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:

Notre Dame is playing a style that would make Jacques Lemaire proud. We really, really hate to see it.

— J.D. Burke (@JDylanBurke) November 29, 2020

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]

I will probably do a Neck Sharpies style post about The Trap over the Christmas break explaining it in better detail, but the idea of the scheme is that it clogs the middle of the ice. There are differing varieties of The Trap and what flavor ND runs in particular is something I'd have to study more specifically (at times on the weekend it looked more like the Lemaire 1-2-2 and at others it more closely resembled the Left Wing Lock 2-3), but the core idea is to take away the middle of the ice and inhibit the opponent's speed. Case in point:

I titled this image "Good Luck Entering The Zone.png" [BTN+ Screencap]

The only play for Johnny Beecher to make here is to dump the puck in. Ciccolini is well covered by Graham, the passing lane to his winger on the far side (the legs of whom you can see in this image) is cut off by two Notre Dame defenders, and if Beecher himself tries to skate it into the zone either Irish defenseman can step up and obstruct his path. The central idea behind the neutral zone trap is to force your opponent to play along the boards, and that's where Michigan was all weekend long. By taking away the opponent's ability to skate the puck into the zone with control, you force the opponent to play dump-and-chase in the corner. This reality played to Notre Dame's advantage because they are masters of inhibiting the opponent without getting penalized for interference (negating Michigan's speed), and because they were winning a high percentage of puck battles. Michigan routinely got bullied in the corner, something mentioned in last week's column as being an issue with a young and Not Beefy roster.

Notre Dame deserves a lot of credit for their discipline and coaching. Jackson is a legend of college hockey for a reason and he knows how to recruit players to run his system. The Irish also simply played phenomenally, with their defensive zone play  serving as a "How to" tutorial for young players on how to execute zone breakouts. It was an absolute clinic: win the battle on the boards, make an accurate pass to an open defender, he makes a tape-to-tape pass to a forward, and it's out of the zone. Over and over and over again. The precision was noteworthy and Michigan actually capitalized on most of the mistakes ND made. It's just that Notre Dame didn't make many mistakes to begin with.

Let's Go Line Dancing!

Another take that stuck out to me on the interwebs this weekend, from the same pro scout as above:

Mel Pearson's insistence on deploying John Beecher in plum offensive situations in spite of every indication that he's not suited to those assignments is... in a word, perplexing.

— J.D. Burke (@JDylanBurke) November 29, 2020

Let's be clear that Johnny Beecher was a very divisive prospect during the 2019 draft process. I knew of multiple scouts who saw him as a legit first round talent (which is where he ended up going) and others who thought he was a fringe third/fourth round guy. My point is that it's not *surprising* that some in the NHL scouting community have the knives out for Beecher and while I'm not here to talk about Beecher as a pro prospect, we should evaluate his role. And really, his line's role, because it's disappointing so far. Beecher has 1 goal on the season and it was a PPG. Linemate Jimmy Lambert has 1 goal and 1 assist, and both were on the PP. Brendan Brisson's lone goal was a PPG. That "top line" for Michigan has been a total non-factor offensively for the Wolverines at even strength, and it's beginning to be a bit of a problem. As the centerman, Beecher gets a fair bit of the blame, but I think it also falls on the linemates as well. Brisson and Lambert are #1 and #2 on the team, respectively, in penalties taken this season as well, and a number of those have been in the offensive zone. The line just isn't clicking.

Through six games it's clear that Thomas Bordeleau is a plus-player when it comes to driving an NCAA line. The same can be said for Matty Beniers. Those two should be the centers of Michigan's top two lines, and Beecher should be the center of the third line. He's still got a lot of talent in him, Mel just needs to tinker with the lines some to find a grouping that works. One option could be to rearrange Bordeleau's linemates, Pastujov and Granowicz. Those two have played very well in the early going and perhaps moving them to play with Beecher, while giving Bordeleau the ability to play with a natural shooter like Brisson, could work all around. Another option would be putting Brisson with Luke Morgan and seeing if the speed of the latter could help kickstart the former. Michigan's probably going to score a zillion goals this week against PSU (see below), but let's not ignore the fact that changes are warranted after a bumpy start to the season for some of the team's most important pieces.

The Defensemen Shuffle

You sir, are now in the dog house [James Coller]

Michigan made its first major personnel move of the season on Saturday when Mel Pearson yanked Jack Summers from the lineup and inserted Jay Keranen on the third defensive pairing. Summers had had two consecutive rough defensive games at that point and Keranen did fine. For all of our worries about the 7th defenseman coming into the season, Keranen has emerged as a serviceable backup. Still, Michigan is a better team when the Summers of last season is in the lineup, as he gives the team another skilled puck mover who can produce offense. He just can't be doing what happened on Friday, or against Wisconsin,  often. In both games Summers gifted the opponent the puck AND then failed to prevent the goal, despite being the last line of defense in front of the net. He whiffed on knocking away the diagonal pass in the Wisconsin game and then made no real effort to clear the net front on Friday, screening his own goalie and obstructing Mann's vision of the Clurman shot.

I hope to see Summers back in the lineup this week because Michigan needs him to play and to play well, but I also liked the decision of Mel to send a bit of a message to his team. These are coaching moments with a young team. Otherwise it was an up and down weekend for the blueliners. Jacob Truscott is quietly emerging as a really promising freshman, making a dagger of a diagonal pass on the Morgan goal in Friday's game and then unleashing his cannon-for-a-slapshot to get Michigan within one on Saturday. Truscott's been strong in his own end in my opinion, and if he's going to be dropping dimes and shooting bombs on offense, he will need a much larger role on this team quickly. Power and Blankenburg were mostly forgettable offensively, while both got bullied along the boards on Notre Dame's first goal on Friday. Cam York made an egregious turnover that led to the empty-netter Saturday but otherwise was also mostly forgettable. After that phenomenal first weekend the defensemen have fallen back into the shadows a bit as of late. The talent's still there though.

Around the B1G

We finally have some tape on the Ohio State Buckeyes. After being swept by Minnesota, OSU split a weekend series with MSU and sit at 1-3 on the season. They look to be about what I expected so far, a team that has some players in Gustaf Westlund and Quinn Preston, but who definitely miss Tanner Laczynski and some of the other veteran leaders. Michigan State is 2-1-1 at this juncture and is also about what I expected, a low scoring team that is something of a Dollar Store Notre Dame, still on the road to respectability but lacking the guns or coaching to pull off with the Irish do. I see both of Michigan's primary rivals towards the back of the conference right now.

In Madison both of Michigan's prior two opponents played each other and surprisingly it was the Ice Devils who swept the Badgers. The first game was an 8-5 firecracker display of offense as the still Johnny Walker-less ASU team poured it on in what was a mostly tight game. The second contest was a much more reasonable 3-1 affair but both games saw shot attempts pretty even, which is a good metric to use for judging how competitive a game was. Now 2-3-1 on the season, there is quite a bit of fuel for the Arizona State Isn't Terrible crowd that your author is a part of. Rather, the Ice Devils look like a solidly mediocre hockey team capable of playing in the B1G. One note on Wisconsin: the Badgers are currently dealing with a COVID outbreak, as four players were out for the weekend series (Ty Pelton-Byce may have been out for concussion reasons though). When Wisconsin gets fully healthy and Holloway returns from the WJC, they could be a scary opponent.

This week's mini-preview: Penn State

Hopefully most of those pucks will be going in this week [James Coller]

If you're about to pull an Oedipus Rex and gouge your eyes out after having watched two straight Notre Dame hockey games, I would discourage you from doing so because Michigan's upcoming series is the exact opposite. Where the Irish are dull and borderline unwatchable in the way they suck the life from the game, the Nittany Lions are fun and exciting. PSU plays an absurd "throw everything at the net" system that has them at the top of the NCAA in scoring offense almost every year and they generally average ~40 shots per game. Notre Dame tries to wait until you make a mistake to then beat you 1-0. PSU wants to boat race you and win 9-6. Hockey can be fun!

The bad news in Hockey Valley is that Penn State lost nearly every one of their notable scorers from last season AND their goalie. The results are predictable: PSU is 0-4 with a -11 goal differential, allowing 5 goals per game so far. The finishers who were able to convert those 40 shots per night into 5 goals are now gone and the young guns have not shown they're ready yet, as the team is scoring just 2 goals per game. The loss of Peyton Jones in net is equally catastrophic since the Lions ask their netminder to be Grant Fuhr every night and save a high percentage of the many A+ chances they cede to their opponent. Jones was good at that; new goalies Oskar Autio and Liam Souliere have not been.

I got to see a good chunk of their games against both Minnesota and Wisconsin and it's hard not to come away from those viewings thinking PSU is just a bad hockey team this year. Guy Gadowsky has proven to be a good coach, having taken PSU from the club level to the NCAA and then from there into the tournament several times. But this is a rebuilding year and there's no way around that. Another reason to be optimistic is that PSU plays the type of game Michigan wants to play. The Wolverines are, on paper, a match made in heaven to play the style of fast-paced, offensive game that the Lions want to play. I would expect a lot of offense and this week seemingly presents the opportunity for the Maize and Blue to reset their offense and get back in the winning column.