cam york

In 1972 the sport of hockey was changed forever by the Summit Series, a best of eight competition between the Soviet Union and Canada. After an extended period of divergence between the European game and the North American game, the Summit Series matched the Soviet Red Army team against the Canadian national team, which was basically just a Who's Who of NHL All-Stars. Team Canada expected to run the USSR out of the building but were stunned when they showed up and the Soviet team was weaving across the ice, criss-crossing with precision passing and carving the offensive zone like a thanksgiving turkey. At the time, no hockey team in the world had ever played like that, as the old style of "stay in your lane" forward play reined. Soviet hockey was a totally new paradigm to the game and was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Canada still won the tournament (very narrowly), but the story resurfaced in my mind this weekend watching Michigan hockey because the shock that Team Canada felt in '72 is a lot like the shock ASU's players must've felt facing the Wolverines on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, hockey has long changed in the last 48 years. Lots of teams now play the way the Soviets did then, but rarely at the collegiate level are teams able to replicate that style. Michigan did, playing with pro precision and Soviet-like movement through the offensive zone, passing, cycling, and rotating chances. I would not label you a dunce if you thought you saw the Russian Five out there this weekend for Michigan. The Maize and Blue out-shot the Ice Devils 84-33 in the two games and outscored them 11-1. It easily could've been 15-1 or worse. Yeah.

Total and Complete Dominance

I don't like to plug my own tweets often, but I thought this is the best way I could sum it up on Saturday:

This does not look like two NCAA teams playing each other. And I don’t think that’s an indictment of ASU

— Alex Drain (@Alex_Drain) November 14, 2020

Arizona State is probably not a great team. They also probably aren't bad. I don't want to be burned like Michigan football was against Minnesota with a fool's gold win but this is an ASU team that was 4-3-1 against top 20 Pairwise teams a year ago, including a win and a draw against Denver and a sweep against Quinnipiac, and were 12-1-1 against the bottom 20 Pairwise last year. The Ice Devils rolled two of their top four scorers over from last season as well as their goalie and added an excellent recruiting class. I would guess they're somewhere between mediocre and good, yet they met a buzzsaw.

[AFTER THE JUMP: Hockey dominance]

We’re back here for Part Two of MGoBlog’s 2020-21 Michigan Hockey season preview. Yesterday we kicked things off by looking at the forwards, which you can take a gander at here. Today we will be taking a long look at the defense and goaltenders, so let’s dive right in.

The Returning Defense: A Pretty Nice Base

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Brian says that this player looks like an extra in a John Hughes movie [James Coller]

This post starts differently than the one on the forwards. That one began by focusing on the new guys since the scoring core of last year’s team was decimated by graduation. On the other hand, with the blue liners Michigan actually returns a pretty good group of players that should form a solid basis for this year’s team. The Wolverines return four of six starters, losing only two players to graduation, Luke Martin and Griffin Luce. Martin was a strong stay-at-home defenseman and Luce had a solid four year Michigan career, but neither player figures to be a huge loss and there’s a lot of upside in the returning core.

The biggest name is Cam York, a lottery pick of the Flyers in 2019 [insert Gritty joke here] and he had a respectable freshman campaign in the maize and blue. York was being asked to fill Quinn Hughes’ skates atop the first PP unit and though that was too much to reasonably ask of any player, York did a solid job. He posted 16 points in 30 games and was named to the B1G All-Freshman team. He’s not going to razzle dazzle like Hughes but he’s a mobile, puck-moving defenseman who does a lot of things well and isn’t prone to allowing the same sort of glaring odd-man rushes that frustrated Michigan fans in Hughes’ second season. Responsible, unsexy, and efficient, we should also credit York for having one of the best spoonerisms in current Michigan athletics (can’t touch Chuck Filiaga though). Expect York to be at the point on a power-play unit again this season and with more raw firepower on special teams, I could see York begin to approach a 0.8 PPG clip in the 2020-21 season.

[AFTER THE JUMP: solid veterans and exciting young guys]

Sponsor note. You are probably aware that marijuana is legal in Michigan now, but did you know that you can now buy it from some sort of spaceship church? No, I have not partaken. Look at this thing:

This is the cleanest building I have ever seen or contemplated. Naturally it is named INFORMATION ENTROPY. Sometimes I put little jokes in these. This is not one of them. This spaceship church where you can get recreational marijuana is literally named "Information Entropy." I feel the previous item pretty much covers it, but: they grow and process their own product locally.

They're at 1115 Broadway in Ann Arbor, open from 10 AM to 7 PM daily. Parking is ample. 21+, please.

Cam McGrone's personal experience. Scary:

Michigan LB Cam McGrone’s mom said he called her as they were stopped by the police in case he didn’t survive the encounter. Teammate German Green said they were kept out there for 2-3 hours. McGrone filmed it https://t.co/hJOlLUIU96

— Aria Gerson (@aria_gerson) June 6, 2020

I thought Jordan Kovacs's statement on the general situation was a good one:

Standing in solidarity with the black community. We all must do our part to dismantle systemic racism in America #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/SEQhXJG3j8

— Jordan Kovacs (@JKovacs32) June 9, 2020

[After THE JUMP: large person amongst small persons]