Goal-by-goal Analysis: RPI Comment Count

Adam Schnepp

Hey. How are you? Been a while, huh? If you’ve never read one of these before, the purpose of this post is to break down every goal of each Wolverine hockey game. Reading left to right, there’s the score followed by whether the goal was at even strength or on the power play. After that there’s the time of the goal and the players awarded points on the play. In parentheses is their season point total.

Michigan swept RPI last weekend, and though they still have a lot of things to work on defensively a number of guys who have offensive upside finally turned upside into production. Long story short: a Michigan team not coached by John Beilein had a good weekend. Let’s enjoy that.

Friday, November 28

1st period

UM 1 RPI O EV 15:55 Kile (6) from Larkin (9) and Hyman (8)

Hyman carries the puck up the boards. Kile moves laterally from left to right, and eventually peels off his defender to head toward the net. The defender at the top of the circle does a nice job of taking away the passing lane to Kile, but taking away one passing lane opens up another (highlighted through the faceoff circle).

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Being able to draw a line through three of your five defenders means someone is blitheringly wide open. Oh, look. Alex Kile is blitheringly wide open. Larkin has the puck in front of the net thanks to the passing lane created in the first screen shot. All he has to do is find a way to thread it through the mass of defenders to Kile.

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Which he does perfectly. You can see that the goalie has to sprawl out to his left to try and get anything on the puck. This is because Larkin was so close to the crease that not only did he have to stay square to him but he had to hit the ice and go into his butterfly to take away the five hole. It takes extra time to move across the crease once you’ve hit the ice, and the goalie can’t recover in time to stop Kile’s shot.

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[After THE JUMP: We got moooooooore goals]

2nd period

UM 1 RPI 1 PPG 8:45 Bubela from Laliberte and Bourbonnais

Serville decides that Downing isn’t going to get down-ice fast enough to take away the guy with the puck, so he essentially treats this like a 2-on-1 and tries to take away the pass. The problem is that he comes off of his defender to do so, which leaves a guy wide open behind him when Nagelvoort already has to concern himself with locking down the post. Serville could have eliminated the pass by sticking with his man, and by dropping down the ice he’s in no man’s land with a problem looming behind.

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Shuart has to come down and take the open man. Serville (circled) has blown a tire and is temporarily out of the play entirely. Downing has picked up the other RPI player in front of the net, but without being positioned in front of his man there’s not much he can do.

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Nagelvoort stops two shots, but he gives up a rebound each time and eventually Bubela puts it past him from the scrum in front, where Shuart was unable to get in front of Bubela and also couldn’t lift his stick. You pretty much expect to get scored on when the opposition gets three or more chances directly in front of the net.

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3rd period

UM 1 RPI 2 EV 6:17 Bourbonnais from Melanson

Travis Lynch tries to play this right. He really does. He sees Melanson carrying the puck into Michigan’s zone and steps up to try and put a body on him. Melanson, however, backhands the puck off of the boards, goes under Lynch’s hit, and picks up the puck on the other side.

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Melanson carries it in along the boards. He notices that he has a teammate with inside positioning on his defender in front of the net. He puts a long shot on goal, I believe in hopes that a rebound would come out front for Bourbonnais (circled) to clean up.

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Bourbonnais is in the right place at the right, extending his stick to redirect the puck. It gets past Nagelvoort but just barely, trickling past the goal line before it can be swept out of the crease.

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UM 2 RPI 2 EV 16:58 Motte (5) from Calderone (2) and Downing (2)

Motte carries this one from the defensive zone through the neutral zone and into the offensive zone. He fakes forehand and moves the puck to his backhand, the fake effectively freezing the defenseman just long enough to give him space to continue carrying the puck to the net.

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Motte doesn’t have a pass to Calderone because the RPI defender has played that well positionally. Instead he pulls the puck to his forehand, shoots, and scores. Sometimes a guy just beats a goaltender, and that’s what happened here.

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UM 3 RPI 2 EV 17:27 Hyman (6) from Larkin (10) and Downing (3)

Larkin picks up the puck along the boards in the neutral zone and tears into the offensive zone. He’s so fast and such a good skater I’m tempted to make a Denard reference. I basically just did. Hmm. Stream of consciousness: not the most discreet writing method. Anyway, Larkin and Hyman cross and the defenseman is bamboozled.

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The defenseman decides to take Larkin, which opens up a gaping swath of ice for Hyman to work with as Larkin dishes across to him.

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Hyman shoots a split second after this frame, and the puck hits the goalie’s side and goes flops in. The solid lines in the above screencap represent what the goalie’s squared to (and it’s not Hyman). The dashed lines represent how his shoulders would be positioned if he was square to the shooter. There’s a flaw in the goalie’s positioning here as he’s over-rotated, and that’s what allows the puck to sneak past for the game winner.

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Saturday, November 30

1st period

UM 1 RPI 0 EV 7:53 Lohan (2) from Calderone (3) and Motte (3)

Michigan forechecks hard and gains possession of the puck behind the net. Motte passes to Calderone in front of the net, but his initial shot is stopped. A wild rebound appears…

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Lohan gathers the rebound and has a one-on-one opportunity in front of the crease. With as much of the upper portion of the net available as I’ve highlighted you’d expect Lohan to shoot immediately, but he doesn’t. You can see in the screencap that he pulls the puck close. A defenseman is about to try something fancy.

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He skates the puck in even deeper, patiently waiting for the goalie to commit to something. He sees the left pad go out and goes around the goalie’s leg. To put this in football terms, a defenseman skating in and scoring is essentially the equivalent of a fat guy touchdown.

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UM 2 RPI 0 PPG 14:50 Kile (7) from Nieves (6) and Hyman (9)

Hyman thinks about skating behind the net here, but he seems to think he can’t get past his defender and turns back with the puck. As he’s getting checked, however, he sees that Nieves has come down to the opposite corner, and he’s able to get the pass off before he’s fully compressed against plexiglass.

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Circled: dangerman. Also, look at Curtis Leonard (#10) trying to block a shot like a frog.

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Four defenders look at Kile at the same time, all realizing that he’s a forward in the middle of a defensive desert. Between the four of them I’m sure had to run more stairs for this breakdown than I walk in a calendar year. Oh, and Kile scored because obviously.

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Hard to blame RPI’s goaltender here because

laundry

UM 3 RPI 0 EV 16:54 Nieves (3) from Motte (4) and Martin (4)

Cutler Martin carries through the neutral zone, loses his handle on the puck, and regains possession in the corner of the offensive zone. He puts a ton of force into a backhand centering pass that he’s intending for Motte, but it looks like RPI’s goalie Scott Diebold poke checks away. They gave an assist to Motte, so whatever happened (the video quality isn’t good enough to tell) the puck ends up skipping toward the opposite boards.

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The puck hits the boards and bounces toward the faceoff circle. Look at Nieves’ windup. The last time I saw anything that exaggerated was in NHL 2003 for Playstation 2. That’s terrifying.

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Nieves’ shot hits the farside post and goes in. You can see in the screencap that the goalie can’t get his glove up fast enough to do anything about the shot.

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Nieves then does the classic gonna-play-freeze-tag-in-the-corner-hey-that-guy-looks-like-he’s-berating-me-but-he’s-probably-not-he’s-wearing-Michigan-stuff celebration. A time-honored tradition, that one.

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2nd period

UM 4 RPI 0 PPG 8:42 Nieves (4) from Copp (6) and Nagelvoort (1)

I’m not entirely sure I can do this one justice, but I’ll try. Welcome to FlightAware: Boo Nieves edition.

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Status: split two defenders

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Distance: so far, a lot?

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I ran out of jokes because I be like dang. Nieves skates in so close to the goaltender that he’s practically begging him to poke check, but maintains possession and lifts the puck seemingly straight up and over the goalie.

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3rd period

UM 5 RPI 0 EV 9:02 Calderone (1) from Motte (5) and Shuart (5)

RPI’s Riley Bourbonnais tries to shoot and fans on the puck. It ends up trickling behind him, and Zach Werenski sees this and ties up Bourbonnais. This allows Motte to pick up the puck and skate it out of the defensive zone.

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As you can see in the above screencap, there are four RPI (now) defenders behind the play. This leaves one guy back to try and stop a 2-on-1 opportunity for Michigan. He stays in between Motte and Calderone until Motte gets into the faceoff circle, at which point he locks on to Motte.

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The RPI defender extends his stick to take away the horizontal passing lane. He doesn’t expect Motte to pass around him vertically, but he’s able to because Calderone has skated ahead of the defender. Once the puck hits his stick all he has to do is tap it in.

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UM 6 RPI 0 EV 13:58 Compher (3) from Shuart (5) and Martin (5)

Max Shuart wins a battle along the boards in the defensive zone and emerges with the puck. He skates through the neutral zone, and as he’s about to run into a defender near center ice he sees that JT Compher is coming through the zone with speed. He dishes to Compher, who has a huge amount of icy real estate in front of him.

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Compher takes a wide angle that helps him out-skate the one defender that he needs to beat, and with nothing but open ice in front of him he begins to cut toward the net.

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Switching to the reverse angle here, you can see that Compher goes from having one hand on his stick…

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…to pulling the puck across his body and getting a second hand on the stick without running into the goaltender. He’s now got the puck on his forehand and taps it in past the goalie’s extended left leg pad. The goalie tried to stay square to Compher and respect a potential backhanded shot, but Compher moved the puck so quickly from backhand to forehand that he wasn’t able to push laterally across the crease quickly enough to get to the opposite post.

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