jack summers

Lotta celebrating going on so far this year [MG Campredon]
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Yea, this Michigan Hockey team is a national title favorite
Alex.Drain • October 18, 2021 • 2:37pm

Last season, Michigan Hockey had a few issues that held the team back from being a Death Star that easily marched to a conference/national title, instead limiting them to a merely quite good fringe top 10 team. One of those problems was consistency, as the team had a rather maddening tendency to bodyslam an opponent on Friday night, just to look like a car running out of gas on Saturday, in the process splitting with teams they should've swept. Another problem was struggling to excel in the first half of the season, limping through late November and December, before turning it on in mid-January. 

The need to rectify those issues was something that David and I talked about on the season preview HockeyCast a few weeks back, and we knew Michigan would get an opportunity to test their progress on both areas early in the season. With a trip to Duluth on the schedule, where the Wolverines would see a pair of top five teams in Minnesota-Duluth and (as it turned out) Minnesota State, a chance for Michigan to prove themselves to the rather skeptical college hockey community loomed. Moreover, it would be a litmus test of where the Maize & Blue are within the broader NCAA landscape.

With the weekend under our belt, I feel pretty good in saying that Michigan has done what was needed to prove their doubters wrong. First they knocked off #5 Duluth by a score of 5-1 on Friday, before toppling the #1 Mavericks on Saturday 3-2 to win the Ice Breaker Tournament, taking home a piece of hardware. Through four regular season games, Michigan is 4-0, with a +13 goal differential. Add in the exhibition against BGSU, and they're 5-0 with a +19 goal differential. They were ranked #1 in the country today by the USCHO voters and I concur. This Michigan team is a national title favorite and let's run through a quick assortment of HockeyBullets to explain why: 

 

Bullets 

The offense is elite. I feel like we've seen enough games to already get the point that, as expected, a top six forward group lined with first round picks produces a monstrous offense. They scored three goals on Saturday against the nation's best goaltender (Dryden McKay), and that brought down their offensive metrics significantly. Through four games, the Wolverines are scoring just a shade over 5 goals per game. Extend it out to include the exhibition game, and you're at 5.6 goals per game. They've hung 7, 6, 7, 5, and 3 on their opponents. The power play is firing at 50% (!). They have two top tier scoring lines (the Bordeleau line and the Beniers line) and have skilled offensive defensemen on all three defensive pairs. There are lethal shooters (Brisson, Samoskevich, Blankenburg, Pastujov), incredible passers (Johnson, Bordeleau), speed (Morgan, Lambert, Beniers, Hughes, Blankenburg), and oh yeah, plenty of skill. 

The goals they've scored this season through just a handful of games are downright pornographic: 

The offense had a lot of skill last season, but replacing York with Luke Hughes, Jay Keranen's spot with Ethan Edwards, and swapping out the Jack Becker and Dakota Raabe types with Mackie Samoskevich and Dylan Duke has raised the offensive ceiling. Not to mention the maturity and growth from players like Brendan Brisson who now have a year of NCAA experience under their belt as sophomores. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Some more takeaways]

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Guess who starts this article off? This guy. [James Coller]
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2021-22 Michigan Hockey Season Preview Part 3: Defense & Goalies
Alex.Drain • October 5, 2021 • 9:42am

Previously: Part 1 (Centers and Maybe Centers), Part 2 (Wingers)

Part 3 of our Michigan Hockey season preview gets rolling today, and it's the last component looking at the roster. The team played an exhibition game on Saturday, defeating Bowling Green 7-1, and so I included some of the scouting we learned from that game in this post. Today we'll cover defenseman and goalies, starting with the towering #1 defenseman who also was picked in a spot corresponding to that number in the NFL Draft: 

 

Owen Power

Year: Sophomore

Height/Weight: 6’5”, 214 lbs.

NHL Draft Position: #1 overall in 2021, Buffalo

Stats: 3-13-16 in 26 games, 7.3% shooting, +20

When Owen Power takes the ice for Michigan in the season opener he will make history, becoming only the 2nd first overall pick in history to play NCAA hockey after being drafted. Power went first overall to the Sabres (condolences, Owen) and it was largely because he was seen by scouts a lot like how Beniers was, as a trusty, safe option in a draft filled with uncertainty. The potential of such prospects as Luke Hughes and Simon Edvinsson may be greater than Power, but none of them have close to the floor that the towering defenseman from Mississauga does. As it stands, he could probably be a third pair guy in the NHL right now. But instead, he came back to Michigan to try and improve, and that was the right idea, because there is room for him to grow.

Power’s freshman season at Michigan saw him paired with Nick Blankenburg for the entirety of the year, and they were a very good tandem. Power made an impact right from the beginning of the season, finishing off this beautiful passing sequence against Arizona State (starts at 0:42):

As the year went along, Power began to flash the traits that made scouts envy him so much. He’s a terrific skater for a 6’5” defenseman, and the long reach is his biggest weapon as a defender, allowing him to nullify plays that other, smaller defensemen can’t. His frame also makes him a shot-blocking weapon to be used on the PK, and his brain is quite solid, normally electing the smart, simple play to get the puck out of the zone and up ice. Though no one will mistake him for Quinn Hughes or Cale Makar as a transition machine, Power is comfortable skating up the ice with the puck but will also chip the puck if it’s the better play. He’s a heady defender who normally makes the right read, whether that’s breaking a play up or executing a crisp pass. Also, the skill, though he didn’t flash it as often as a Hughes brother might, is there:

When he wants to skate around with the puck, he can do it comfortably:

And for the record, his shot has a good bit of zip on it, as you’d expect for a player that size:

There’s not much he can’t do, but the challenge for Power this season will be growing in two areas: flashing that skill more regularly to add a dynamic touch to his game, and becoming a meaner, more physical defender. For the first point, I just showed you some nice highlights of Power skating and pulling some moves, but those were few and far between. As I noted a couple paragraphs ago, Power’s game last season was built around simplicity and routine, not razzle dazzle. The skating ability and the hands are there, but can he come out of his shell a little more and make things happen? That may be the difference between him becoming a Noah Hanifin-type or a Rasmus Dahlin-type at the NHL level.

Secondly, I’d like to see Power use his frame a little bit better. For a player that size, he was far too unwilling to impose his will on the opponents. If Power doesn’t become a dynamic offensive defenseman, then he needs to make up for it in his own end and there are pretty clear roadmaps on how to do that. Chris Pronger and Rob Blake were not dynamic offensive defensemen, but they made up for the lack of flashy highlights by being an absolute menace in their own end, adept at using their massive size to clear the netfront and vicious in applying the ole crosscheck to the midsection to win puck battles in the corner.

Power won’t be able to get away with some of the stuff Blake and Pronger did in NCAA hockey in the year 2021-22, but I’d like to see him realize that he’s a lot bigger than every other player on the ice and use that size to his advantage defensively. There should be no one near the crease when Power is on the ice, and he should aim to become harder to play against physically when a puck battle ensues. Michigan is going to be oozing skill this season, but Power is one of the key players who should bring the muscle.

If he can improve in these two areas, adding a little bit more of a dynamic component to his game and becoming more physically aggressive in playing defense, the sky’s the limit for Power this season.

Season Expectations: There will be a healthy crop of competition coming from Minneapolis (and from Blankenburg), but Power should win B1G Defenseman of the Year this season. He’s got more talent than anyone in the conference, and assuming he and Blankenburg get even larger PP roles with York gone (we saw Power on PP1 in the exhibition game), I’d like to see Power approach a point-per-game this season, while playing strong defense in his own end. Power and Blankenburg should be Michigan’s Nicklas Lidstrom-Brian Rafalski tandem, an all-situations, minutes-chomping pair that plays 28 to 32 minutes in high-leverage games (read: the NCAA Tournament). PP, PK, even strength, you name it, Michigan should lean on Power heavily. Maximize the last season you get with the unicorn before he leaves for Buffalo.

[AFTER THE JUMP: Mr. Captain and more]

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Michigan Hockey's weekend, in one image [James Coller]
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Hockey Weekly Falls Into The Trap
Alex.Drain • December 1, 2020 • 9:05am

You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? Michigan Hockey was blasted back to reality by the NCAA hockey equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits (a name I couldn't quite come up with on this week's HockeyCast (and high school quiz bowl me hates me for forgetting it)), losing games 3-2 and 2-1 to Notre Dame at Yost, their second straight sweep at the hands of the Irish at home. Notre Dame rolled in without tanks or other high profile weapons but had an even more feared asset: a well-coached hockey team running one of the most grotesque hockey systems out there, the neutral zone trap. And just as the 1990s version of the neutral zone trap claimed the lives of some of the most feared and offensively skilled teams of that era's NHL ('95 Red Wings, '96 Penguins), Michigan's hyper-skilled offensive juggernaut got stuck in the tar pits, unable to gain any traction. The season is far from over, but the road to a potential national championship will also be far from easy.

 

The Revenge of The Trap

There's always someone waiting for you at the blue line in The Trap [James Coller]

I follow a number of professional hockey scouts on Twitter, the kinds of people who watch the B1G periodically but aren't college hockey-specific enough to know the ins and outs of each conference. Those kinds of people are now watching every Michigan Hockey game this year because of the presence of Owen Power, Kent Johnson, and Matty Beniers on this team. My timeline was filled with these kinds of tweets over the weekend:

For those unfamiliar, Jacques Lemaire was the coach of the New Jersey Devils who is credited with taking the neutral zone trap mainstream, the system that Notre Dame runs. Observers of the B1G like myself have known about the visually disgusting, yet annoyingly effective, style of hockey that the Fighting Irish play for years, but it was quite a shock for pro scouts to see it in action, including one who sits behind our own David Nasternak at Yost this season. Plenty of NCAA teams still run the neutral zone trap even as the NHL has trended away from its rigid adherence in the 90s/00s. Hell, Michigan ran a variety of it last year. But what startled scouts this weekend isn't that the Irish run The Trap, but how well they execute it, and that's credit to their coach, Jeff Jackson. Any team can run The Trap, but few can run it as well as Notre Dame does at the college hockey level.

[AFTER THE JUMP: I promise it gets more fun by the end]

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Unverified Voracity Can Never Be As Good A Pick As Tom Brady
Brian •

Mo Hurst is still in your base. Hockeys are scouted. Jacked Higdon details!

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Unverified Voracity Insults Philadelphia's Mayor
Brian •
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