luke morgan
While you have had your eyes trained on the Michigan Football campaign that is now well underway, the 2021-22 Michigan Hockey season has been zooming up behind you, first from the periphery, now into your rear view mirror. And much like how the mirror says that objects in it are closer than they appear, hockey season is closer than you may realize. In just 4 days, Michigan Hockey will take the ice for its exhibition game against Bowling Green, and in just 10 days the season will kick off against Lake Superior State University at Yost Ice Arena. All of this means that it is time to begin rolling out MGoBlog's hockey season preview, which is quite a bit more thorough than the one I put together last year.
And why not? The team is preseason #3 nationally (should be #1 in your author's opinion), with expectations of a B1G title and hopes for a national title. The team is loaded with talent like never before, and so I've anted up and produced a five-part Michigan Hockey season preview. The first three pieces will break down the roster, followed by a piece on the B1G and the schedule, followed by The Story, Predictions, and Wrap. These five stories will go out over the next two weeks, taking you up to the regular season opener against LSSU. Today we begin with part one of the roster preview, looking at the forwards who are definitely centers, and those who are probably wingers but could play center (I will explain both of those in the piece). So let's begin with the true centers, featuring a pair of Hobey candidates and a pair of upperclassmen:
Position Preview: Definitely Centers
There's a thing in hockey, a lot like baseball with shortstops and catchers, where every forward is a "center". It's the most important forward position, so anybody who makes it to high-level hockey as a forward will have played center quite a bit in their youth/junior careers, since low-level hockey coaches make the logical decision to put the best player on their team at the most important position. Thus, most forwards who reach the NCAA level are all marketed as "centers", but that's not what a lot of them actually are. If we were using the loose definition of "center", most of the forwards on Michigan's roster would be classified here, but we're using a more restrictive definition: only players who have logged significant time at center in their Michigan career or are widely regarded as centers as recruits will be put here. So, Bordeleau, Beniers, Beecher, GVW all fit here, but crucially, not Kent Johnson, who some NHL Draft guys still call a "center" but played next to no center last season. Kent is in our wingers-only piece.
Matty Beniers
Year: Sophomore
Height/Weight: 6-1, 175
NHL Draft Position: #2 overall, 2021 NHL Draft, Seattle
Stats: 10-14-24 in 24 games, 17.5% shooting, +21
Beniers, as we often joke, is the only good thing to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beniers is a Massachusetts kid born and raised, and frankly he's just offensively northeast: dad went to Cornell, mom was on Broadway, brother goes to Williams College, and sister also goes to Cornell. Matty would not look out of place in a Ben Affleck/Matt Damon film and he was planning to follow the family Ivy League lineage as a firm Harvard commit in early 2020. There was no way in the world he was leaving Massachusetts.... right? Well, then Harvard and all the Ivies canceled their 2020-21 hockey season and as an elite recruit with NHL Draft aspirations, Matty was given two choices to play that season: either head to Europe like the OHL kids and play in Bodunk, Solvakia on a team whose unpronounceable name is in a foreign language, or decommit and play for someone else. Because Michigan is apparently now The School You Play At If You're A Top NHL Draft Prospect In The NCAA, Beniers flipped to the Maize & Blue. And man, that was a quite the pickup.
Beniers instantly became a huge part of Michigan's offense (and defense). He had a couple goals in his NCAA debut against Arizona State and Beniers was, along with Bordeleau, one of two primary offensive drivers for this Michigan squad. For a successful line to produce offensively, you need someone to drive play up the ice. Normally that's your center, and as flashy and skilled as Kent Johnson was, Beniers is the one who drove that line. When he had to miss a couple games for the WJC's in early December, Michigan missed him a lot.
Speaking of Kent Johnson, the two worked really well together, playing the entire season as a tandem. Johnson is the more creative, skilled player but he also sticks more to the perimeter. No one's going to call Beniers a physical center, but no one is going to call him a perimeter player, either. The #1 thing that scouts raved about in the pre-draft process (one that finished with Beniers being picked 2nd overall by Seattle) was his commitment to do what it takes to win a hockey game. For an 18-year-old center, his all-around game and defensive presence was remarkably polished. Some of his most appreciated highlights to scouts were not offensive stuff, but were hustle plays like this:
Shoutout to the fine folks at EPRinkside for that clip. Here Beniers is on the penalty kill and he shows everything scouts love about him: the smarts, the effort, the hustle. He knows this is not a situation where scoring a short-handed goal is the primary objective and instead just meanders through the offensive and neutral zone like a bored child in a shopping mall killing time. That's what Beniers does.
He's only average sized, but is a workhorse along the boards and his willingness to apply pressure on the forecheck was an important component of Michigan's offense. And his tenacity in the defensive zone anchored his line in the DZ. When he was at the WJC, playing against players (in some cases) two years older than him who represented the best U20 players in the world, he was extremely comfortable taking tough defensive assignments for Team USA. Beniers is the definition of an all-situations center at the collegiate level. Put him on the PP and the PK, and he will also eat minutes at 5v5, tilting the ice in his team's favor. Pretty nice weapon to have.
Offensively, Beniers isn't going to blow you away. He doesn't have a standout skill the way Kent Johnson does with his hands, but Beniers is a classic jack-of-all-trades offensive center and when mixed with his Energizer Bunny motor, he's a productive offensive player. Here's an empty netter that he sets up that shows a lot of his best attributes:
Beniers takes it into the zone and slots it for Moyle to make it 4-1 Wolverines pic.twitter.com/v4MaD26fY0
— Michigan Hockey (@umichhockey) January 16, 2021
What stands out: the strength to ward off the defenders, the skating ability to still have enough left in the tank at the end of the shift, and then he anticipates Moyle out front and makes a really nice pass to set up a tap-in goal. This next one didn't lead to a goal, but it's a high-danger chance that Beniers sets up again through strength, presence, and a high hockey IQ:
A turnover in the Wisconsin zone, Beniers feeds Johnson and Rowe makes the stop pic.twitter.com/JHgi294OBX
— Michigan Hockey (@umichhockey) February 14, 2021
Kent Johnson got more of the points on the line but plays like that showcase what anyone who watched Michigan Hockey saw last season. Beniers did the dirty work for the line and made everything happen, the engine for one of the B1G's most effective lines. Thankfully we get one more season to see that engine churn before it burns coal in the NHL.
Season expectation: Beniers is probably going to play with KJ another season and those two guys will make up 2/3 of one of Michigan's top two lines. Last season there was a bit of a changing cast of players as to who ran with them. We will answer the "lines" question in a later post, but unless Mel Pearson has amnesia, KJ and Matty will be together. Those two guys had chemistry, so why break them up?
I'd like to see Beniers shoot a little bit more and become a bit more creative offensively, but he's one of the guys on the team with the least to really improve on. He doesn't have many weaknesses at the NCAA level and is an impeccably well-rounded hockey player for still only being 18. Beniers was a point-per-game player last season and just missed All-B1G, so I'd expect >40 points and an All-B1G selection over a full, regular-length season. He's a Hobey candidate, and one of Michigan's three or four most important players.
[AFTER THE JUMP: Some more important players]
Friday, November 23, 2018
#14 Michigan 1, Wisconsin 1 (2OT, W)
1st period
No scoring
2nd period
Messner goal
UM 0 UW 1 EV 3:01 Assists: Zirbel
Hughes pinches and blows a tire, which allows Zirbel to pick up the loose puck. He has Messner streaking ahead to his left, which is the easy play here. Michigan's in a fairly good situation themselves, though, as they're able to get two defenders back; Lockwood is pictured in the bottom right corner of the frame, and Cecconi got even deeper after seeing his defense partner fall.
Cecconi plays off, I'm guessing as a way of keeping himself in position to rotate to the weakside winger if Messner passes to his left. Instead, Messner throws a shot on net. Lavigne stops it, and though he allows a rebound it's at least in the best possible position: to the side, almost on the red line.
Lockwood turns and glides and watches Messner get deeper than him while Cecconi lets Messner cross his face to get to the position below, so this is a defensive miscue by both of the defenders. I put this more on the winger than the defenseman, though, because the defenseman's typically going to take the front of the net to cut off a backdoor feed, which Cecconi does here. Messner gets his own rebound and flips it high on a shot Lavigne shouldn't have had to face to begin with.
[The guys who could key a step forward for the offense get on the board after THE JUMP]
Morgan has the most upside of the guys [Michael Caples/MiHockey]
Michigan announced a trio of additions to the 2017-2018 hockey roster. None of these guys projects to be particularly impactful, but there are enough of them to warrant a post.
One, incoming freshman Jack Becker, was already known. What information exists on Becker, a 7th round pick in 2015, was assembled in the first bit of the recently completed Epic Hockey Recruiting Overview. In a nutshell:
He'll be 21 in January and was only even somewhat productive in the USHL in his final season, when he put up a 16-12-28 line. … very large person at 6'4" … looks to be a project who will do well to get past the third line.
He's a big body who will be elderly indeed by the end of his Michigan career and could turn into a David Rohlfs sort; more likely he ends up on a checking line for the duration.
Grad transfer Alex Roos is either a fourth liner or healthy scratch sort. He had a decent freshman season (10-7-17) with Colorado College but dropped to 6 and 5 points in the subsequent two years. He had not skated for a single game as a senior when he quit the program in January. Most likely situation: Roos is coming to Michigan to actually get a post-grad degree and will walk-on for his final year of eligibility.
The third newcomer is LSSU transfer Luke Morgan. Morgan, a 5'11" forward, had 22 points in 36 games as a 19-year-old freshman with Lake State a year ago. This was a significant uptick from 25 points in 60 games in his only year in the USHL, which may indicate he's a late bloomer. He did score a winner at Yost last year:
Laker forward Luke Morgan decided the outcome with around three minutes left in the game. The goal came off a pass from J.T. Henke, and Morgan shot right behind LaFontaine for the goal.
And hey, we've got a breakdown of that goal. It is Michigan being utterly terrible on defense:
Henke hits Morgan, who’s a stride or two ahead of the chasing Michigan defenders. He’s basically got the time and space to do whatever he desires.
Morgan decides within a stride that what he desires to do is shoot. You can see in the screen cap below that the puck has been release from Morgan's stick while LaFontaine’s almost completely in his upright crouch. I can’t tell from the replay whether this went five- or six-hole, but it found a gap as LaFontaine was getting into his butterfly; he reacted a hair too slow here.
A guy walking into the slot without anyone near enough to even take a penalty with three minutes left in the third period. 2016-17 Michigan, I will not miss you.
Anyway. Morgan will sit out this year and then enter 2018-19 as 21-year-old sophomore. That's a four-year commitment to a guy who may not have a huge ceiling. Hockey scholarships can be split so it's possible that Morgan is only getting a partial ride and Michigan's risk here is low. Morgan is essentially an incoming freshman who can't play this year, so my assumption is Michigan wanted to add a guy and at this late juncture Morgan's 0.6 PPG in the WCHA was more appealing than various overagers still floating around out there.
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