Week 13: Finally, a B1G Sweep
Michigan takes all six points from Penn St for its first sweep of conference play. On Friday, it was ugly. On Saturday, it was in doubt. Both times, the young Wolverines came through
It’s Friday evening, and the University of Michigan men’s hockey team has just beaten Penn State 7-3, but that result is invisible on Adam Fantilli’s visage. The Ontario-born freshman is somewhere between anger and disappointment, despite the victory and his own four point performance.
From the waist down, he remains in uniform: hockey pants and socks, skates still on his feet. He’s shed his jersey though, along with his elbow and shoulder pads, leaving behind a dry-fit undershirt, sleeves clipped by scissors. The added height thanks to his skates and cut-off sleeves lend further credence to a physical presence that is perfectly imposing without their help.
His assessment of the game is blunt: “We’re happy to get a win, but not good enough collectively.” He adds “We need to tighten it up in our D-zone and be a little bit more accountable.”
Fantilli’s perspective—sensing that a resounding outcome concealed an uninspired process on the evening—reveals the same maturity that comes across in any conversation with the eighteen-year-old. It reflects the confidence he feels in himself and his teammates, as well as the lofty expectations to which he holds those two parties.
A question about how he plans to celebrate his older brother’s first NCAA goal disrupts the presser’s solemn tone, but even then, Fantilli remains restrained—fixated on the need for improvement to match the evening’s result with a more convincing performance in twenty-four hours: “We might go grab a bite to eat and celebrate him a little bit, but not much. We’ve got a game tomorrow.”
Forty-four seconds into Saturday’s game, the necessity of Fantilli’s words of warning became apparent. Tyler Gratton and Xander Lamppa each banged in chances from point blank range, and Penn State led by two within a minute. However, despite injuries and an inscrutable review for head contact, despite trailing 3-0 in the second and 4-2 in the third, Michigan roared back for a 5-4 victory to take a clean six-of-six points off the Nittany Lions, its first sweep in conference play.
With the 7-3 triumph the night prior, Michigan managed its first official Friday win since November 11th in South Bend. Though the Wolverines managed to snap a streak that spanned six series, their coach was underwhelmed by the performance.
“We gave them their chances, and we played like we’ve played every Friday night,” said Brandon Naurato after the game. “It’s just we won, so still trying to figure it out.”
The Nittany Lions doubled up Michigan in shots (54-27), and while Guy Gadowski’s team is known for its penchant for pulling the trigger at every opportunity, Naurato still felt his team struggled to limit quality chances:
“They throw a lot of pucks at the net. They high flip. They always have a lot of shots. High-danger chances are what I’d be worried about, and they probably had a lot of them. I thought Portillo was great.”
The game’s first period encapsulated that spirit, with PSU badly outshooting their hosts but falling behind thanks to the Wolverines’ efficiency in attack.
Freshman winger Jackson Hallum opened the scoring, pouncing on a loose puck in the slot after fellow freshman Seamus Casey turned artfully around Dylan Gratton and centered. Though Casey’s pass was intended for Nolan Moyle, Hallum provided a decisive finishing touch to wire the puck past the glove of Liam Souliere.
Three-and-a-half minutes later, with Tyler Paquette in the box for tripping Hallum, Adam Fantilli doubled the Wolverine lead.
The play spawned from Luke Hughes electing to reset into neutral ice rather than forcing a desperate keep-in. Rewinding only as far as the red line, the sophomore defenseman sauntered back into the offensive third, rounded the net, then found a late-arriving Fantilli. Fantilli’s shot left Souliere without a chance, and the freshman marked the occasion with a triumphant twirl of his stick in celebration.
After the goal, the game was not quite nine minutes old, and Michigan led 2-0 on the scoreboard, despite trailing 10-2 in shots. By period’s end, that deficit would be 18-7, with Erik Portillo cleaning up numerous messes in the Wolverine defensive zone.
Early in the second, Michigan appeared at grave risk of squandering its lead. A Jay Keranen major for boarding and game misconduct sent Penn State to a five-minute power play just before the frame’s two-minute mark.
Six seconds into the infraction, Xander Lamppa scored his fourth goal of the year, and PSU had halved the Wolverine lead. However, Michigan’s penalty kill rallied to ward off the remaining four minutes and fifty-four seconds without incident.
Naurato described the effort of his killers as “big time” and added that limiting the potential damage on the Keranen major “gave us some momentum.”
Building off that momentum, the Wolverines managed a brief surge midway through the frame.
At the 9:50 mark, Seamus Casey danced around and through a quartet of PSU defenders before feeding Rutger McGroarty in the slot. The Nebraskan freshman rifled home his tenth goal of the season with his first touch, again leaving Souliere powerless to answer.
Some forty seconds later, Adam Fantilli stripped a Nittany Lion below the goal line and centered. Once again, the pass deflected rather than finding its target directly, but junior Philippe Lapointe was on the scene to finish the job. His second goal of the season lifted Michigan to a 4-1 lead.
Penn State still carried a hefty lead on the shot chart (27-13), but the Wolverines were in control where it counted. Even with Lamppa adding a second before the intermission, Michigan would take a cushion into the third.
In the third period, the Nittany Lions continued to enjoy a territorial advantage but once again failed to beat Portillo until the game was out of reach.
“[Portillo] keeps us in a lot of games,” said McGroarty. “He’s a ballplayer; he puts his body in front of the puck that’s for sure…51 saves, that’s a good night, so we gotta play better in front of him.”
Beyond Portillo’s steadiness between the pipes, it was a quiet third period until a late explosion of offense after Guy Gadowsky removed Souliere for an extra attacker.
With just over two minutes to play, Adam Fantilli outmuscled Jimmy Dowd to a loose puck to deposit an empty-net goal. The jovial celebration following his first goal of the evening was replaced by an emphatic signal to the net, an apparent nod to the officials who overturned what looked to be his second of the game early in the second period.
Moments later, Luke Hughes struck the open target from deep in his own zone, moments after his initial attempt to do so ended up just missing for an icing whistle.
Even after the two empty netters, though, the action wasn’t done. PSU scored an academic goal to bring the score to 6-3, before Luca Fantilli proved there is more than one Italian-Canadian sniper in Brandon Naurato’s freshman class, jumping into the rush with Lapointe before beating Souliere (who was by this point back in his net) with a backhand-forehand move.
According to Adam, it was the third time the two Fantilli brothers scored in the same game, having done so once in prep school at New Hampshire’s Kimball Union Academy and once in the USHL with the Chicago Steel before Friday evening.
“The second they got out on that two-on-one, I was jumping up and down. He had his chance and buried it,” the younger Fantilli said of his brother after the game. “He’s been working hard to get in the lineup and he’s been capitalizing when he gets the chance, so I’m really happy for him.”
As Naurato put it after the game, it was an evening on which Michigan “found a way to win” rather than dominated, leaving the first-year head coach to focus on the path to improvement rather than celebration:
“I’m just worried about our process for this year, and for the rest of the time I’m at Michigan, whether it’s for two weeks or twenty-two years. We need to keep taking steps and play a certain way, and we just weren’t ourselves.”
Still, that the Wolverines can beat the sixth-ranked team having left their collective best on the shelf reflects the young team’s progress in the month of January. Perhaps even more clearly, the evening reflected the dominance at either end of the rink of the team’s netminder and its talismanic freshman.
Fifty-one saves made for a career high for the junior Swede, and even if a good portion of those came from bad angles or great distance, more than a few did not. Were it not for Portillo’s dominance, Michigan could easily have trailed by several goals before it even managed a shot.
Meanwhile, Fantilli’s physical presence proved overpowering for the Nittany Lions. The freshman continues to amaze with the variety of his toolkit: He can dazzle with a deke, beat a goaltender from distance with his laser of a shot, or slice open a defense with a pass. Still though, the scariest thing about Adam Fantilli for the rest of the NCAA is his simple directness.
On the goal that officials eventually overturned, the Nobleton, Ontario bowled his way through the PSU zone and scored through rather than past Souliere. On his empty netter, Fantilli’s combination of power and speed to outleverage Dowd, then his defiant celebration, showed an anger to his game, a refusal to be denied the goals that sustain him and his team, whether by officials or by Nittany Lions.
If last week’s results in Minneapolis showed that the Wolverines can play with and beat any country when they’re on their game, Friday’s game proved that Michigan can knock off a top-ten team with a substandard performance, as long as numbers one and nineteen come to play. The process was far less sound than a weekend ago, with the Wolverines showing an uncharacteristic sloppiness on the puck that all but ensured a steady stream of Nittany Lion chances.
Still, thanks to the decisiveness of Portillo at one end of the rink and of Fantilli at the other, Michigan managed to score a much-needed Friday victory. It might not be a replicable path to long-term success, but there are worse options to have in one’s back pocket.
The first period of Saturday’s game didn’t look much different than Friday’s, but the result was much worse for the home team. PSU outshot Michigan 20-8, again capitalizing on the Wolverines’ cavalier relationship to the puck. The Nittany Lions’ 2-0 lead from the game’s first minute would hold through intermission.
The second period offered early promise with a bad angle drive from Adam Fantilli appearing to halve the deficit on the power play. Instead, a farcical review awarded Penn State a five-minute major for head contact, with Ethan Edwards deemed the guilty party.
Sophomore Danny Dzhaniyev stretched his team’s lead to three 1:26 into the ensuing power play, but Michigan would limit the damage on the major to just the one.
Even when they were scoring the night previous, the Wolverines never spent extended time in the PSU end of the rink. From the expiration of Edwards’ major onwards, Michigan would hardly leave it—not even as the Nittany Lions’ desperation crescendoed again in the game’s dying minutes.
With 5:28 to play in the second, Luke Hughes began the process of getting even with a well-placed wrister from distance. The goal launched a comeback that was born at once of a collective and of an individual.
Yeoman’s work in the offensive zone from Nick Granowicz and Mark Estapa cast the Penn State defense into flux. Estapa’s relentlessness below the goal line kept the puck alive, with his linemate’s support. Granowicz—absorbing no fewer than a half-dozen cross checks to the back—stood at the top of the crease, providing a screen for the eventual point shot.
Luke Hughes controlled a long carem off a Keaton Pehrson shot attempt. The clock showed 5:38 to play in the second as he collected the puck, and PSU forward Ture Linden—playing without a stick—came out to the point to apply pressure.
As if playing with his prey, Hughes drifted to his right, then arced toward the goal line, before doubling back toward the point. After cresting the top of the offensive zone, Hughes offered a subtle but sharp cutback toward Souliere that shook Linden for good.
With Granowicz taking away Souliere’s eyes, Hughes had ample room to shoot for in the upper half of the net. After his prolonged dance with Linden, Hughes wasted no time finishing the play. The clock read 5:28. At this level, you aren’t supposed to be able to score after holding onto the puck for even two seconds. Hughes took ten before beating Souliere.
For his next trick, Hughes struck on the power play. Crisp passing corralled the Nittany Lion kill into a tight shell around Souliere’s crease. Hughes sent a pass from the high slot to freshman T.J. “No Relation” Hughes, before one-timing the return feed past Souliere from the top of the circle.
After his first, the sophomore didn’t celebrate, instead maundering to neutral ice before receiving tepid congratulations from his linemates. After the second, Hughes dropped to a knee—gliding the length of the Michigan bench in celebration.
When asked when over the course of the comeback he believed the Wolverines would prevail, Hughes shrugged as if miffed by what seemed to him a silly question: “I don’t know, man. You always believe you’re gonna win. If you don’t believe you’re gonna win, you probably shouldn’t be on the ice.”
Entering the weekend’s final frame, Michigan trailed by a goal. Linden exacted a modicum of revenge just over three minutes into the period with a goal that brought the score to 4-2 in favor of the Wolverines.
In desperate need of a response, Michigan found one from Hughes once again. This time around it was an unspectacular wrist shot from along the wall, just powerful enough to trickle through Souliere.
2:52 later, a wheeling Luca Fantilli played a pass through the neutral zone that sprung Dylan Duke for a breakaway. The Ohioan winger beat Souliere with a backhand-forehand move, while falling to the ice, to tie the game and send Yost into a furor.
The din would only intensify 1:17 later, when Adam Fantilli stickhandled through a pride of Nittany Lions, then spun to feed Hughes at the opposite point. For his fourth goal of the game, Hughes kept it simple: a stride toward the crease before winding and firing. Granowicz stood once again between Hughes and Souliere. Michigan led, as Yost erupted again.
After the game, Naurato described Hughes’ effort as “Probably the best individual performance by a defenseman in Michigan history. I don’t know the stats, but it’s not just about his goals, it’s about everything—how hard he defended.”
Facing a pointless trip to Ann Arbor, Penn State still couldn’t muster the desperation that characterized their first ninety-odd minutes of hockey in town. Michigan kept play moving toward Souliere, not so much clinging to their first lead of the game as flaunting it. The Wolverines outshoot their guests 14-7 in the period, the only stanza in which they managed more shots than PSU all weekend.
Naurato referred to the evening as a “Big, big night for Michigan—the Big Ten standings, the Pairwise, but more importantly just knowing that we’re in every game.”
When asked what had sparked his team’s comeback, he replied “Maybe just the team talk. There’s times, not just with our team this year, but just in hockey in general, you can tell if guys believe that they can come back.”
Hughes offered an example of such positive “team talk” in his post-game remarks, saying “We have a really good team, and we didn’t have a good minute of the game. There’s still fifty-nine left. If they score two in one minute, we can definitely score as many as we want in 59.”
Naurato added “I think this team’s learning a lot about themselves, and it’s cool to be a part of.” Fortunately, for Michigan, those lessons came not in defeat but in triumph.
That the Wolverines could reflect on Friday’s four-goal win as a disappointment showed their majority; that they could come back to not just beat Penn state after trailing 3-0 but to do so in regulation despite a two-goal deficit in the early third, proved their resilience. The combination ought to have the conference, and even the country, on notice.
Odds & Ends
A Peculiar Friday Night Review
Early in Friday’s 3rd period, Michigan challenged for a high-sticking offense. In the moment, a bemusement fell over Yost Ice Arena, with all except those on the home bench seemingly unaware of what exactly had been challenged.
On the bench, Naurato appeared certain that the review would come yield a major power play, before shifting to dismay as he recognized that the officials didn’t even seem to have identified the play he wanted them to scrutinize. Partway through the extended stoppage, he sent Nolan Moyle over the penalty boxes to alleviate that confusion, but to no avail.
“They were looking at the wrong replay when I looked at the big screen and then they showed another random replay that wasn’t it,” Naurato explained. “McGroarty got high-sticked by our bench. After penalties we’ve seen called in the past on us, that’s a major.”
Though color analyst Fred Pletsch correctly identified this moment—McGroarty applying pressure to a PSU defenseman at the point next to the Wolverine bench, the BTN plus broadcast did not show a replay of the moment.
With a gallows humor perhaps made possible by the positive result of the evening’s contest, Naurato then quipped, “I’m just trying to keep that challenge percentage as low as possible. I think we’re like—I’m making this up—may be one in fifty or one in sixty since I’ve been here.”
That percentage dropped further on Saturday, with two more unsuccessful challenges. “If my job was evaluated on reviews, I don’t know if I would have made it past the first week,” chuckled Naurato.
Thanks to Jaime Crawford (@JCrawford077 on Twitter) for the 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.
2 incredibly huge wins. Wow. What a weekend.