Week 7: Sick, Swept, but Proud and Resilient Nonetheless
With illness sweeping through the locker room, an under-manned Michigan team suffers a sweep to Minnesota. Despite the disappointing loss, it was a valiant weekend from the Wolverines
“We didn’t talk about hockey at all,” Brandon Naurato said Friday night, describing a week in which his team dealt with the mental and physical effects of a serious virus sweeping through the dressing room. “It’s calling parents [who are] driving from other countries and states, finding out that their kids are in the emergency room and getting on flights and making sure everyone’s good. We didn’t watch video. We didn’t talk about the power play [and] penalty kill. Did we pre-scout them? Yeah we pre-scouted and got a plan, but it puts things in perspective and what’s important. We know what type of character and resilience our guys have, and we’re super proud of them.”
On Thursday and Friday at Yost Ice Arena, a beleaguered University of Michigan men’s ice hockey team suffered a sweep at the hands of conference foe Minnesota. On Thursday night, the Gophers took the game 5-2, before a 6-3 victory the following night. Despite the unwelcome results, the Wolverines delivered two commendable efforts with a severely undermanned roster.
A team of Michigan’s talent and aspirations will never talk about moral victories, but it was impossible not to admire the team’s effort, even in defeat. “I’m extremely proud of how our guys responded,” Naurato said. “It’s difficult. We’re not making excuses with the numbers. They wanted to play, and they came out here and they worked their butts off.”
As Naurato explained after Thursday’s game, the week involved “nothing but worrying and thinking about our teammates and their mental health and their physical health.”
In that game, fixtures in Naurato’s lineup including T.J. Hughes, Jacob Truscott, Adam Fantilli, Steve Holtz, and Nolan Moyle were out with severe illness, and freshman Brendan Miles was also unavailable to fill in.
The outbreak forced freshman Johnny Druskinis into his collegiate debut on the blue line, while fellow freshman Tyler Shea (the team’s third-string goaltender) was forced to dress as a skater, donning Frank Nazar’s #91 sweater with his own goalie-cut #32 inappropriate for the occasion. Shea’s only appearance on the ice was a mad dash back to the bench from the penalty box, having served a “protocol violation” minor assessed to the Wolverines. Even with the additions, the Wolverines were a skater shy of a full lineup.
Nonetheless, Naurato pointed out that a hockey game, even in inauspicious circumstances, came as something of a salve at the end of a trying week: “It’s a good distraction for them to play the game and think about hockey versus thinking about everything else going on.”
He went on to highlight the work done by the medical staff during a week of genuine crisis: “Brian Brewster, Darryl Conway, the Michigan medical team, Michigan Hospital—I can’t imagine if this was a junior or minor pro team without the resources that we have at Michigan. That’s why they’re the leaders and best. Everyone’s pulled together and has done an unbelievable job to take care of these kids. That’s not a plug; it’s real. They saved some guys. It’s a big deal.”
Perhaps most affecting from Naurato’s post-game comments though was a concise description of the severity of the illness afflicting the absent Wolverines, saying “Without getting into details, the first phone call I got, I hope I never get again.”
For The Michigan Daily, Connor Earegood offered a compelling case as to why the game should not have happened in the first place. In laying out this argument, Earegood consulted with Associate Athletic Director Kurt Svodoba.
In an email to Earegood and The Daily, Svodoba wrote “Our medical experts are the sole decision-makers concerning decisions impacting the health and welfare of our student-athletes. In times of community spread, such as we’ve seen across the U-M campus this week, we consult closely with University health officials. The goal, as always, is to ensure the most outstanding care for our students and the safest outcomes for their individual situations.”
In other words, the calculation as to whether the Wolverines had enough healthy bodies available to play Thursday evening lay at the feet of Michigan’s athletic and health administrations.
I don’t want to imply that Brewster, Conway, or Svodoba were derelict in their duty of care to Michigan’s players. As Naurato gestured to, the university’s medical staff did literal life-saving work in addressing a state of emergency this week. However, as part of that care, it should not be left to Michigan itself to determine whether playing in a game was feasible for the remnants of the Wolverine roster.
Allowing the game to unfold despite the myriad absences was one more example in a long list of the problems with an utter leadership vacuum within the organization of college sports. Quite plainly, this was a case where some combination of the Big Ten and NCAA needed to step in to relieve Michigan’s obvious burden.
That rescheduling the game likely would have been difficult is immaterial. We are talking about the well-being of Michigan’s student-athletes. The logistics of finding a new date to play out the series pale in comparison.
I’m reluctant to mention the cancellation of last season’s Great Lakes Invitational game against Western Michigan as context here, because I don’t want to suggest that the decision to play this weekend was made with an eye toward public perception rather than player safety. However, it’s difficult not to think about the grief the Wolverines took for “ducking” WMU last year in considering a potential cancellation.
In both cases, Michigan (and their opponents) would benefit from a decisive ruling from a central authority within the sport. There would be no need for speculation as to whether the game could have happened, nor would there need to be unnecessary risk passed onto vulnerable student-athletes. Given that this was a (crucial) conference showcase, it feels especially negligent of the Big Ten not to have intervened.
As Naurato and Earegood both pointed to in different ways, this was not just a matter of physical well-being but also mental health. Michigan was a team with its collective minds removed from the rink throughout what should have been a week of practice, preoccupied with thoughts of their ill teammates.
It was neither a weekend nor week for focusing on hockey around the University of Michigan, but we should at least touch on some of the particulars of the two games.
In the first period Thursday, the Wolverines adopted a more conservative, defense-first approach than we are accustomed to seeing from the high-flying team. In so doing, they spent long swaths of the frame in their own end. Nonetheless, a remarkable collectivism and defensive intensity meant that, despite a 13-8 edge in shots, the Gophers managed just one goal. Meanwhile, Michigan scraped out a late-period power play goal from sophomore forward Dylan Duke to leave the first period on level terms.
Seamus Casey did the heavy lifting to set up the goal with a paradigmatic example of the “royal road pass” across the slot, from which point Rutger McGroarty bumped a pass to Duke for a tap-in.
In the second, the pace escalated in a period that saw twenty-nine combined shots on goal. Seven minutes and change into the frame, Rhett Pitlick notched his second goal of the game to put the Gophers up 2-1. The goal came at four-on-four with Philippe Lapointe in the box for slashing and Gopher freshman phenom Logan Cooley serving a cross-checking major against Eric Ciccolini.
Notably, Cooley did not receive a game misconduct for his offense, just the five minutes—a sentence that appeared incongruous with its severity.
“I thought it was an extremely dangerous hit,” Naurato said after the game. “We’re already short-manned. I hope Chick iss okay. He tried to play one shift and then he was done, so we’ll see where he’s at tomorrow. I thought it was extremely dirty. I thought it should have been a DQ; I’m not a referee. It’s a blindside hit. You can’t protect yourself, and it’s far enough away from the boards that it’s even scarier than being right up at the boards. And that’s the same player that scored their fourth goal.”
Naurato’s point about location seems the most salient here; at that area on the ice, with Ciccolini at full speed in a bid for a short-handed opportunity, any contact from behind invites disaster.
When Lapointe’s penalty expired and the Wolverines began their power play, Duke scored again—this time batting a puck from mid-air past Gopher netminder Owen Bartoszkiewicz.
Jimmy Snuggerud, though, propelled Minnesota back ahead within two minutes of Duke’s breakthrough. By period’s end, Michigan still trailed on the scoreboard and the shot-counter, but it entered the third with plenty to play for on a night when that felt near impossible at puck drop.
Before a potential third-period comeback got off the ground though, Michigan received a two-minute minor for a “protocol violation” over arriving moments late for the final frame.
Though again not looking for excuses over a letter-of-the-law penalty, Naurato expressed disappointment at the way officiating left his team’s comeback bid dead on arrival: “It’s upsetting, you’re in the game going into the third, and then everything that happened…I’m really proud of these guys…I haven’t talked to the guys yet about why they were late. If you look up the rule, yeah it’s a penalty.”
What Naurato left unsaid is that a night in which the team’s third goaltender dressed as a left winger had already left the game well past the point of being governed by protocol.
The infraction turned a half-killed minor to Jackson Hallum into a five-on-three, where Logan Cooley gave the Gophers a 4-2 lead. The penalty and ensuing goal threw a wet blanket on Michigan’s comeback hopes, and five minutes later Luke Mittelstadt put the possibility of a storybook victory to bed with a goal to make it 5-2.
After the game, Dylan Duke reiterated his coach’s message—that the team had no interest in excuses.
“No matter who’s playing, no matter who’s going, I think everyone believes in each other. We think we can win with any lineup,” he said.
It is fitting that Duke was the lone Wolverine to speak after the game—his performance during it emblematic of his team’s resolve amidst their adverse circumstances.
Anyone who follows Michigan hockey has no choice but to develop a soft spot for Duke—a tireless worker, artist at the net front, and player whose affable nature carries with it a perpetual sense of (seemingly) unintentional comedy.
On Thursday night, with his play during the game and then with his words after it, Duke took that fan favorite-status to another level. On the ice, Duke had absorbed a heavy hit from Gopher defenseman Jackson Lacombe early in the second, leaving the Ohioan winger in serious pain on the Wolverine bench. Despite that pain, Duke responded with the glorious aforementioned batted goal, his second of the night.
After the game, Duke spoke with remarkable equanimity. He went out of his way to avoid anything that could be construed as an excuse while naming the obvious weight felt by himself and his teammates, explaining that the team’s confidence in its available players should not be confused for playing without thoughts of those who were not able to take part: “Those guys are always in the back of our minds—our brothers, our teammates. We love them. We’re always thinking about them, and we’re playing for them.”
Whether at the level of hockey or humanity, it was an awe-inspiring evening from Duke, the kind of performance that simultaneously reminds us of the frivolousness of the game of hockey and of its power. The nineteen-year-old sophomore doesn’t yet wear a letter, but by the time he leaves Ann Arbor, that will surely change.
On Friday evening, the game unfolded along a similar script, with the undermanned Wolverines putting forth an impressive effort under the circumstances (again featuring a pair of Duke goals) but one that fell short of securing a positive result on the scoreboard. Moyle and Truscott returned to action Friday, but Philippe Lapointe and Ciccolini fell out of the lineup.
Michigan played a much faster first ten minutes than it had Thursday and generated much more sustained offensive pressure. By the end of the first period, the Maize and Blue had a comfortable 15-7 edge in shots…and trailed 2-0 with Gopher goals from Lacombe (making a cameo as a forward alongside Matthe Knies and Snuggerud) and Pitlick.
In the second, the Gophers exerted a control over play in a way that reflected their numerical superiority to an unprecedented degree at that point in the series. An early Jaxon Nelson power play marker stretched their lead to three.
With the Wolverines at risk of fading out of the fight, Duke again struck from the goalmouth.
Nelson answered back for Minnesota though, and the Wolverines entered the third trailing by three. Despite that deficit, Naurato was adamant that his team never lost its sense of self-belief.
“We genuinely believe [in the possibility of a comeback] being down 4-1,” Naurato said. “We made some adjustments to send some guys outside the zone and get some cleaner breakouts and entries because it backs them up, and I think it worked pretty well. We believed we could come back in the third period, [the team was] fighting for everything to make it work.”
As the third neared its midway point, Duke notched his fourth goal of the weekend, once more from within spitting distance of Bartosiewicz, once more breathing life into his team at a moment when it would have been blissfully easy to yield.
When asked about what makes the forward so effective around the net, Naurato noted that there are “a ton of little skills that go into it, but the biggest thing is his mentality—that he wants to be in that spot. It’s a hard area to be at, and he gets rewarded for it.”
Unfortunately for the Wolverines, Knies stretched the Gopher lead back to three, only for Mackie Samoskevich to answer twenty-four seconds later.
As the clock ticked away, Naurato made an aggressive play to pull Portillo for an extra attacker with a bit more than three minutes to play. Ultimately, the move fell flat, and Ryan Johnson all but secured a Gopher sweep with an 180-foot empty net conversion.
From the cold perspective of the Big Ten standings and the PairWise, it was a disheartening weekend for the Wolverines. However, to those able to consider context in ways that a league table or computer ranking system cannot, it was a remarkable performance.
Understandably, Naurato could not offer any clarity on when more Michigan skaters may return to action, but he did mention that the whole team would be looking forward to the return trip to Minneapolis in late January. He emphasized that at the end of a trying week the team would have to adopt a long-term perspective: “It’s gonna be a great story at the end of the year, and we got a lot of chapters, and we’re just gonna keep writing this story.”
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