week, Radio-Canada’s Marc Antoine Godin—visiting Yost Ice Arena to check in on Montreal Canadiens first round pick and University of Michigan talisman Michael Hage—asked Wolverines coach Brandon Naurato whether “the traditional pressure” associated with his program still applies after last summer’s round of roster churn.

Naurato’s answer was unequivocal: “Oh yeah, they wouldn’t think any differently based on who’s in that room. Our expectations are to win a national championship and be on top…That’s the goal at the end is to be in the Big Ten championship game and the Frozen Four.”

It’s no surprise that the team itself would harbor those beliefs. No competitor could enter the arena (broadly defined) without them. But what is the objective case that this team—by all accounts lacking in projectable talent relative to its predecessors—can not just match those teams’ accomplishments but exceed them, winning two games in the NCAA Tournament to get to the Frozen Four, then two more once they get there to win the whole thing.

“You hope that you may look a different way on paper, but that doesn’t mean we’re maybe a better team just because we have a bunch of draft picks,” Naurato said last week. “So even with all the talent, if the talent doesn’t play the right way…it’s just there’s different things for each year that the staff and the players have to kind of manage. I think this team, they give it everything, and there’s some minor setbacks or mistakes that we’ll clean up at this stage. I think there’s an honest effort. I think everybody cares, and then you’re just teaching through it.”

Setting aside the ‘21-22 team and its absurd array of talent, this year’s Wolverines find themselves in a roughly equivalent position to the squad’s two previous incarnations. Just making the tournament is perhaps more assured than it was at this time a year ago and not quite so certain as it was the year prior. U-M has struggled for consistency but also shown itself to be a worthy peer to several elite teams.

Wins over Michigan State, Western Michigan, Boston University, and Ohio State suggest at the very least the Wolverines can compete with the NCAA’s best. Granted, a goal-less weekend sweep at Mariucci to Minnesota in early December did provide one challenge they failed to measure up to, though it is also one they will have a chance to avenge at Yost in February.

At a team meeting last week, Naurato ran the group through the specifics of their strength of schedule and their results, then posed a question: “Do you feel you can beat them? Yes we do. Then you have to do that two weekends in a row, and you’re national champions if you get to the tournament…There should be belief that you’re right there.”

To get where it hasn’t been since 1998, Michigan just needs to play to the best of its ability for two weekends and four games. Easier said than done, of course, but certainly within reach. With that said, the tendency of postseason hockey toward chaos hardly makes for a strong foundation for a playoff campaign. There is firmer footing, however, in the Wolverines’ season-long fight to become a team well suited to thrive in that chaos.

As a starting point, the hockey that is played in October is not the same as the hockey played in spring; I don’t imagine that statement requires justification to anyone who has watched the sport with any regularity.

That über-talented ‘21-‘22 team was in some ways better suited to October than April. That team of course enjoyed a successful run to a Big Ten Championship, as well as the run to the Frozen Four. However, as you may recall, in the postseason, Michigan’s most reliable scoring line was not the Olympic one of first round picks Matty Beniers, Brendan Brisson, and Kent Johnson; it was the fourth line: Garrett Van Wyhe, Jimmy Lambert, and Nolan Moyle. It would’ve been unthinkable that may be the case (and the Wolverines enjoy any sort of playoff success) based on regular season point totals.

This week, Naurato spoke to the difference between winning hockey at the start of the year and the end. “The foundation of regular season success would be field position: Getting into the O zone and tilting the ice and playing in the offensive zone, which is what we’ve preached for years and why we put so much into it,” he contended.

It’s not that those ideas are irrelevant to winning in the postseason, but the elevated stakes enforce a collective shift in mentality, which accentuates different facets of the game. According to Naurato, “The success in the playoffs, number one is discipline. We’ve talked to our team about that, and then capitalizing and managing the game and defending—how you play through the neutral zone, your tracks.”

“It’s not just penalties,” he continues. “Discipline to be okay with just getting the puck out of the zone versus trying to make the extra play…Everyone wants to make plays and carry pucks into the offensive zone, but sometimes you have to get it out and change, so that when you’re teammate comes on, you’ve set them up for success.”

Puck management, or simply avoiding turnovers, is an essential part of winning in the playoffs. As Naurato explains it, “You can look at a D zone coverage breakdown and what happens, but where it starts is puck play.”

“When you practice D zone coverage or practice certain things, it looks perfect and you’re in advantageous spots,” he adds. “What happens when there’s chaos or a guy breaks his stick or a guy falls down? Are other guys over-scrambling to run to the play or are they controlled and poised? Pros are controlled and poised…With kids, it’s having the maturity to be poised in chaotic situations.”

Discipline also means defending away from the puck, or what Naurato refers to as thinking with the defensive brain. Naurato encourages his players to think of himself with two brains—the first is the brain with possession of the puck and the second is the brain while defending. “If you’re thinking with your second brain in 50/50 opportunities, you’re a good defensive player,” he says. “If you’re only thinking with one brain, you’re going to be in trouble…When it’s a 50/50 puck, do I blow the zone, or do I stop?...That’s the difference in being a 200-foot player. Yes, you may not get the breakaway when he does chip it 2/10 times when he does chip it off the wall, but the other 8/10 when he doesn’t, you’re not giving up the chance against, and that’s a true second brain defensive hockey player in my opinion.”

It’s a lesson Naurato himself had to learn during his playing days at Michigan from coach Red Berenson: “Red said this to me when I was in school. He said, ‘If you score a goal a game, you don’t have to come back and play defense.’ And it was like February. He was like, ‘How many goals do you have?’ I’m like, ‘seven.’ So he’s like, ‘So you better start coming back.’ I never forgot that.”

In Michigan’s last four games, the role of discipline in dictating results for the Wolverines is obvious. In U-M’s home win over then top-ranked Michigan State on Jan. 17, MSU had a 37–32 advantage in shots and a 4.4–3.4 edge in expected goals (per College Hockey News), but Michigan found a way to win by playing responsibly: dumping pucks out of their zone when necessary, only sending the Spartans to one power play, and capitalizing on one of their two chances on the man advantage.

The next night at Munn Ice Arena in East Lansing, the Wolverines played well at five-on-five, but not enough of the game happened at five-on-five for it to matter. Michigan had five power plays (scoring once), and State had eight (scoring twice, plus a short-handed goal). That time spent in the box is costly, even when it doesn’t result in a goal against. If nothing else, it’s time your power play players (i.e. your scorers) aren’t on the ice.

That same lesson clearly applies to last weekend’s split in Madison. Over two games between Michigan and Wisconsin, the Badgers had eight power plays compared to just two for the Wolverines. All that time killing was a driving factor in Michigan blowing leads and dropping points in both games, even if it pulled out the shootout win Saturday. Discipline isn’t just about penalties, but penalty problems so extreme are bound to be fatal.

In keeping with the two years previous, the Wolverines haven’t mastered consistency at this stage of the season, but the optimistic case rests on the idea that this team has been built around winning playoff hockey principles since October. That’s been the only way for this team to win all season. It’s a process that starts with Michigan’s best player, Hage.

On any given night, Hage’s task is nothing less than domination. As Naurato explains it, Hage’s job is to “do what you do well and be the game-breaker…We want you to be a dominant player…Who’s dominating the game? And it’s not that we expect that of him, but to give us a chance, we need him to do that.” It’s a heavy burden for an 18-year-old freshman, but it’s been handed to him because carrying it is within his reach.

That means counting on Hage in all situations: “If we’re up, we need you to defend. If we’re down, we need you to be the game-breaker…The compliment to him is that at 18: Because of who he is and what we have, we’re asking a lot from him.”

In explaining what he’s learned about succeeding at the NCAA level over his first 23 collegiate games, Hage himself emphasizes the poise Naurato alluded to above. “It’s hard,” he said Tuesday. “You can’t just expect to show up and score every night. Sometimes you’ve got to do different things to help your team win…You never know what the game is gonna bring, and you have to stay level-headed. It’s such an important time of year, and it’s stressful.”

As for what he expects of himself, Hage says, “I want to create offense, but you [also] want to be someone that can be trusted in every situation.” Earning that trust means recognizing the hierarchy of priorities, or thinking first with his defensive brain. He believes his game is at its best when he’s “being hard, not getting scored on, good defensively, and then creating offense and trying to produce for our team.”

For Michigan to win that elusive tenth national title this season, that is what it will take. After all, as Josh Eernisse points out, it’s the same process the Wolverines embraced this time last year.

“We found our stride at the end of the year, and we were able to start stringing games together, but it only happened when we got every guy to buy in and all the guys were dedicated to doing the little things, even away from the puck and playing hard defensively,” he recounted Tuesday. “If we can get on the right track with those things, I think the offense takes care of itself…It’s just trying to make sure at the end of the day, we’re winning net-front battles, we’re being hard defensively, and we’re just being hard all around. That’s…what it’s going to take in playoff hockey.”

Thanks to Michigan Athletics for this week’s preview image. Please also check out THN.com/Detroit for daily Detroit Red Wings coverage.