Week 10: A Rivalry Reinvigorated
Michigan splits a weekend home-and-home with MSU—first falling Friday in a game that illustrated Sparty’s quick turnaround in the Nightingale era then winning Saturday to close the first half strong
“I think it’s good for youth hockey in Michigan,” said head coach Brandon Naurato after the latest edition of college hockey’s most played rivalry. “Growing up in Detroit, going to the GLI, or playing Michigan State in the Duel in the D or whatever they called it back in the day—that’s stuff you look forward to. It’s a lot of fun. You look up to all these guys as young kids, so I think it’s awesome for youth hockey in Michigan.”
The interim head coach had been asked whether Adam Nightingale’s rapid, year-one turnaround at Michigan State had reinvigorated an in-state rivalry that had teetered dangerously close to Harlem Globetrotters-Washington Generals territory in the last decade. That was never more apparent than in the Wolverines’ and Spartans’ collision in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament last spring, in which State scored the first goal of the series and Michigan the next twelve.
While it may be a boon for Michigan’s young hockey players, the overnight Spartan resurgence also saw a six-game Michigan winning streak in the intrastate feud snapped.
For the third consecutive weekend, the Wolverines finished better than they started though—stumbling Friday evening in East Lansing before a convincing 2-1 Saturday victory that wasn’t as close as the final score back at Yost.
On Friday night at Munn Ice Arena, a strong start saw the Wolverines out to a 1-0 lead. Michigan did an excellent job at defending the blue line, neutralizing the Spartans’ ability to attack off the rush. Meanwhile, the Wolverines found success at forcing MSU turnovers to jumpstart their own transition game.
The eventual opener came not in transition though but thanks to a sustained spell in the Spartan end of the rink. After MSU netminder Dylan St. Cyr stopped but couldn’t smother a Johnny Druskinis point shot, Nolan Moyle tied up the stick of Nicolas Muller. Thanks to his captain’s effort, freshman T.J. Hughes found the puck on his tape in a soft spot in the Spartans’ coverage and promptly whipped it past St. Cyr’s blocker.
Though Hughes’ marker would prove the Wolverines’ only goal of the period (and eventually the game), it wasn’t for a lack of quality chances. Rutger McGroarty, Luke Hughes, and Mark Estapa each earned quality looks at St. Cyr’s net, only to be denied.
Instead of carrying a several goal lead into the first intermission, one that wouldn’t have felt ill-fitting from the run of play, Michigan entered the locker room on level terms with the Spartans. Defenseman Cole Krygier had tied the game on what looked to be an innocuous shot from the point that Erik Portillo failed to corral with his catching glove with just under three minutes to play in the period.
Eight minutes into the second, MSU took the lead when Tiernan Shoudy scored amidst a netfront scramble during which Portillo appeared to lose track of the puck and the four Wolverine skaters on the scene failed to clear it from danger.
In his post-game assessment, Naurato was blunt in describing what he perceived to be unforced errors facilitating the two Spartan goals: “Both their goals are unearned goals. It’s not a second effort from us, and it’s a shot from the corner at the blue line.”
In assessing Portillo’s performance, Naurato emphasized the cruel way in which a goaltender’s mistakes cannot be concealed while pointing out the need to muster more than a single goal to compensate for an off night in net: “Everyone’s gonna make mistakes; he just happens to be the goalie. We’re not worried about it. He’s a great goalie, and we’ve just got to pick him up.”
As the second period progressed, the Wolverines continued to apply pressure in the Spartan end, but St. Cyr held firm in resistance. With Matt Basgall in the box for interference, a well-worked passing sequence culminated in a Philippe Lapointe one timer that St. Cyr sprawled to stop.
As the period concluded, T.J. Hughes, Rutger McGroarty, and Gavin Brindley had the Spartan defense scrambling, but Nightingale’s last bulwark held firm.
There is an iconoclastic quality to St. Cyr’s netminding. In an era ruled by towering goaltenders and in which puck handling has become taboo in many circles, St. Cyr stands at five-foot-eight and seems to relish the opportunity to jumpstart the Spartan breakout. Over sixty minutes in East Lansing Friday evening, he was not the sole reason for State’s success, but he was an awfully big one.
During the third period, Nightingale’s team was effective in slowing the game down to a crawl with just thirteen combined shots on goal between the two sides. Though the Wolverines were able to apply some pressure in the game’s dying breaths, they were unable to beat St. Cyr and pull level.
In his post-game media availability, Naurato contended that the 31-23 Spartan advantage in shots was not the most accurate reflection of the run of play, noting “the shots are the shots, but we had a lot of Grade A scoring chances.”
When asked what looked or felt different about Nightingale’s Spartans to the team Michigan beat six straight times a year ago, Moyle identified a tactically sound foe but added that he still felt the Wolverines needed to be better.
“They’re a good team, credit to them,” the captain said. “They played with a lot of structure; they played physical; they were well coached, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen. I think there’s no excuse for us. We’ve got to be able to put together a sixty-minute game, not just fifteen minutes and then take shifts off and then find it late in the game there.”
One night later, back in Ann Arbor, the Wolverines—keen to avoid closing out the season’s first half by getting swept—delivered one of their most sound performances of the year.
From puck drop, Michigan achieved a clear territorial advantage, seeming to spend long passages of the period engaged in the Spartan end of the rink. Though the Wolverines only outshoot MSU 14-12 in the first, that margin was not as reflective of the game’s flow as their 2-0 advantage in penalties drawn.
On the game’s second power play (a bench minor for too many men), Michigan snapped its drought with the extra man, as the period neared its midpoint.
The Wolverines lured the State penalty kill to St. Cyr’s right with a string of one-touch passes before a Luke Hughes one-timer from St. Cyr’s left ricocheted off Dylan Duke and in.
Even if an impressive passing sequence preceded it, that the slump-busting power play goal came from a shot that appeared to be on its way well wide banking in off Duke’s arm felt appropriate, an omen that the Wolverines’ power play fortunes were changing.
After the game, Naurato called the power play breakthrough “a monkey standing on a piano off your back” following the six-game dry spell. He added “Even the times we didn’t score [on the power play], I think we were doing a lot of good things—converging, outnumbering at the net. It was super positive.”
The slog of Friday’s third period had been replaced by a faster pace, and that transformation favored the team in maize and blue.
In the second, the Spartans provided more resistance than they had in the first, but Michigan continued to marginalize them to the outskirts of their offensive zone.
“I think a lot of their offense is just how many shots they try to generate, especially from the point,” said freshman defenseman Seamus Casey. “So a big thing for us was boxing out and trying to let Erik see as many shots as he could. And then getting pucks out of our zone, it was getting five back all the time and just working from there as a unit, and I think we did that a lot better than Friday night—basically no second chance opportunities.”
Though Michigan continued to avail itself as the superior team, the Wolverines could not find a way to slip a second puck past St. Cyr until barely two minutes remained in the second period.
T.J. Hughes anticipated a David Gucciardi clearance attempt and controlled it with a delicate first touch along the wall. Hughes played the puck on for McGroarty at the point, who fed a wheeling Keaton Pehrson.
Pehrson, attacking along the half-wall to St. Cyr’s right, delivered an incisive pass across the slot for Hughes to redirect past the helpless goaltender. On his twenty-fourth birthday, the senior Minnesotan defenseman decided to give out gifts rather than receive them.
Most importantly, the goal provided the Wolverines with some breathing room, and a two-goal margin to carry into the third.
In the game’s final twenty minutes, the Spartans sustained offensive pressure in Michigan’s end of the rink, outshooting the hosts 16-4. Were it not for an exemplary bounce-back performance from Portillo, who stopped thirty-seven of thirty-eight Spartan shots and did not concede until there were just five seconds left on the clock, that two-goal margin may not have been enough.
“I’m so happy for Ports,” said Naurato after the game. “He deserves it. This whole time—whether he’s been great or wants a game back—he’s been working his butt off.”
Naurato added that the timing of the midseason break along with the strong final performance would portend good things for the junior goaltender: “You can take Sidney Crosby or Portillo, and when they have confidence versus when they don’t, they’re two completely different players. So I think that’s just on him to find his confidence, and he’s doing that through his work ethic. I think it’ll be good to go home to Sweden and eat some good food from mama and come back ready to go.”
From Casey’s perspective, Portillo’s success stems in large part from the fact that his size does not seem to come at the cost of mobility. The freshman noted that Portillo has a unique ability to present a formidable figure between the pipes without having to venture far out of his crease: “He’s not coming out at you, but he’s still big obviously, because he’s huge, but he can move so well and always feels like he just takes up all the net, but you still can’t make a deke because he’s deep in his crease.”
Senior Spartan winger Jagger Joshua broke up Portillo’s shutout bid with the game’s outcome no longer in serious doubt by batting a rebound home to close out the game at a 2-1 margin that did not reflect the Wolverines’ control from start to close.
To Naurato, Michigan’s success at limiting the Spartans’ shot quality was less about X’s and O’s and more about approach. “Honestly, it’s not like a tactical or structure move,” the head coach said. “It’s just mentality and guys buying into what we’ve been saying all year.”
The Saturday night victory was not just about earning a win against a bitter in-state rival but also about concluding a turbulent first half of the season with optimism.
With twelve freshmen, the Wolverines are college hockey’s youngest team, and those youthful players have been cast into featured roles. Moving forward, Michigan’s coach expects that even a half-season of experience will put the team in position to improve its standing in the Big Ten during the second half.
“I keep saying they’re freshmen, so they don’t know what they don’t know,” Naurato noted after Saturday’s game. “They gotta get beat or beat up to figure it out and grow. Maybe they didn’t know how hard it was gonna be last night or against Penn State on the road or against Minnesota when you’re short-handed. Well, now they know. So we’re not making excuses in the first half, but now you know what to expect, you’ve got be mentally prepped and physically ready.”
Odds and Ends:
Michigan Women Close Out 2022 on a High Note
The Michigan women’s team finished its 2022 calendar year Friday night at Yost with a 5-2 victory over Rhode Island. Over a three-minute-and-forty-three second spell in the second period, the Wolverines netted five goals through five different scorers to all but seal the game.
With the win, Jenna Trubiano’s team will carry a four-game winning streak into their holiday break. Between November and December, the Wolverines played nine games, won eight of them, and outscored their opponents 47-11 along the way. Even if you pull out an 18-0 rout of Montana State at the Beehive Showcase, Michigan’s 29-11 margin in eight games remains sterling.
That impressive run of form has the Wolverines well on their way toward their goal of qualifying for nationals as a top-ten side in the ACHA. The team will return to action in mid-January with a trip to Arizona for two games with Arizona State and one with Grand Canyon University.
TJ’s Ascension
All season, scoring beyond the customary top line of Samoskevich, Duke, and Fantilli has been a challenge for Michigan. In recent weeks, the emergence of T.J. Hughes—playing alongside some combination of Rutger McGroarty, Gavin Brindley, Philippe Lapointe, and Jackson Hallum—has helped answer the need for improved depth scoring.
With Fantilli unavailable this weekend due to the tyrannical strictures of Hockey Canada’s World Junior camp, that exigence was even more acute, and Hughes and company responded.
On Friday, playing with McGroarty and Brindley, Hughes’ line had seventeen even strength shot attempts, eight more than the next closest Wolverine trio. On Saturday, with Brindley replaced by Hallum, the line notched twelve even strength shot attempts, doubling the next closest Michigan unit.
Of course, it wasn’t just about the volume of shots for the Hughes line; it was also a weekend of conversion. With a pair of goals, Hughes can now claim nine markers in his first eighteen collegiate games, a neat goal-every-other-game pace. Not bad for an undrafted ’01 who did not commit until late May.
After Saturday’s win, Naurato referred to the emergence of the freshmen-driven second line as “big time” before adding “I think the last three weeks, they’ve been pretty good, and it’s getting better every time. We talk a lot with them about making inside plays away from the puck, and they’ve done a really good job with that.”
Meanwhile, for the Hamilton, Ontario native, a two-goal weekend was a nice introduction to the Michigan-Michigan State rivalry. Even as a transplant in the Wolverine State, it didn’t take Hughes long to develop an appreciation for the enmity between the two sides.
“All week, our upperclassmen are telling us about the rivalry,” Hughes said. “We watched some videos on what happened in the past and just kind of got us fired up. Friday night right away we knew we had to learn to hate them, so that definitely happened quick.”
Production Note
With the holiday break, we will be moving away from our regular Wednesday-Sunday publication schedule, but fear not, that doesn’t mean we’ll be leaving your inbox barren. We will be covering Team USA’s World Junior camp in Plymouth next week, and, even if it will be from afar, we will continue to write about the various Wolverines’ WJC exploits along with some bigger picture notes on the tournament through the new year. You can also expect another player profile dropping at the end of next week. Many thanks for reading throughout the first half of the season, and we look forward to resuming our normal pattern in January.
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