Week 9: Imperfections, Mala Leche, and a Split in Madison
After an underwhelming Friday night defeat, Michigan showed a different dimension to earn a much-needed Saturday night regulation victory with Mark Estapa, the team’s mala leche, leading the way
For Mark Estapa, the experience of rushing back into the play after a sojourn in the penalty box is a familiar one. With forty-eight penalty minutes on the season, the sophomore forward is fifteen minutes up on the next closest Wolverine.
On Saturday night in Madison, having served twelve minutes in the first period for an elbowing minor and misconduct, Estapa’s two-minute interference sentence ended, and he returned to the defensive zone just in time to lay the puck on for freshman Jackson Hallum to streak out of it.
Hallum raced through neutral ice, before spinning to his backhand to create space upon entering the offensive third. After feigning a net drive to lure in Badger forward Dominick Mersch (caught at defenseman after the power play), Hallum slipped a pass in for Estapa. Estapa executed a tidy forehand-backhand move to roof the puck past Badger goalie Jared Moe, and Michigan tied the game at two.
Some twenty hours earlier, Estapa had inadvertently won a faceoff back into his team’s empty net, sealing a 6-3 Friday evening defeat. He could hardly be blamed for the own goal; after all, his job was to win the draw and he did. However, the consequence was nonetheless a humbling loss to an erstwhile winless team in Big Ten play.
On a team stacked with projectable NHL talent, on a night where they could ill-afford an overtime victory much less a regulation loss, an undrafted sophomore—plying his trade in the bottom six—won the day for the Wolverines.
It’s not that Estapa wants for the tools of his teammates receiving greater NHL attention, but he’s carved out a niche for himself in this Michigan lineup for something other than his skill and skating.
There is an expression used in Spanish soccer: mala leche. Literally, it means “bad milk,” but it is used to describe a player who plays with an ugly streak. As The Guardian’s Sid Lowe once said of Barcelona’s long-time midfield pivot Sergio Busquets: “In a team of Lilliputians, he provides the mala leche – the bad milk, the nastiness that others don't have. He winds up opponents: accusations of gamesmanship abound, from England particularly, against a player who has drawn more fouls this season than even Messi. If Barcelona like to present themselves as the good guys, Busquets is the bad guy. Now more than ever before. And that's the way they like him.”
It’s not that Busquets lacked the technical quality of his teammates through Barcelona’s golden age but rather that he also brought something different. On a team known for fluidity and attacking skill, the lanky Catalan midfielder provided a different element: the uncouth, the unsavory, the nasty.
While Estapa has the skill as a skater and stickhandler to feature in any team’s top six, at Michigan, his talents are better deployed as a depth piece: ferocious on the forecheck, dominant along the boards, effective on the penalty kill, and maximally physical every time he steps on the ice.
On Saturday night in Madison, Michigan’s mala leche provided the necessary boost to scrape out a come-from-behind 4-2 victory.
Not long before Estapa’s goal fresh out of the box, Carson Bantle had given the Badgers a 2-1 edge. Bantle’s tally provided an unwelcome reminder of the previous night’s struggles with transition defense. Instead of allowing those wounds to fester though, Estapa pulled his team level.
Then, with the game still tied and inside of seven minutes remaining in regulation, Estapa took his efforts a step further. With the Wolverines shorthanded, captain Nolan Moyle hectored Badger defenseman Tyson Jugnauth behind the Wisconsin net. Under Moyle’s pressure, Jugnauth’s desperate breakout pass went straight to Estapa’s blade. From there, the sophomore once again showed a goalscorer’s instincts around the net, this time pulling the puck behind him with his backhand only to scoop it past Moe on the forehand.
It wasn’t a goal born of hacking and whacking in the corners, nor was it a matter of post-whistle pushing and shoving. Instead, it was a deft finish with all the grace of a Samoskevich, Fantilli, or Hughes marker.
On a weekend in which the power play never scored and the vaunted DAM line managed just one goal, it was Estapa who lifted his team to victory. As Brandon Naurato told The Michigan Daily’s Noah Kingsley after the game, “It’s just like any life lesson. When things don’t go your way, and you can pick yourself back up and keep fighting and keep playing, and then have success like Mark did, it’s a big deal.”
Five minutes and fifty-eight seconds after Estapa pushed the Wolverines out front, Rutger McGroarty clinched the victory with an empty netter from his own blue line. It was an imperfect Saturday night in Madison, but the Wolverines had earned a much needed victory.
On Friday evening at the Kohl Center, Michigan played a strong first fifteen minutes to set out to a two-goal lead. The Wolverines controlled the game with strong possession play and puck management. Even still, hints that the Badgers might find joy on the counter-attack emerged from the game’s opening minutes.
Despite the occasional defensive lapse, the Wolverines established a lead thanks in large part to another strong performance from Gavin Brindley and McGroarty, this time accompanied by T.J. Hughes.
The trio did impressive work to extend possession in the Badger zone, before Hughes found McGroarty in the slot, and the Nebraskan winger scored (on a sizzling wrist shot) for the second straight game.
Barely three minutes later, the all-freshman line burned Wisconsin again, this time in transition. Hughes gained the zone and slipped a pass for McGroarty, who used his first touch to send a pass right to Luke Hughes’ sweet spot. The Devils’ prospect, again with his first touch, wired a shot past Jared Moe.
Goals haven’t come as easily for the sophomore as they did a year ago, but Hughes showed impressive scorer’s instincts in beating Moe. Rather than making the conventional play and collapsing toward the net, Hughes trusted his ability as a shooter and McGroarty’s as a passer by slowing down through the slot to set up a potential one timer. When the freshman winger delivered that opportunity, Hughes wasted no time depositing his third goal of the year. That McGroarty had a goal and assist in the game’s first fifteen minutes hinted that his strong play was manifesting on the scoreboard in ways it had not for long stretches earlier in the year (more on this below in Odds & Ends). The Wolverines had a commanding 2-0 lead and looked a sure bet to add to it.
As quickly as Michigan seized control, though, the game unraveled. First, Charlie Stramel scored after a Wolverine miscue sprung him on an odd-man rush. It was not his first quality look at Erik Portillo’s net on the evening, and it wouldn’t be the last.
With Johnny Druskinis serving a five-minute major for contact to the head, Brock Caufield tied the score at two, where it would remain until the close of the period.
The second period was a disjointed affair. Twelve combined penalty minutes kept five-on-five play to a minimum, and, while Michigan was again solid in possession, it struggled to generate quality chances against Moe. Meanwhile, the Badgers exploited occasional chasms between the Wolverine forwards and defensemen, leading to more offensive opportunities in transition.
Corson Ceulemans and Zach Urdahl scored on reminiscent seeing-eye point shots, each squeaking through netfront traffic and beating Portillo from long distance. The Badgers carried a 4-2 lead into the third.
Needing a third-period rally, Michigan instead opened the frame by taking a too-many-men-on-the-ice minor. The penalty killed, the Wolverines seemed on the precipice of a prime opportunity to kickstart a comeback when Anthony Kehrer hit Dylan Duke into the boards beyond Moe’s net.
Whether a two-minute boarding call or five-minute-major, the hit appeared to usher in a life-giving power play opportunity. Instead, officials whistled Duke for a befuddling embellishment infraction, his crime evidently crumbling headfirst into the boards in absorbing Kehrer’s hit.
Even at four-on-four instead of the numerical advantage it deserved, Michigan pulled to within one, when Adam Fantilli buried a one-timer from a severe angle off a Luke Hughes feed. It wasn’t Fantilli or the rest of the DAM line’s best night, but it offered a momentary reminder of how little time and space the Nobleton, Ontario-native needs to make an impact.
The phantom penalty whistled on Duke was not decisive; Michigan even scored in its immediate aftermath. To that point in the game, the kind of sustained intensity we saw last weekend against Harvard was in precious supply, but a potential major power play could have offered a path back to level terms. Instead, a ludicrous call against Duke made life more complicated at a point in the evening when Michigan had a desperate need for simple answers.
Some six minutes after Fantilli cut the deficit to one, Cruz Lucius put a serious dent in the Wolverines’ comeback ambitions with a late deflection to beat Portillo. His line, with Stramel and Jack Gorniak, posed consistent problems for the Michigan defense and earned its second goal of the evening as a reward.
When Estapa won a faceoff straight back into his own empty net with forty-five seconds to play, the outcome was sealed. 6-3, Badgers on a puck they never touched. It was that kind of night for the visitors.
“You earn your own luck,” Brandon Naurato told The Michigan Daily’s John Tondora. “And we didn’t tonight.”
In the end, Friday night was not a horrible performance from Naurato’s team but dropping points to the Big Ten’s clear cellar dweller is a disappointment for a group with ground to make up in the B1G standings. The Wolverines were insufficiently connected, particularly in defensive transitions, and failed to create a significant volume of quality offensive chances. Throw in an Erik Portillo performance that was a clear notch below his effort last weekend against Harvard and an 0-for-4 effort on the power play, and you have the recipe for an underwhelming defeat.
To assess the weekend in its totality, the diagnosis is not much different. It was not a poor performance from the Michigan attack, but it wasn’t a sharp one. The Wolverines seemed to struggle in stringing together passes (a standard prerequisite for their style of offense), and the extended passages of in-zone menace that characterized last Saturday’s victory over Harvard never came. Meanwhile, the aforementioned challenges in corralling Wisconsin’s offense off the rush prevented any feeling of security from ever setting in.
It’s entirely possible that dropping points Friday will prove fatal to Michigan’s aspirations of winning a Big Ten regular season title. Through eight conference games, the Wolverines’ .375 points percentage leaves them tied with Notre Dame for fifth in the league.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but see something magically optimistic in Saturday night’s performance, despite glaring warts. Michigan’s offense never quite found its rhythm, the normally fearsome power play looked decent but never struck, and the defensive struggles that doomed Friday’s effort lingered. This Saturday victory saw twenty-nine fewer combined shots than the one that preceded it a week ago at Yost, an obvious indicator that the game did not unfold according to Michigan’s desired high-flying terms. Despite all that, Michigan found a way through the Badgers.
It wasn’t a weekend of dazzling creativity, smothering defense, or unflappable goaltending. It was a weekend that called for Michigan’s mala leche to deliver not just his customary physical edge but also a pair of goals requiring the adroit touch around the net of a first rounder. If bottom six performances like the one Estapa offered Saturday persist, there can be no doubt that Brandon Naurato’s Michigan will have more than a brief word to say when it comes time to determine a champion this April, December Big Ten standings be damned.
Odds & Ends
McGroarty’s Surge Continues
Last weekend, we highlighted the success of Gavin Brindley and Rutger McGroarty (then running with Philippe Lapointe) at generating sustained offensive opportunities throughout the Harvard series. This weekend, playing with T.J. Hughes, the two were not as dominant as they had been the weekend prior, but McGroarty continued to flourish as a vital depth scorer.
McGroarty’s freshman campaign has taken off in fits and starts. In late October, he netted a hat trick against Western Michigan in Kalamazoo. With the three goals, McGroarty sat at ten points in his first eight NCAA games. What followed was a six-game stretch in which he managed just one assist in the first six games of conference play.
Perhaps he had not played as well as ten points from his first eight games implied, but he also played much better than one point in the ensuing six would suggest.
In the four games since that scoring slump, McGroarty has seven points and is now riding a three-game goal streak. He didn’t earn that streak with fortuitous deflections or goaltending blunders but rather three snipes that left the opposing goaltender helpless.
McGroarty brings a combination of intelligence, versatility, and physicality to Brandon Naurato’s lineup. He is equally capable of creativity from the half wall and sowing chaos around the goalmouth. His movement and size have helped him create space for teammates even when his own offensive game has dried up. However, at times, featuring on neither the Wolverines’ top line nor power play, he has not appeared to have a clear role.
Now, McGroarty is making a credible case at being the team’s most dangerous forward beyond its top line. If he can continue his current scoring form (or even a slightly muted version of it), McGroarty will also dispel the notion that all an opponent need do is shut down the Duke-Fantilli-Samoskevich line to stall the Wolverines. In so doing, he will open up space for Michigan’s top trio, without even playing with them.
Druskinis & Contundencia
Since we already dug out our Spanish-to-English, soccer-to-hockey dictionary to laud Estapa, we figured we’d turn to a different phrase from the world of Spanish football to describe Johnny Druskinis. Once again, we turn to Lowe’s work for The Guardian. In a recent piece, Lowe interviewed Rodri (normally a defensive midfielder for Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City but playing as a center-back at the World Cup for Luis Enrique’s Spain), who says of his positional swap “It’s not a position where you necessarily have to be very, very strong: if you read the game well you can get there on time. But for me the most important element for a centre‑back is contundencia. That’s the thing a centre-back most needs. If you can add other things, then great. But that’s the key. And if I play there that’s what I have to work on.”
Unlike mala leche, there is no direct translation for the term, but Lowe explains that it describes the ability of a player to be “firm and decisive in every action.” Longtime Real Madrid and Spanish center-back Sergio Ramos embodied the trait: seldom the most gifted or even tactically intelligent player on the pitch, Ramos won every trophy in club and international soccer thanks to his decisive mentality in his own end. A central defender does not always need to choose the perfect pass or even execute their chosen pass perfectly, but there is no room for a pass played with hesitation. In the defensive end, reluctance or uncertainty are a fast-track to fishing the puck or ball out of your own net.
It is through this notion of contundencia that Johnny Druskinis has gone from healthy scratch to emergency, illness-induced fill-in to fixture on Michigan’s blue line in a matter of weeks. Again, we should stress that this is not to suggest that Druskinis lacks the puck skills of his fellow defensemen; if he couldn’t move the puck with the comfort Michigan’s high-octane attack necessitates, he couldn’t play.
However, like Estapa, Druskinis distinguishes himself by bringing an element that does not necessarily conform to the Wolverines’ standard. It is no coincidence that Brandon Naurato trusted Druskinis in the dying minutes of Saturday’s win, as the Badgers made an empty-net push. With his physicality and confidence in his decisions, the Plymouth-born freshman has emerged as a valuable and distinctive arrow in Naurato’s quiver.
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