At the midway point of the season in early December, Michigan Hockey had already taken some major damage to the hull of their ship. It was taking on water, but not yet sinking. Repairs seemed to be on their way and there was reason to believe the storm was passing and calmer waters lay ahead. I wrote the following at that time: 

For all their flaws, this is still a top 12 team in even strength possession with elite shooters that outshoots and out-chances its opposition most nights. That's a good starting place to build around and predict a strong second half with. Tighten up the screws on the PK, play better third periods, and continue to score at a high clip on the PP and Michigan should bank points/wins at a much higher rate, one good enough to get into the NCAAs

Over this recent era of Michigan Hockey, it was almost always true that the team was better in the second half than the first half of the season. The 2017-18 team was 7-7-2 at the break, but was 18-13-3 at the end of the regular season before making a bit of a postseason run. The 2018-19's roster was fundamentally different in the two halves so it's an improper comparison (their 2nd best player was injured in the 2nd half), but here are the other seasons since then:

• 2019-20: 6-10-2 at the break and finished the regular season 16-14-4
• 2020-21: 5-5 at the break and finished the regular season 14-9-1
• 2021-22: 14-6 at the break and finished the regular season 25-9-1 (final record was 31-10-1)
• 2022-23: 12-7-1 at the break and finished the regular season 20-11-3 (final record was 26-12-3)

Due to some combination of youth/inexperience and other assorted negative factors, Michigan usually fumbled around and played with their food in the first half of the season before becoming a strong team in the second half. In the early Mel years (up through 2020) that meant turning on the jets to make a run at slipping into the NCAA Tournament. In the later Mel years + Naurato's first season, that meant going from extremely talented but mildly underachieving to "damn, these guys could win the national title", and in two cases, coming close. 

It was thus reasonable to expect, in early December, that the Michigan Hockey team that was then 8-7-3 would put together a much stronger second half. They had spent the fall portion of the season without a key defenseman (Ethan Edwards), had lost Rutger McGroarty, their most productive F, for a chunk of it, and had several other injuries and ailments at different points. It felt like there was reason to believe that Michigan could get a bit healthier, iron out some frustrating areas of their play, and go on a bit of a run in the second half as they do seemingly every year. They sat on the bubble in early December, so going on a bit of a run in a legit conference should likely be enough to get Michigan in. I wasn't majorly concerned about the season at that point. 

Now I am concerned. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: why i'm concerned]

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[David Wilcomes]

The second half run we've come to expect did not happen. Or at least not yet. Related: Michigan Hockey is also running out of time. Discarding history's most irrelevant and least serious Michigan Hockey series in early January against Stonehill, Michigan is 5-4-1 in the second half. Fine, but statistically no different than their 8-7-3 first half. In the mean time, they continue to get no help in terms of scoreboard watching and have only squandered their own chances to boost the resume. They went 1-3 against an elite MSU team, blowing a three-goal lead in one game and losing twice in regulation after being tied in the second half of those games. They went 1-0-1 against an elite Wisconsin team, losing a game in OT that they led 3-2, 4-3, and 5-4 (the latter in the third period). 

The Pairwise probability matrix at College Hockey News has Michigan's NCAA Tournament chances down to 34%, as they currently sit 16th in the metric. You need to be at least 14th to get in with two conferences are autobid leagues this year, and would like to be 13th to feel good. The season is not over, but this is the season right here. This is the backs against the wall moment for this team, four games to close the regular season against similar levels of competition, good/decent but not great Minnesota and Notre Dame squads, two at home and two on the road. If you can win 3 of those 4 in regulation, you can hop back into the picture. But more splits like they've been getting weekend after weekend, and the little precious time this team has left will continue to evaporate. 

If there was ever a time for that Michigan Hockey second half "run", it would be now. Because if it doesn't come now, a team with two first round picks, two second round picks, and ten total drafted skaters will miss the NCAA Tournament. Which, let's be clear here, would be a pretty bad outcome for this season. There are too many good players on this team to waste not getting a crack at sports' most random and meaningless postseason tournament. If 2013 Yale can win the national title in hockey, this Michigan team could too. They need to give Rutger McGroarty and everyone else a crack at it. To not get in would be a failure. 

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[David Wilcomes]

It dawned on me while recording the HockeyCast yesterday that this Michigan season is the same as the season the Pittsburgh Penguins are currently having. As I type this on Monday night, the Penguins are 7th in expected goals for percentage at 5v5 in the NHL (53.12%). They're 8th in possession at 5v5 as well. In all situations, they're 4th in xGF% and 5th in possession, 8th in shots for%. The Penguins have a lot of good players, Sidney Crosby continuing to age gracefully and remain a relative superstar with 31 goals and 55 points in just over 50 games. Erik Karlsson, their big offseason pickup, hasn't been bad at all. Tristan Jarry, their goaltender, has been stellar, 11th in goals saved above expected and a .914 SV%. Their backup, Alex Nedeljkovic, has an even better SV%. 

So many individual components for the Penguins look good. There's only one problem: they don't win games. Everything about the Penguins says they should be a good team, but they aren't. They're out of the playoffs as it stands and with the trade deadline coming up, may deal away star winger Jake Guentzel and wave the white flag on the season. Much like Michigan Hockey, individually great players and an ability to win the territorial battle and tilt the ice in terms of shots hasn't actually brought the Penguins' record much of anything. I've been waiting for Pittsburgh to make a run all season because their talent is there, yet week after week it doesn't happen. Maybe it will, they've got more time to steer it around than Michigan does, but the similarities are eerie. 

Michigan's problems in the second half are somewhat more varied than they were in the first half with the never ending run of blown leads. There aren't necessarily obvious individual culprits. Sometimes it's a holistic third period meltdown. Sometimes the offense just doesn't have enough life at 5v5. Sometimes Jake Barczewski lets in a soft goal at a bad moment. Sometimes the defense as a unit is sloppy and inattentive. Every so often the puzzle comes together and you get a convincing win, but the norm for this team is an incomplete puzzle, a piece or two missing under the table, lost in the fabric of the carpet. A new problem popping up like a mole that needs to be bonked with a hammer before the next one comes up. To turn this bad vibes mess around, Michigan needs to figure out how to put it all together. Reduce their problems in the defensive zone, finish their chances, put more stress on opposing goalies through traffic shots, and get solid goaltending from Barzo. Consistency shift to shift, period to period. 

 

[Bill Rapai]

Two HockeyBullets 

Defense and goaltending just aren't good enough. Michigan played two solid, simplified games against a BAD Ohio State team en route to 4-2 and 4-1 wins, but here are goals per game allowed in the last seven contests, with those two games removed: 4, 3, 3, 5, 6, 1, 7. These are against good offensive teams, MSU and PSU making up five of the seven games in the sample, but still, that's a lot of goals going in. Even with as good of offensive talent as Michigan has, you're not going to go on a run where you rip off a bunch of wins in a row if you're asking the offense to score at least 4 goals per game to beat good teams.

This for me is the biggest recurring theme with this team, that they don't keep pucks out of the net for a variety of reasons. Jake Barczewski is a solid goalie but doesn't regularly rescue the team like Erik Portillo did at times in the past (not always, but 2021-22 especially he was quite good at bailing them out). Their PK has improved up to near 80%, which is a good point for the coaching helping to improve the team, but is still not a major strength when it comes to goal prevention. And then most importantly, the general team defense is subpar. Michigan, as constructed around more skilled, offensive talent, is probably never going to be a lockdown team. But this group is the worst from a fundamental defensive standpoint in the last four years that I have covered. 

Marshall Warren and Jacob Truscott, a pair of veteran defensemen, have been disappointing. Truscott in particular seems to have regressed from last season, when his injury in the second half was a major loss for the team's defensive play in their postseason run. Warren came over from BC with tons of hockey experience and has been fine, but not much of a difference maker. Tyler Duke and Seamus Casey aren't bad players but they're both severely undersized for defensemen, which leaves Michigan consistently vulnerable around their net. Ethan Edwards isn't as small but he's under 6' as well. It's a defense that's in general lacking size and length (if they run a lineup of Truscott, Warren, Edwards, Fantilli, Duke, Casey, they have one D over 6' and four below that mark) and I don't think it's a total coincidence that they struggle with rebounds/deflections. 

 

[Bill Rapai]

I can't help but continue to feel like it was a mistake to lose Keaton Pehrson (unless he was offered the chance to return and voluntarily left for NoDak, in which case it's a bummer). At 6'2" he would be their tallest regular defenseman (Steve Holtz is their 7th), whereas on North Dakota, he is one of four defensemen 6'2" or taller who have played at least 25 games for the Fighting Hawks. Boston U has the dynamic Lane Hutson on the shorter side but also ices a lineup with 6'1"/200 Case McCarthy, 6'1"/191 Tom Willander, 6'7"/216(!!) Cade Webber, 6'0"/190 Ty Gallagher, and and 6'2" Gavin McCarthy. Michigan is one of the smaller back-ends in college hockey and that is a story of their season. 

Size with defenseman has risen and fallen in terms of conventional wisdom in NHL circles and your author is one of the people bringing it back to the forefront. Criticism of the scouting obsession with defensive size came when scouts fell in love with defensemen who were bad at hockey merely because they were big (see: Erik Gudbranson), but in some cases it shifted too far the other way, deeming size as an unimportant trait. I fall in between: there are ways to make it work as a smaller defenseman, particularly if you are small and hyper skilled like what Seamus Casey is to Michigan, but there is an undeniable advantage to being big as a defenseman. You can hit harder if you weigh more and box players out easily around the net.

Height is generally correlated with wingspan in human anatomy and thus if you are taller, you are also likely to have longer arms, which gives you a larger reach with your stick and a wider amount of plays you can nullify with a pokecheck. Big, hulking D are better for dominating around the net and breaking up the cycle in-zone, while tall D and their long reach are great for blocking shots and shutting off rush chances/forcing opponents to dump it in vs. possession entries. Teams built around big defensive groups have had considerable postseason success in the NHL, as the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup last season icing a lineup where only one defenseman was shorter than 6'2". The Tampa Bay Lightning combined the towering size of Victor Hedman and Erik Černak with the hulking bodies of 6'1" Ryan McDonagh/Mikhail Sergachev to win back-to-back Stanley Cups this decade. The LA Kings won two in three years in the early 2010s with a similar model built around 6'2-6'3" defenseman who were also hefty. 

Bringing it back to Michigan, it feels to me like size is an element Michigan is lacking on defense and it is a story with this team's defensive issues. NCAA Hockey doesn't feature the same big bodies of the NHL, but if we go back to the comparisons between Michigan's defense and that of a BU or North Dakota (or Wisconsin in the B1G), Michigan has an irrefutably smaller group. They also have a defensive group that has a number of players built around smooth skating puck movers. Casey is the star at that, but Edwards, Luca Fantilli, and Tyler Duke to some degree all had that on their scouting reports coming in. In totality, it's felt like Michigan's blue line has been built around too many of the same kind of player, a glut of smaller, puck-moving defensemen and not enough players with size and an aptitude for playing in their own end. There's not much they can do about it right now, but it's something I'd like to see them try to fix as the build future rosters for future seasons. In the near term, a greater commitment towards digging in and boxing out around the net, while making simplified passes to get pucks out of the zone will have to suffice. 

 

 

[Bill Rapai]

Simplified offensive approaches pay dividends too. Michigan remains a pretty high scoring team, but on the other hand, they've now scored two goals or fewer in three of their last four games. The theme of 5v5 scoring has come and gone over this season, Michigan going through periods of droughts and then periods of success scoring at even strength. The past two weekends have been another one of those slumps, scoring just a single 5v5 goal in each of the two MSU games and then two in each of the two PSU games. The Saturday game, which saw Michigan lose 4-2, gave Michigan one total power play, much to Brian's chagrin on the podcast. Is it ideal or "right" that a possession and skill team like Michigan only got one PP? No, but that's how it goes sometimes and you don't want to be in a situation where you need to get PP opportunities to have a shot to score. 

For me what stood out about the MSU weekend at Yost/Detroit was Michigan not putting enough complicated pucks on Trey Augustine. Most people focused on Augustine's excellence in that series and indeed he was very sharp, but I thought Michigan was too dead-set on trying to create the A+ look. Michigan has the skill to create high level goals with a decent amount of repeatability (I wrote about this last Hockey Weekly) but you can't make it your only source of offense. Also, when a goalie is hot, as Augustine was, he's going to be difficult to beat in those A+ situations. Obviously if he has no chance on a perfectly timed seam pass or something like that, it suffices, but a goalie who is in a groove, they're going to be difficult to beat even if you get a high level shooter isolated on him, as Michigan found out that night. 

So what's the recipe for solving a locked in goalie? As it is in the NHL, putting pucks on net and fighting for rebounds. Taking point shots and get traffic in front. That's what I mean by "complicated pucks", ones that the goalie can't see clearly, that force him to deal with a rebound or mad scramble in front. Analytics in hockey have generally de-emphasized these sorts of shots because they are low percentage, but there is also a truth around so-called "playoff style" goals. If a goalie is on his game, you want him to not be able to see the shot clean, or make him deal with a potential rebound that challenges him. You're not always going to be able to create A+ looks, especially against better defensive teams, and having that plan B of simplifying the offensive approach, putting pucks on net, getting traffic, and charging hard for rebounds is going to be key. If nothing else, it may be very big for this weekend's matchup...

 

[David Wilcomes]

Previewing Notre Dame 

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish come to Yost Ice Arena this weekend for the first of the two critical series that Michigan will play to close the season. Despite their general mediocrity over the past few years, the Irish have been extraordinarily strong at Yost and this particular weekend, the late February Michigan/ND clash that somehow always gets scheduled, has been a major bugaboo. Michigan is 0-7-1 against ND at Yost in the *regular season* (they did defeat them in the B1G Tournament semis in 2022) over the past four seasons and have faced ND in either the last or second-to-last weekend of the regular season in three of those four years (twice at Yost, once at Compton) and are 0-5-1 in those games. Facing ND at Yost or in late February (or both) has meant death for an unexplained, possibly extraterrestrial reason. 

Despite the aura of past traumas, this ND team is pretty mid. They are 21st in Pairwise, 15-15-2 on the season, about as mediocre as you can be. They've had their moments, including wins over MSU and BU, in addition to a beatdown they laid on Michigan in early December, but also are a sub-.500 team in conference play. They ain't that good! The Irish don't score many goals, 93 in total in 32 games and 18 of them are from Landon Slaggert. No one else is in double figures for the Irish, a team that is shooting only 8.9% as a team and this is a team that doesn't shoot a ton to begin with. Like last season, they lean heavily on star goalie Ryan Bischel, who has a .929 SV% and holds the roof up for Notre Dame. 

It's a moderately intimidating task after the recent offensive issues because it won't be easy to score against Bischel and the ND penalty kill isn't bad either, so Michigan's PP won't have a walk in the park. I expect lower scoring games, which haven't tended to fit Michigan either this season. A pair of mold-breaking, disciplined wins would be a welcome sight and set them up for a crack at Minnesota in Minneapolis with heightened stakes. A split is a more logical expectation but here's hoping it all clicks. Michigan showed they could do it by beating ND 2-1 in the second game of their first series, so hey, it's possible.