Week 11: “ Looking in the Mirror and Realizing ‘hey, we got a really good team here. What are we going to do about it?,’” a Buckeye Split
Michigan is humbled Friday against a bitter rival, before a resilient Saturday performance for a weekend split with Ohio State
“It was a lot of video, and there was a lot of looking in the mirror and realizing ‘hey, we got a really good team here. What are we going to do about it?’”
Some twenty hours before freshman forward Rutger McGroarty offered this reflection, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team had been overwhelmed by Ohio State, falling 7-2 in a scoreline that may actually have flattered the Wolverines when you considered the visitors’ 52-21 advantage in shots.
What were McGroarty and his teammates going to do about the humbling defeat? Avenge it with a vital 4-2 victory—overcoming an early deficit, before navigating a tight game with a maturity beyond their years, to secure the win before a raucous crowd at Yost. If Friday’s performance was meandering and rudderless, Saturday’s was purposive and razor sharp.
Junior defenseman Jacob Truscott explained the Friday performance succinctly after the game: “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.”
Midway through the first period Friday night, a Dylan Duke power play marker put Michigan ahead, but the Wolverines were already being doubled up in shots on goal.
The Wolverine lead was gone within five minutes thanks to a power play goal from OSU junior Travis Treloar, and though the first period would conclude with the score level, the 23-7 Buckeye advantage on the shot chart offered a clearer picture of the contest’s opening twenty minutes.
Throughout the first, the Ohio State forecheck posed Michigan enormous problems, with the swarming Buckeyes repeatedly stymying the Wolverines’ bids to exit their own end with control. The result was an enormous territorial disadvantage for the hosts, with Michigan having no one but Erik Portillo to thank for exiting the frame on even terms.
To Truscott, the Wolverines were perhaps too fixated on exiting with possession rather than alleviating pressure. “We gotta go north,” said the Port Huron native. “We can’t play around with it. We gotta move it fast going north, get the puck out, and we tried too much back there…They have a good forecheck, but we gotta beat that.”
In the second, the story was the same as far as game flow was concerned, only the Buckeyes finally broke the levee that was Portillo. Michigan continued to flounder in its own end; Ohio State continued to turn their offensive screws; Portillo held admirably firm, but by period’s end, the hosts trailed 6-2.
“[Portillo] played unreal, and he bailed us out a lot,” said Truscott. “The score could have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for him.” Even Portillo’s heroics were insufficient to stop the OSU surge with the Buckeyes scoring four consecutive goals over an eleven-minute spell in the middle of the period (including a Tyler Duke clapper from the point to answer his brother’s goal in the first).
Dylan Duke provided temporary relief by netting his second of the night after the fourth of those Buckeye tallies to peel the margin back to three.
There is an inevitability or perhaps an undeniability to Duke’s game. The sophomore scored four times during the Wolverines’ illness-induced sweep at the hands of Minnesota in November (all of them from within spitting distance of the net), and once again, with everything spiraling out of control around him, Duke punched in a pair around the net.
You get the sense that some fifty years from now, with the Earth too hot for asphalt, fresh water in preciously dire supply, sea levels surging, and mass extinction well underway, Dylan Duke will shovel in a goal from three feet outside the crease.
With fifty-two seconds remaining in the period, a Tyler Duke five-minute major for kneeing offered faint hope at a path back into the game. Instead, Patrick Guzzo scored a short-handed goal seven seconds into the power play, sending the teams into their dressing rooms for the second intermission with the score at 6-2.
The Buckeyes added a seventh not quite ten minutes into the period, before a fracas involving Jackson Hallum, Gavin Brindley, John Larkin, and Tyler Duke led to a prolonged stoppage in play as officials sorted out the infractions.
During this pause, the Wolverines huddled closely around captain Nolan Moyle at the bench.
“I just was trying to send a message that, you know, there’s eight minutes left in this game, at least just start to send a message because we play tomorrow,” said Moyle of his message after the game. “Be smart. Game started to get a little chippy there, and obviously you want to be physical and compete and show some emotion, but just a reminder that we play tomorrow, so just being there physically and letting them know there’s another game tomorrow.”
The outcome of the Friday contest was no longer in any semblance of doubt, but Moyle wanted to sharpen his team’s focus on the task before them the following afternoon.
In his postgame comments, coach Brandon Naurato emphasized that the poor performance was less a failure of tactics and more one of effort. “We’ll look at the tape and see where there’s things that we can be better at, but they stuck to their game plan and they were physical and they won more races and battles than us,” Naurato said. “It’s just a hockey game. A player made a comment on the bench like ten seconds into the second period—they went D-to-D and just dumped it in; he’s like that’s all they’re doing, that’s all they’re doing. And that’s hockey. We can talk about all this beautiful O-zone possession and being connected and playing offense, but if you don’t outcompete the other guy, it doesn’t matter.”
As much as the result and performance were underwhelming from the opening puck drop, perhaps the most troubling part of the game was Michigan’s inability to reverse the rapid spiral out of its control.
“They just had us on our heels right away, and we didn’t push back,” Naurato pointed out. “I think that was a big thing. Teams are gonna have a good period or whatever, and we gotta find a way to push back. It just didn’t ever come.”
Even with the game teetering on the edge of falling out of reach, opportunities like the Tyler Duke major did provide a chance, however unlikely, to get back into things, and the Wolverines couldn’t rise to the opportunity. After a first period in which it was thoroughly outplayed, Michigan was tied, only for the game to descend further out of its grasp over the next twenty minutes.
Maybe it is a reflection of their youth, maybe it stemmed from the long layoff since the team’s last official game, but, regardless, the Wolverines will be unable to achieve their season-long aspirations if they cannot find a way to reverse a game script slipping away faster and with greater aplomb than they managed Friday.
Eighteen seconds into Saturday’s game, it appeared Michigan may have been in for another long evening. A desperate Cam Thiesing backhand from below the goal line caromed off Truscott’s skate and past Portillo.
The hard-charging Ohio State forecheck continued to bear down on the Wolverines through the game’s opening minutes, and, at least for a moment, Michigan seemed on the precipice of an existential crisis with consecutive blowout losses at the hands of its arch-rival imminent.
Instead, Mackie Samoskevich, who has the air of a man who wouldn’t be phased by sharing a room with a tiger, much less a one-goal deficit in the first period, pushed the evening toward a different direction.
“Just saw a lot of space throughout the neutral zone, just used my speed and pushed them back a little bit, saw a hole through his legs, so I just thought I’d rip it,” explained Samoskevich after the game. This was a good plan, and rip it he did, the sophomore’s laser beam of a shot ringing off the post and in to level the score.
“It would be easy for us to fall over and have the same thing happen as last night, but we came back,” said McGroarty. “Samo scored a sick goal, and that was big for us, and then we just kept rolling ever since.”
All smiles with the outcome secure, McGroarty could describe the Wolverines’ road to victory as smooth and golden from their opening goal onward, but five minutes would hardly elapse before there was more adversity to contend with.
An Ethan Edwards game misconduct and five-minute major for head contact, compounded by the decision to dress thirteen forwards and six defensemen (rather than the twelve-seven ratio the Wolverines deployed the night before), placed Michigan’s Saturday night redemption arc in serious jeopardy.
However, rather than kneeling to the Buckeye power play (which had applied serious pressure though it didn’t score on its first chance of the evening earlier in the period), the Wolverines ripped the game back into their own control.
Outstanding shorthanded hustle from Moyle yielded a breakaway bid, which in turn drew an Ohio State minor penalty, bringing the game to four-a-side for two minutes.
That Moyle, who a night prior had stressed to his teammates the importance of closing the right way Friday to set up Saturday success, drew the call was a reflection of his effort and intensity throughout the evening. “You can say all the right things, but unless you go out and execute and then back it up with your actions, then it doesn’t really mean anything,” said Naurato. “And I think Nolan really backed it up tonight.”
Fifty-seconds into the four-on-four, Samoskevich and Truscott found themselves bearing down on Jakub Dobes’ net with just one defender in their way. The Connecticutian winger slipped a pass across the crease for Truscott, whose initial bid was stopped but not the rebound.
Michigan would carry the resulting 2-1 lead into the first intermission.
Ohio State opened the second with 1:47 of carryover power play. It received another power play two minutes after that when Michigan was whistled for too many men. Again though, the Wolverines used their time shorthanded to seize momentum rather than concede it.
Consecutive successful kills set the stage for a period in which the Maize and Blue delivered a performance unrecognizable to the team that had been blown out the night prior. As Naurato put it, “I don’t think that was us yesterday. I think today it was more us.” Haplessness in their own end had been replaced by cohesion, domination of the puck, and sustained offensive pressure.
“We always talk about stacking positive shifts together,” Naurato said. “And when you do that, you wear them down, wear them down. If we can out-change them, now they’re tired, we have fresh legs, and just percentage-wise, it just gives you a better chance to have success and get some quality scoring chances.”
Those stacked positive shifts produced an insurance goal before the horn sounded on the second, the culmination of a lengthy spell in the offensive zone for the Wolverines’ freshmen line of McGroarty, T.J. Hughes, and Gavin Brindley with support from Truscott and Seamus Casey on the back end. In the end, Brindley did the honors, scooping the puck past Dobes.
However, midway through the third, adversity would beckon again when Mason Lohrei scored from the point to bring Michigan’s margin back down to one. In keeping with the evening’s theme, the Wolverines determined that rallying back would make more sense than yielding.
McGroarty sealed this fate with a power play marker to restore the two-goal cushion just after the clock ticked under four minutes to play.
The Wolverines would survive OSU’s desperation bid with the extra attacker and close out a convincing 4-2 result.
To Naurato, the humility of one of his brightest stars illustrated the mindset that served them so well in the resurgent victory: “You know what Luke Hughes can do, but he flipped six pucks twenty feet in the air at the end of the game just to get it out versus going for the empty net. That’s winning hockey.”
“It would’ve been easy to give up—not give up, but get down on ourselves and feel bad for ourselves, and [instead] guys stepped up,” Naurato added. “I think that was probably the coolest thing.”
In the latter quotation, Naurato was describing the team’s rocky start to the evening, but the sentiment applied just as well to the overall performance.
The young Wolverines found a way to turn an unfortunate start into a one-goal lead at the first intermission. Yeoman’s work on the penalty kill nullified the Buckeyes’ five power play chances. When Ohio State struck in the third, McGroarty and company made certain that there would be no repeat of the previous night’s second period.
The weekend may have offered yet another reminder of Michigan’s youth, but it concluded with something new, or at least something that had never before been clearer: that these green Wolverines could withstand the slings and arrows of an emotional, back-and-forth game, while remaining level-headed and in command, before emerging victorious.
Their next chance to illustrate this mettle will come next weekend in Minneapolis, with an enormous two-game set against the Big Ten-leading Minnesota Gophers.
Odds and Ends
Keranen Carries Heavy Load and Provides a Steady Presence with Michigan Down to Five Defensemen
Michigan spent two-and-a-half periods Saturday down to five defensemen, after Ethan Edwards was ejected. This meant Michigan had to mix and match its remaining blue liners, all of whom saw a significant uptick in ice time (often with an unusual partner) as a result.
“We mixed up the pairs with five, because we had to,” explained Naurato after the game. “Even today, we just talked about growth and failure and pain and the different analogies or scenarios that we go through as kids or adults, and going forward from that, to survive, you just have to step up and do it…We have five D, it is what it is. Then Truscott’s in the box and we have four—Brindley almost took a shift on D. You have to survive when your back’s against the wall. I think it shows true character. Those guys stepped up.”
Among those who stepped up against that exigence was senior Jay Keranen. Having spent spells in the first half as a forward, Saturday night saw the senior back in his natural position along the blue line. From that role, he delivered a performance that set the tone for the rest of his team: steady, direct, and technically sound whenever he stepped on the ice.
When asked what the Brighton native brought Saturday night, Naurato gushed: “He makes the tape-to-tape pass to get it out. He gets it off the glass, he blocks the shot, he finishes the check, and that’s what our whole team needed. Also, when those guys go out there and do it, I think it’s contagious. You realize that good things happen when you play the right way, and Jay was righting the ship on that.”
Alums!
If there was one saving grace to Friday’s game, it was the celebration of Michigan hockey’s 100th anniversary, marked by the return of alums Andrew Copp, Kent Johnson, and Nick Blankenburg.
Blankenburg went as far as marking the occasion by connecting from the far blue line during the customary second-intermission game of “Score-O.” There was little else for the Children of Yost to celebrate on the evening, and Blankenburg and Johnson each concluded their return cameos by tossing their sticks to the adoring Children.
Portillo Weathers the Storm
It is perhaps a cliché to describe a goalie’s performance as exemplary despite a blowout defeat, but Erik Portillo did just that Friday. Then, on Saturday, he was even sharper.
In sum total, Portillo stopped eighty-two of the ninety-one pucks that came his way this weekend, which amounts to a .901 save percentage. While that figure in and of itself may not dazzle, it is quite remarkable considering his workload (and to be blunt, his lack of defensive support) Friday.
In our midseason roster review, we noted that Portillo returned from the holiday break a year ago in imperious form: posting a .948 last January to kick-start a dominant second half.
Portillo’s Friday performance was sisyphean—costing him in terms of save percentage thanks to the disastrous volume of Buckeye chances but showing a tremendous resolve to stop as many as he did.
To my eye, the best omen from Portillo’s weekend was his rebound control. At times in the first half, the junior Swede seemed to be fighting what once had been routine shots, resulting in an outsized number of second chance looks for Wolverine opponents. While all of those OSU opportunities did inevitably create some of those over the weekend, Portillo played with a stickiness that wasn’t always there in the first half, swallowing up the vast majority of Buckeye bids without allowing follow-ups.
Thanks to @umichhockey on Twitter for this preview image. You can support our work further by subscribing or by giving us a tip for our troubles at https://ko-fi.com/gulogulohockey.
Really good stuff as always, Sam