"We Believe in What We're Doing. It's Just Winning the One Game"
"We Believe in What We're Doing. It's Just Winning the One Game"
After a third straight Frozen Four defeat, what separates Michigan from a national title? In conversation with Brandon Naurato in search of an answer
This piece is part of a two-leg collaboration between Hockey’s Arsenal and Gulo Gulo Hockey. In part one at Gulo Gulo Hockey, you can find a review of the state of the University of Michigan men’s hockey team following its third successive Frozen Four and national semifinal exit based on a one-on-one interview with coach Brandon Naurato. In part two at Hockey’s Arsenal, you can read a thorough breakdown of the way Michigan adapted its offensive zone system to the neutral zone, setting the stage for cleaner entries and another extended postseason run.
It took two days for University of Michigan men’s hockey coach Brandon Naurato to re-watch his team’s season-ending 4-0 loss to Boston College. He wanted to investigate, confirm what his eyes told him and what, upon further review, the underlying numbers would also support.
In real time, BC’s 4-0 win was a lightning bolt. The first blow came on the second shift, the knock-out in a mad flurry at four-on-four in the second period. The effect by the end was overwhelm at the dominance of Mssrs. Smith, Leonard, Gauthier, and Perreault. “There's no secret into how they won the game,” said Naurato at the time. “Those guys are studs. Studs. All credit to their team. It's not taking credit away from anybody else. Those guys are special, and they won that game. They broke it open.”
From a more clear-eyed perspective, the margins were finer than they seemed the night of the defeat. By xG (which Naurato describes as the best way to tell the story of a game other than the final score), BC had a 2.6-2.3 advantage. Michigan out-chanced the Eagles fourteen to twelve, though BC had five Grade A chances to the Wolverines’ two. Michigan took 58% of faceoffs and spent five minutes and forty-nine seconds in the offensive zone (about two-and-a-half minutes more than the Eagles).
Boston College, crucially, doubled up the Wolverines in slot shots: eight to four. “That’s where we lost the game,” said Naurato from his office in late April. This line of investigation is not to question the result of the Wolverines’ third straight national semifinal defeat but rather to understand it; reviewing these figures—a few clicks away via his desktop—appears a means of processing.
Because of the familiarity of ending a season two wins shy of a national championship, it is tempting to dip back into old narratives—that Michigan’s emphasis on offense via youthful skill comes at the expense of defending. The underlying numbers tell a different story: BC earned its victory through the ability of its four top gunners to drive high quality offense to the slot, but this was not a game in which Michigan’s defense was blown apart.
Over the course of the evening, the Wolverines played a tight defensive game, preventing the Eagles from racking up chances. In fact, BC put 4.5 xG up against Denver (who sent 1.6 of their own at Jacob Fowler in the Eagle net) two nights later in the national championship game, only to be stymied by Pios goaltender Matt Davis. Against Michigan, BC’s stars were ruthless in finishing off their chances, which included taking advantage of the four-on-four sequence that defined, and effectively ended, the game as the Eagles scored twice in forty-nine seconds to take a 3-0 lead.
“It’s puck luck, but you earn that,” says Naurato of winding up on the right side of single-elimination chaos. He points to Dylan Duke’s goal in the third period in that Frozen Four-clinching win over MSU. “It’s not structure,” says Naurato. “It’s a game-breaking play.” Michigan was on the right side of those plays in its regional and the wrong side against Boston College.
When asked whether he regrets not matching lines as a tool to slow the Eagles star power, Naurato replied, “I don’t ever want to be concerned with that because…it ruins the rhythm. I don’t want to influence anything unless it’s positive in a game. I want to influence everything leading up to the games in practice, but when the weekends come, it’s their team. I just want them to be able to play. I don’t want to pull them away.”
As to his other takeaways from BC, Naurato says “I don’t blow up my structure and my philosophy because I know what gets us there. It’s not just the score. That’s the moral of my story. We believe in what we’re doing. It’s just winning the one game.”
There is ample evidence to affirm Naurato’s confidence, whether at the collective level or the individual. Since he arrived as an assistant for the 2021-22 season, then taking over as head coach the following year, Michigan has been to three consecutive Frozen Fours and won two Big Ten Tournaments while losing in overtime in the final of a third. Of course, Naurato did not exactly have to start from scratch when he became head coach in the summer of 2023, but under his watch, production has only increased as the Wolverines graduated a veritable arsenal to the NHL.
In that ‘21-22 season, Michigan had arguably the most talented roster in the history of college hockey. Its top five scorers included four first round NHL Draft picks (three of them in the top five overall selections) and a player who missed out on the first round by just seven selections. The Wolverines sixth highest scorer, Owen Power, was the first overall pick in the ‘21 Draft. Matty Beniers—the second overall pick in that draft—led the team in scoring with twenty goals and twenty-three assists in forty-three games. Kent Johnson—fifth pick in the same draft—was the fifth highest scorer with eight goals and twenty-nine assists.
In 2023-24, the cupboard was hardly bare in Ann Arbor but not quite to the astronomical scale of two years prior. The top five scorers included a first rounder, two second rounders, a fourth rounder, and the undrafted T.J. Hughes. Gavin Brindley led the team in points with fifty-three points. Beniers’ forty-three points from ‘21-22 would have placed him sixth in scoring. Two of Michigan’s biggest offensive drivers in this year’s run to the Frozen Four were undrafted: Hughes and freshman Garrett Schifsky, who put up sixteen goals and eighteen assists for thirty-four points.
“Schifsky played with elite players, but he earned that,” said Naurato of the rising sophomore, an exemplar that draft status does not dictate ice time or point production. “As a coach, when you say things…whatever you tell him to do, he does, and then he gets rewarded, so now I’m using him as an example. I tell guys to go to the net, Schifsky did, he’s scoring, he’s gonna keep playing, he’s gonna play with these guys. That’s the evolution of him is he filled a role where he was reliable, he was competitive, and he had the skill to play with the high-end guys. Well, next year, he’ll probably be in the same situation, but your junior year, are you the high-end guy, are you the driver?”
Despite his confidence in his process, Naurato knows that bridging the gap from where his team stands to a national championship requires improvement and adjustment. “We need to get our goals against down,” he says. “That’s the answer. I could talk for days about it, because it’s not like we don’t focus on that…I hate the stigma of Michigan trades offense to give it up. That’s not what our structure is.”
He adds that the kind of defensive improvement he seeks has more to do with fundamentals in defending the net and scoring square than a systemic overhaul. “It’s putting more value in boxing out, body position, getting underneath sticks,” as Naurato puts it.
“You have your brain when we have the puck, and you have your brain when you don’t have the puck,” he adds of learning to perfect the defensive side of the puck. “The guys that can switch that brain, i.e. transition, as quickly as possible because it happens five times in ten seconds sometimes, they’re the elite thinkers and the elite players.”
This year, taking a team that went 4-5-1 in its final ten games before the December break to a Frozen Four required significant in-season evolution, with Naurato and his staff using the time off around the holidays to transform the team’s approach to the neutral zone.
The idea was to take the exact system through which Michigan organizes its offensive zone and power play and apply it to the neutral zone. Naurato himself wondered whether an unorthodox 1-3-1 in possession in the neutral zone would be too much to take on in the middle of the season. “I didn’t like our neutral zone routes on build-it situations, so I had an idea, and I was telling [assistant coach Matt] Deschamps, ‘eh, we can’t do this at the break. It’s too much. Nobody does this,’” recalls Naurato. “And Deschamps is like, ‘dude, nobody does anything you talk about. Let’s just do it.’ And we did it.”
It worked in part because it leaned so heavily on concepts at which the team already excelled. Naurato offered as one reason he felt comfortable attempting the re-design, “they know the O zone so well, and that’s our bread and butter. I felt like if I taught the O zone in a different area of the ice, they could grasp it quick.”
In simple terms, the idea was to use the same basic 1-3-1 formation Michigan used to lethal effect on its power play to lure a stationary defense into the middle of the ice, only to kick the puck to speed underneath in space along the flank. As Naurato summates, “It’s always in motion, filling space…but at the end of the day, we want to be in the middle of the ice with the puck, and we want two people inside, and somebody traveling down the weak side. That is our system in a nutshell.”
In the offensive zone, the movement sets up a convergence at the net. In the neutral zone, it was about creating speed and open ice through which to gain the O zone. Though the 1-3-1 is a near universal standard on the power play, bringing it to neutral ice would confuse opposing coverages (who are accustomed to defending a 2-1-2 or 2-2-1 structure in this situation).
Note: If this all sounds a little bit hazy, this would be a perfect time to jump over to the Hockey’s Arsenal side of this collaboration for more details on these tactics, how and why they work, and the process of teaching them.
The transformation helped Michigan get more clean entries to the offensive zone and take better advantage of its forecheck. The Wolverines’ record improved, but there remained blemishes. After a 6-2 loss to Minnesota in Mariucci on March first, Naurato realized that the revamped neutral zone had caused a new problem.
“What was happening is we were working on this, and we were playing too slow,” he explains. “And I’m like, ‘guys, the whole intent is this is just a built-in option, a read.’ We got away from playing fast, so then we worked on playing fast again, along with the build-up and reads, and I think that helped a ton going into the playoffs.”
Michigan went on to win six of its next seven games to close out the month of March, the lone exception the Big Ten championship overtime defeat at Munn Ice Arena, avenged eight days later to secure the trip to the Frozen Four. You could see it in action in the build up to Frank Nazar’s “Michigan 2.0” pass that helped lift the Wolverines past the Spartans in the regional final.
Then came the Boston College game, from which the question begs: What does this neutral zone overhaul have to do with getting from a three-times-running national semifinalist to a national champion?
Well, to posit “defense wins championships” as an axiom is to suggest that it is easier to go into a single-elimination tournament with an emphasis on limiting chances than on creating them. In the words of Red Wings goaltender Alex Lyon at his end-of-season interview in April, “I think every team in their maturation process comes to a realization that you can’t necessarily rely on goals all the time, and the ability to keep pucks out of your net is something you can control to a much greater degree.”
Naurato believes Michigan can achieve with the puck the degree of control Lyon ascribed to defending through the creation of structure in possession. He rejects the idea that offense is simply a matter of talent; instead, the idea is to create a system to accentuate that talent. That’s what the Wolverines and Naurato have in their Pep Guardiola-inspired system that has now expanded from the offensive zone into the neutral zone.
Here again, it’s worth pointing out the individual and team results both suggest it’s working, and that’s not a coincidence. Among the primary benefits of the system Naurato deploys is the way that training players in this system also serves as individual development. (And again, if you want more details on this training, check out the Hockey’s Arsenal companion piece for one drill that proved essential to perfecting the new neutral zone.)
“Really I’m teaching puck support and puck management. But inside of that, guys are working on stick detail and all these other things,” explains Naurato. “So it’s offense and defense. It’s development. It’s not a structure or a system just to win; it teaches better angling; it teaches better stick detail; offensively, it teaches better puck support and puck management, which is what you want.”
Since the loss to BC on the 11th of April, four key members of the ‘23-24 team have foregone remaining eligibility to turn pro: Frank Nazar, Gavin Brindley,Dylan Duke, and Seamus Casey. However, two other central figures from this year’s team eschewed professional opportunities to return for their junior seasons in Rutger McGroarty and Hughes.
“It’s massive, and then you hope that you tell Rutger and TJ’s stories later, and it ends up being what all these kids want in the end,” said Naurato of their choice to return. “It’s not about playing in the NHL for your first game. It’s about playing there for as long as you can…Because of that loyalty, I’ll make sure that those guys get what they need to have success.”
And in the end, Naurato takes his greatest pride not in individual development, point production, wins, or trophies but rather in the people who comprise his program.
He gets to this idea in explaining the conversation he might have with a player who is struggling, as if distilling the program into a single hypothetical meeting. Naurato doesn’t believe in psychological manipulation as a motivator to break free of a slump. Instead, he wants to help chart a path out of that slump together, cultivating an environment where people like McGroarty or Hughes want to stay and keep developing.
“I want you to do more,” Naurato says. “‘Hey I haven’t scored in five games.’ ‘Great, let me sit with you and let's watch all your stuff.’ I want to help you score because I need you to score. I don’t need to fuck with you and put you on the fourth line to get you going, because our kids they work and there's an honest effort. That's what's so good, man, is we have great people, and they're always together and they care and it sounds cliché, and I always say this, but that's the culture.”
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