Puck Preview: Bowling Green Comment Count

Brian

Falcon-New[1]The Essentials 

WHAT Michigan at Bowling Green
WHERE BGSU Ice Arena
WHEN 7:05 Friday/Saturday
LINE College hockey lines, junkie?
TV None. Radio 1050 WTKA.

Bowling Green

Record. 9-20-5 overall, 4-18-4 Gongshow. Bowling Green is by far the worst program in the league. They've given up more goals than any CCHA team (82—3.2 per game) and score way, way fewer than any other (36, a full 25 fewer than Notre Dame, the second-most impotent team in the league). I find this depressing. BG deserves better.

But they don't have better. BG does have a 5-2-1 nonconference record against UConn, UAH, Cansisus, and Bemidji. They've held up the conference's banner in the nonconference.

Previous meetings. None.

Dangermen. Well… I mean, it's tough to pick one out. Freshman Ryan Carpenter and sophomore Camden Wojtala have 20 and 18 points respectively; they have 10 and 9 in 26 CCHA games. Freshman Adam Berkle also has 10 in conference. So they don't have an 0.5 PPG scorer in conference play. There aren't any. This is not a jinx.

Defense. None of BG's defensemen do anything notable on the scoresheet; they all get nailed on plus minus. This is not a jinx.

Goalie. Junior Andrew Hammond is the only guy. He's got a .896 in 34 games; his backup has seen about a single game's worth of time. I assume Hammond's poor save percentage is an effect of poor defensive play in front of him; I can't plausibly claim that I have expertise in this area.

Special teams. Your power plays per game:

  BGSU Michigan
PP For / G 4.3 3.7
PP Ag / G 4.9 4.2

I wouldn't expect much of a difference between power plays for and against; Michigan has gone into series against opponents way more likely to take penalties than they are the past few weekends and seen a Wolverine parade to the box on crosschecks that are actually legal hits not involving the stick at all and so forth and so on. Gongshow is gonna gongshow.

When teams are on special teams, it will be advantage Michigan. Bowling Green is 55th in power play efficiency at 9.5 percent; while they're a lot better at killing power plays (25th; 82.5%) their lack of firepower overwhelms everything else. Michigan is up to… uh… 40th on the power play.

Michigan vs Those Guys

Don't let them score via horrendous turnover. There were a number against Northern and few other scoring opportunities that were not catching the third pairing in its own zone. BG doesn't appear to generate many scoring chances on its own; if they don't win a game it will likely be a totally gross thing off forechecking.

Don't give up a softie. This is pretty insulting to the Falcons, but seriously they're averaging just over a goal per game in the Gongshow.

That's all I've got. BGSU's been playing pretty well lately but it's about bounces going against M. Either that or some guy doing something he's never done before. You can blame me when the jinx comes home.

The Big Picture

If Michigan sweeps and Ferris gets swept M will share the regular season title. While the former isn't farfetched the latter is given how well the Bulldogs have been playing in the second half of the season. Since it will take a BG sweep to prevent Michigan from getting a second-round home series we can move on to the Pairwise barring Mayan-type events.

As far as the Pairwise goes, a sweep sees Michigan tread water. They'd probably drop a spot or two in that case just because some teams within a hair's breadth of them will sweep better teams. Less than a sweep is worse but actually not awful. They've basically salted away all Gongshow comparisons and the RPI is the only thing that will make a difference with Ferris. BGSU is nowhere near TUC status and won't affect that category, so the RPI is it.

Comments

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