Week 17: “If We Play Like That the Rest of the Season, We’re Going to Be in a Really Good Spot”
Michigan stumbles in the final weekend of the regular season, falling in a shootout then OT to Notre Dame. Still, Brandon Naurato sees promise in the way his team came together—on the ice and off it
The University of Michigan men’s hockey team has lost four straight games to close out its regular season. Sure, two were in the shootout, a third came in overtime, and the other took place in forty-five-degree weather on a football field in Cleveland, but four losses are four losses.
Still, head coach Brandon Naurato walked away from Saturday’s 2-1 overtime defeat optimistic about the postseason to come, and this wasn’t blind hope or simple naïveté. It was born of evidence.
Naurato watched his team respond to a stinging Friday loss by outshooting Notre Dame 49-22. He joined a post-game ceremony to celebrate his five-man senior class. He saw the way the underclassmen greeted those seniors upon their return to the dressing room. All of it inspired confidence.
“Technically, we lost the last four games in a row, and the way those seniors came up to that locker room, it’s just way more important,” Naurato explained in his post-game presser. “How tight those guys are and how close they are, that’s [how] championship teams [are], then us just winning games, so hopefully we have a chance to do both.” He would go on to add “If we play like that the rest of the season, especially the third period, we’re gonna be in a really good spot.”
The results were disappointing for the second consecutive weekend, but Naurato takes confidence in the way his team came together Saturday night—on the ice and off it.
On Friday night, U-M fell in a shootout after regulation concluded with the score tied at three. It was a game that seemed to adopt a novel complexion with each goal scored, one that bore precious little semblance to the one that preceded it.
“We played well enough to win, but we need to find a whole nother gear for playoff time,” offered Naurato in his postgame assessment, before adding “We can create more chaos; we didn’t create enough chaos tonight.”
4:18 into the first period, freshman T.J. Hughes opened the scoring with Irish defenseman Ben Brinkman serving a two-minute minor for interference.
After a strong Wolverine start produced Brinkman’s infraction, Hughes lifted the Maize and Blue to the lead with an end-to-end rush. The chasm that opened through the heart of the penalty kill felt decidedly out of character for Jeff Jackson’s Notre Dame. “I grabbed the puck, skated up and no one really came on me, so I just kept going,” Hughes said after the game.
Hughes took advantage of the opportunity afforded him with artful stickhandling, even careening into the end boards with help from Notre Dame defenseman Nick Leiverman for his troubles, but the porous Irish defense suggested that Michigan may be in for a lark.
That fantasy subsided within about three-and-a-half minutes with Jesse Lansdell deflecting a Drew Bavaro point shot home on the power play, then Landon Slaggert scoring off a peculiar chipped ricochet.
The first suggested that we were in for a back-and-forth affair; the second threatened to break Michigan’s will after an unfortunate bounce ended up in the Wolverine net.
Instead, Gavin Brindley notched the fourth goal of a frenzied opening ten minutes fifty-seven seconds after Slaggert’s marker.
The play began with an ambitious Luca Fantilli stretch pass for Frank Nazar, who led a streaking Jackson Hallum into the offensive zone with a feed of his own. Hallum played a backhand pass to Brindley, who popped Notre Dame goaltender Ryan Bischel’s water bottle with a resounding finish.
It appeared a track meet was taking flight, but instead, the remainder of the first, then all of the second, ticked away without another goal.
In the second, Michigan showed it could play through the often impassable Irish neutral zone, but struggled to create quality chances upon its secure passage to the offensive end of the rink. Meanwhile, Notre Dame suffered a territorial disadvantage but managed to apply pressure on Portillo via a flurry of well-worked counterattacks.
Six minutes into the third, Jack Adams restored the Notre Dame lead with another power play goal. On the ensuing several shifts, the Irish smothered Michigan, pinning the Wolverines in their defensive third and getting to work on the cycle.
“They made a push, and we would have liked to push back harder sooner,” noted Naurato.
After a few minutes of absorbing pressure, Michigan pulled itself of a late-stage malaise with a desperate push in the game’s dying breaths.
With 2:29 to play, Nick Leiverman went off for interference, and Michigan called a timeout. The Wolverines huddled around Naurato as he drew up a play, and, when play resumed, the first-year head coach lifted Portillo and sent out six forwards, four of them freshmen (Adam Fantilli, Brindley, McGroarty, Hughes, and sophomores Mackie Samoskevich and Dylan Duke).
“[Naurato] gave us our spots and just said make your plays and do your thing, so that’s what we kind of did,” explained Hughes. Sometimes the simplest plans are the best ones.
For a moment, it appeared Dylan Duke would head to the box for a slashing infraction, but the Ohioan winger successfully persuaded the officials that the Irish stick in question had broken before he made contact with it.
The two-man advantage (one for the penalty, one for the extra skater) remained in place, and Adam Fantilli rifled a bad-angle shot past Bischel’s blocker for his twentieth goal and fiftieth point of the season, tying the game with the clock reading 1:57.
Michigan would turn the offensive screws for the remainder of regulation and into overtime. Samoskevich and Fantilli had the best chance of the three-on-three session, bearing down on Bischel 2-on-0 but failed to get a shot off. In the end, the Wolverines couldn’t beat the Irish netminder a decisive fourth time.
“We were on top of them for two, three shifts in a row, almost had a goal,” explained senior defenseman Keaton Pehrson. “When we play hard, and we play to our identity and play with a little more desperation on our side, it leads to good things.”
However, good things wouldn’t come from the shootout with Leiverman outwaiting Portillo to convert on the first attempt, before five straight saves between Bischel and Portillo gave the Irish the extra point.
In the end, it was a game in which Michigan was able to control two-thirds of the rink but couldn’t break down the Irish’s defensive zone structure with enough consistency to win.
As Pehrson explained, “ At times, they sit back, and they’ll play super defensively and sit in their structure, and they puck shots and not let guys get to the net, so that makes it tough. That’s why we just gotta create a little chaos there to get them out of their structure.”
Naurato’s account was more succinct: “We did a good job defensively; I think we can be better offensively.”
Overtime excepted, the extended sequences of offensive zone dominance that characterized Michigan’s recent successes against Michigan State and Wisconsin were absent Friday. The lone even-strength Wolverine goal of the evening came off the rush rather than through a possession-heavy passage of successful play in the final third.
So, while Michigan’s efficacy through the neutral zone against Notre Dame may inspire confidence moving forward, the Wolverines’ inability to sustain offensive pressure and break down the fixed Irish defense kept the team from collecting three, or even two, points Friday night.
As such, the Wolverines had a clear task set out before them Saturday: Leave Notre Dame scrambling in its defensive zone with frenzied possession and steady pressure on Bischel’s net.
After a tentative opening period with just thirteen combined shots, the Wolverines did just that—peppering Bischel with sixteen shots in the second, then twenty-seven more in the third. Where there had been glimpses of Michigan’s trademark possession game Friday, it jumped off the ice during the final forty minutes Saturday.
Shift after shift, Michigan played through and around the Irish defensive zone structure, and the Wolverines had no trouble converting that time on the attack into quality goal scoring chances.
The Irish were scrambling thanks to the kind of chaotic pressure Pehrson and Naurato named as absent the night prior. Instead of seizing the opportunity to clear the zone to mount a rush of their own, Notre Dame’s weary skaters had no choice but to dump and change when they did manage a temporary escape. Despite that volume of chances, Michigan would beat Bischel just once and fall in overtime.
Drew Bavaro provided the Irish with the opener three-and-a-half minutes into the third with a long-range shot on the power play. However, unlike the night prior, Michigan would waste no time in responding—setting straight about the business of exploring the Notre Dame zone, forcing the Irish back into scramble mode, and putting Bischel under heavy duress.
That push culminated in a Rutger McGroarty equalizer a second before the period’s midpoint off a slick feed from fellow freshman Seamus Casey.
The onslaught continued over the period’s final ten minutes, but, this time in keeping with the prior evening, Michigan couldn’t find the decisive go-ahead marker it sought.
Instead, Bavaro buried an inviting rebound 1:30 into overtime,and the Irish iced a four-point weekend in Ann Arbor.
The regular season now over, we are on the precipice of a time of year that privileges small sample sizes and results over a season’s labors and process. Even still, Naurato believes his team’s formula from Saturday night will bear fruit more often than it won’t:
“I’m happier with how we played in losing—maybe it’s because we were already in second [thanks to Minnesota and Wisconsin wins earlier in the day]—than if we would’ve won by five goals and played the wrong way. I feel better about our team going into the playoffs. Now it’s just a fresh slate.”
Michigan will commence painting that blank canvas on Friday evening, with a best-of-three series against Wisconsin at Yost and the winner moving on to the Big Ten Semi-Final.
Odds & Ends
Seniors!
Per tradition, Michigan concluded its final home game of the regular season with a ceremony in honor of its outgoing seniors. Eric Ciccolini, Nick Granowicz, Jay Keranen, Keaton Pehrson, and Nolan Moyle skated through a receiving line of proud teammates, coaches, staff, friends, and family. Each received a bouquet, a stick, and the flag of their home state (or province as the case may be for Ciccolini).
“Michigan’s lucky to have them and everything they’ve given Michigan in their four years,” said Naurato of the class.
When asked for a defining memory of his four years at the school, Jay Keranen kept it simple. “Just the fans,” he said, before adding “You hop on the ice and the band’s going and the Children are buzzing—this was my dream school growing up, and so you watch it, and then you go out there and you’re on the ice—it’s something special every single time. I’ll cherish that for the rest of my life.”
Across four years, they qualified for four NCAA Tournaments, won four Duels in the D (except Moyle who won five), and took home last year’s B1G Tournament. As seniors, Ciccolini, Granowicz, Keranen, Pehrson, and Moyle were tasked with leading college hockey’s youngest team on the heels of a late spring mass exodus to professional hockey and midsummer coaching change. They welcomed twelve new freshmen aboard and helped steer their team to keeping their perfect tournament record intact.
As Frank Nazar put it earlier this week, their presence and leadership leaves their younger teammates’ desperate to provide these five with an exit befitting their contributions to school and program:
“I don’t know if a lot of guys understand what it is to play at Michigan for four years and move on after that. I don’t fully understand, but I have a good grip on how it feels for them to say goodbye to four hard years and fun years at the school. And honestly, it means a lot more than just to them. For us to move on and hopefully do well in playoffs and just get those games in and do one last push for those seniors, so then they can have something to look back on when they look back at their four years here. I think that’s something that, me personally, I push for in practice and games.”
Casey & Nazar
On the theme of pulling silver linings from Saturday’s defeat, I would argue it was both Seamus Casey and Frank Nazar’s best games since recent returns from injury.
For the former, it was just the second weekend back after missing the first half of February with an apparent lower body injury, and, by some distance, his liveliest performance since his return.
It’s not that Casey had been poor in his three previous games, but he hadn’t flashed the same eye-catching dynamism quite the way he’d seemed to before his time out of the lineup.
Saturday, he was back to his usual tricks: labyrinthine rushes with the puck, virtuosic stickhandling, and artful passing. His setup for McGroarty was the most obvious example, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. Beyond his offensive flair, we also saw the Floridian freshman take charge in his defensive end.
Meanwhile, Frank Nazar—who didn’t make his season debut until this month—offered his most impactful performance to date. While he did show flashes of brilliance and obvious star power, Nazar had yet to jump out as often as he did Saturday. Whether with a burst of speed or a subtle pass to cue up a teammate, whether making his way to a dangerous scoring area, hitting or being hit, #91 in Maize—elevated into an outsized role in part by necessity after Adam Fantilli’s game misconduct late in the first—stood out all evening. He was also a significant contributor to the Wolverine penalty kill.
In both cases, it’s encouraging to a measure of consistency that hadn’t quite shone through to this degree since their respective returns to the lineup, and both Casey and Nazar promise to be vital contributors to the forthcoming Michigan run.
Fantilli’s Ejection and a Curious Performance in Stripes
We’d really like to keep the officiating talk brief, but, as we just touched on, Adam Fantilli was assessed a game misconduct late in the first for elbowing. In a vacuum, this was the correct call; Fantilli had left his elbow up on a counter-hit. However, within the context of a period in which the freshman seemed to absorb two or three Irish cross-checks, slashes, or interference without a whistle on every shift, it was frustrating to see Michigan suffer from unbridled physicality that emerged as an obvious consequence of absentee officiating once again. That Michigan lost the nation’s top scorer on the evening Luke Hughes returned from his stint out of action due to injury felt almost cruel.
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