The Catchup: Hockey Comment Count

Brian

Now that football has ceased, a glance at some ongoing sports you may not have paid much attention to yet.

They're real bad

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photo not meant to reflect poorly on Jack Lafontaine [James Coller]

Let us cut to the chase. This is the worst Michigan hockey team since Red Berenson rescued the program from its mid-80s doldrums. The three Michigan teams that missed the tourney prior to last year were at least within shouting distance of a bid. Flip a game or two and those guys squeeze into the tournament.

This year's team is 6-7-1 and currently 31st in RPI, in the bottom half nationally. Compounding matters: they're probably the luckiest team in the country. After getting bombed by Penn State their Corsi* is 59th out of 60 teams, ahead of only Alaska-Anchorage. They've survived because their goalies have a collective .927 save percentage, and that has nothing to do with the quality of shots they've faced. While having a good save percentage is, you know, good, SV% is a notoriously fickle stat requiring something more than a full NHL season to produce anything even sort of predictive. Michigan's ranking there could be skill; it could be luck. If it's the latter, Katie bar the door.

The eye test is little better. They were just blown off the ice by Penn State 6-1 and 5-1; when they played LSSU it looked like a bad WCHA team playing itself. Jake Slaker, a 20-year old former St. Lawrence recruit, went from nowhere to the top line. He's scoring some; he's also –9.

Without a turnaround for the ages the only thing keeping this team from the cellar of the Big Ten is Michigan State.

*[Your percent of all shot attempts in a game. Broadly more predictive than actual goals.]

What happened?

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Slaker, a late add, went from St. Lawrence commit to M's top line [Coller]

Last year's team was fool's gold that forestalled Red Berenson's perpetually impending retirement yet again. They had an insane amount of talent. Tyler Motte, Kyle Connor, and Zach Werenski went directly to the NHL, with JT Compher not far behind. Those four guys drove so much of Michigan's play, and they also lost two productive scoring line wingers in Justin Selman and Boo Nieves.

A decent but not great incoming recruiting class could not replace that production. The academic suspension of promising freshman Cooper Marody (10-14-24 a year ago) did not help. This team has two guys—Alex Kile and Will Lockwood—who look like top six forwards on a good Michigan team.

The defense is hypothetically deep and good, but in practice teams are piling up excellent scoring chances because Michigan can't exit their own zone, can't enter the opponent zone, and are giving up the constant parade of odd-man rushes that's been characteristic of the program over the past few years.

All of this traces back to the head coach. Every player with an opportunity to go pro does so as quickly as possible, even guys like Andrew Copp who are total shocks. Marody's suspension is just about unprecedented in hockey. For years Red has tolerated guys like Tristin Llewellyn and Michael Downing who take awful penalties and constantly pinch at the wrong time.

Even last year's massive pile of talent was outshot 49-27 in a 5-2 loss to North Dakota in the second round of the tournament. Michigan had an NHL first line and the most prolific rookie defenseman in the NHL this year and still got blown off the ice by a program it used to look at as a peer. What does this program look like with good, but not transcendent talent?

Unfortunately, this.

Is there any hope?

Not realistically. This isn't a one year issue, but a steady decline over the last half decade that last year's talent managed to defy. This team still has more talent (9 draft picks!) than the majority of teams they'll play in the Big Ten, but one of the teams they have more on-paper talent than just blew them off the ice. One of the others, Ohio State, is sixth in RPI.

Michigan teams have picked themselves off the mat at midseason before and gone on runs to make or narrowly miss the tourney; the difference between those teams and this one is the distance they'd have to go to go from losing games to winning them.

What now?

Suck it up and wait it out, I guess. I have to imagine that a fourth missed tournament in five years would be the point at which Red Berenson walks away to prevent damaging his legacy even further. Michigan would have good options afterwards, but the point to talk about that is later.

Comments

Wolverine Devotee

December 7th, 2016 at 12:08 PM ^

Red is Bobby Bowden if Bobby Bowden went 5-7 with the talent he got all the time.

Warde talking him into coming back from what I heard from Spath. He was probably going to retire.




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Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 12:18 PM ^

Yes, I also heard Warde talked Red into coming back.  In Mr. Manuel's defense, there might have been a good reason (such as...possibly Warde approached his favorite candidate and was told "not this year, but maybe next").

This is going to be a big hire for the Michigan AD--probably the biggest hire Manuel will have to make in the next 5 years.  They can't just settle for hiring a Tom Anastos / Wilf Martin type.  They have to get a name, even if it ends up having to be a name with no previous association with Michigan.

xtramelanin

December 7th, 2016 at 12:55 PM ^

that wilf martin?  nice guy, but couldn't handle the pressure.  inherited an ungodly amount of talent (excluding me) from farrell and between him and  3 1/2 years of giordano, squandered it away in 4 years.  

Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 1:08 PM ^

Hired, I assume, because he played for Michigan and he happened to have coached a club team out in Colorado years before.  I kind of wonder who else wanted the job if Wilf is the one who got it.

Tom Anastos is Michigan State's version of the same thing--played for MSU, coached a club team for a while, then was out of hockey (unless you count being an administrator of a hockey league or a hockey rink) for a decade or more before he was hired.

In both cases, the situation seemed to result from good ADs who knew nothing about hockey and didn't make the effort to learn.

The Wilf Martin hire was just so weird, so hard to understand.  Why did he want the job?  Why did Canham offer it to him?  Giordano I guess made sense--he was available in November of 1980 when we needed an emergency replacement.  The fact that we didn't go out and look for a permanent coach after that season is pretty odd as well, but didn't Farrell leave to go into private business?  I'm guessing that Michigan hockey didn't pay much above a living wage at the time.

xtramelanin

December 7th, 2016 at 1:22 PM ^

when we got to camp.  wilf had a problem with the bottle (allegedly).   

it was odd in later years when i would call the ticket office for various tickets and talk to him occasionally.  

farrell was from houghton, a yooper, and went back home.  IIRC, we were ranked #5 my freshman year, at least for a while.  i still don't get why he left. 

stephenrjking

December 7th, 2016 at 1:02 PM ^

Is it possible part of Warde's reason for delay was the challenge of getting up to speed on an important hire so quickly? Hockey wouldn't be a total mystery to him, but with everything going on elsewhere as he steps in that could theoretically be a big ask.

I hope the big name, if it exists, isn't Don Lucia.

stephenrjking

December 7th, 2016 at 2:02 PM ^

Do we even have a chance with Gadowsky? I would imagine that staying at PSU would seem pretty attractive right now. 

Lucia has a harder time fighting teams like Saint Cloud for talent than he used to, but he doesn't seem to be able to succeed with the talent he puts on the ice, either. Even if he can't just win a recruiting battle by coaching at Minnesota anymore, Minnesota ought to be at least as competitive as SCSU and North Dakota and they aren't.

wesq

December 7th, 2016 at 1:35 PM ^

This is a present from Berenson to the next head coach to leave the program with reasonable expectations when the next coach starts. Carr leaves in 2008 after Long, Hart and Henne are gone and takes the 2008 season on the chin, the next coach has a much better chance of succeeding.

Pepto Bismol

December 7th, 2016 at 2:12 PM ^

Remember Brian Ellerbe?

(oh, sorry, does that only work for basketball?)

 

 

I've been happy to let Red call his own shot, even though we could all see the program trending this way.  As long as he kept amassing talent to keep the ship afloat, I could handle moderate-to-debatable underachieving.  Now they're bottoming out.  Berenson thought he had guys returning and they all left.  That's the biggest indictment for me.

That and the perennial complete and utter disregard for team defense. 

 

lhglrkwg

December 7th, 2016 at 12:21 PM ^

and he should shoulder all the blame for refusing to retire and sending us right back to the mess the program was when he got it.

(I know Warde may or may not have asked Red to return this year. Doesn't change the fact that Red probably should've retired back in 2011 or so)

stephenrjking

December 7th, 2016 at 2:20 PM ^

I have stated repeatedly that Red has earned the right to choose when he retires. He made the program what it is, and without him it does not get nearly the attention here and in other places that it does.

But that does not mean he cannot be responsible for the current state of the program. It is a price I accept, but the current team on the ice is indeed his responsibility. 

matty blue

December 7th, 2016 at 3:32 PM ^

i guess i wasn't specific enough...i have a problem with the phrase "shoulder the blame for refusing to retire."  i can't "blame" him for not retiring.

can we hold him responsible for the current state of the program?  of course.  it's his program.  but i guess i'm okay with a down season or four if it means we're not pushing him out before he's damn good and ready.  those situations suck, hard, and he deserves better than that.

Clarence Beeks

December 7th, 2016 at 1:11 PM ^

I've played goal for a really long time (and once upon a time at a decently good level) and have coached goaltenders, and that article isn't accurate. The reasons they use for variability are the reasons why GAA (not save percentage) is a terrible metric for goaltenders.  It's just a really odd article, especially given that their idea is to use a coin-tossing model (not to mention just using even strength play).  That's way too simple.  At any level of play you can get a darn good idea of how good a goaltender is that season and against that level of play (i.e. not a predictive measure of future performance against improved competition) based off of significantly less games.  The reason for the unpredictability of goaltender development up through the ranks has much more to do with non-game factors.

Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 1:21 PM ^

Save percentage is better than GAA.  That's not the point.

You surely understand, though, that the difference between a great goalie and a mediocre goalie is pretty small.  A save percentage of .925 is great; a save percentage of .900 is currently unacceptable at this level (NCAA).

So what's the difference?  One goal on every 40 shots.  In other words, less than 1 goal per game separates a great goalie from a below-average one.  Sure, you eventually figure out which goalie is great an which is below average, but a "true" .925 goalie and a "true" .900 goalie could easily both be at .910 through 10 games and it wouldn't really be a statistical freak in either case.

That's Brian's point here--you can't say Michigan has great goalies after 14 games, especially since 3 different goalies have multiple starts.  That .927 save percentage could easily be a .915 or .910 save percentage plus a little bit of luck (2 pucks that hit the post & went out instead of in, 4 wide open shots where the skater fanned on the puck, a missed call by the replay booth or whatever).

Clarence Beeks

December 7th, 2016 at 2:06 PM ^

"You surely understand, though, that the difference between a great goalie and a mediocre goalie is pretty small.  A save percentage of .925 is great; a save percentage of .900 is currently unacceptable at this level (NCAA)."

Definitely don't agree.  That's a massive difference.  When it's a small sample size (in the case of what you said, 40 shots), sure that's a small difference (just one goal, as you say), but over the course of ten games it's ten goals. That's not a small number, in any way, even over ten games and to get to that point, even over just ten games, a lot is either going consistently right or wrong.  That said, 10 games is way too small of a sample size, but once you get up to 20 games, that's plenty.  It just isn't a "fickle" stat when you're applying it over a halfway reasonable sample size (which is much more like 20 starts rather than 170+ games, like in the article you linked).

 

 

Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 5:15 PM ^

Well, this doesn't require a knowledge of anything other than stats.  It's a simple word problem like you would have had in Stats 202:

"1. A person successfully completes a task 370 times in 400 tries.  What is the probability that he completes that task:  (a) at least 760 times in the next 800 tries, and (b) less than 720 times in the next 800 tries?

2. We know a person will successfully complete a task 91 percent of the time.  What is the probability that he completes that task at least 370 times in the next 400 tries?"

That's all this is.  All you need to know is how to apply the binomial distribution.  There are other papers on the internet about being able to extrapolate a goalie's save percentage from one season to the next; nothing in those papers indicates that stopping pucks is anything other than a stochastic process.

I realize there is a lot of resistance to the treatment of sports as stochastic, so in the end YMMV.

Kevin13

December 7th, 2016 at 12:37 PM ^

for this program, but he needs to retire and probably needed to retire a few years ago. The team makes the same mistakes it has made for years and you never see improvment. I just think Red has loss touch with coaching young men. It's too bad, but it happens to everyone.

Would love to see Mel return as the head coach, but as been stated this is a huge hire for UM as we need our once proud hockey program to return to being a dominate team.

Sac Fly

December 7th, 2016 at 12:40 PM ^

This program hasn't developed a defenseman in something like 10 years but you couldn't really see it because the guys coming in were already good enough to play. However, Jon Merrill, Jake Trouba, Werenski, Pateryn, Bennett, Kampfer and so on all left Michigan with the same skills that they came in with.

On the flip side, the guys who didn't pan out like Serville, Nolan De Jong, Kevin Clare, Downing, Llewellyn all came to Michigan with holes in their game that never got fixed. You can see it happening right now when Griffin Luce feels the slightest forechecking pressure and coughs up the puck.

When you have an entire group of defensemen for years making the same correctable mistakes on their 1st day as a freshman as they do their last day as a senior you have a huge coaching problem.

stephenrjking

December 7th, 2016 at 1:09 PM ^

One could argue that player development in general hasn't been good. Some guys have grown (Zach Hyman for example) but for many players the skills they've shown on the ice have been the ones they've built themselves.

That last year's offense was keyed by a guy who came in with his skills already equipped before joining the team doesn't seem to be a huge coincidence.

Don

December 7th, 2016 at 12:48 PM ^

He'll be 77 tomorrow. Being a head coach at an elite program isn't an old man's game, and Red is old. Happens to us all.

Contrast this situation with Bo's retirement at just 60 yrs old. I know his health was a concern, but he also wanted to give Gary Moeller a shot at running the program. Why Red hasn't done the same thing for Pearson or Powers is puzzling, at least to me.

If Red wanted to retire last year but Manuel talked him into staying, that might suggest that a preferred successor wasn't ready yet...

Novak-blood

December 7th, 2016 at 12:46 PM ^

I recall being at Yost as an undergrad for the big return to the NCAA Tournament vs. Cornell in '91. So much excitement surrounding the program. Have been fortunate to attend 3 Frozen Fours (Cincinnati '96, Milwaukee '97, Denver '08. Win or lose, the Blue were always so competitive. They'd fight, scratch, and claw 'til the final horn.

Flash forward to today. They got blown off the ice last week by a program that's only been D1 since 2012. It is super hard to watch and pains me deep in my gut. The fall has been precipitous. The 22-consecutive NCAA appearances streak seems so f'ing long ago. I hope Warde will hire someone who can bring us back to our rightful perch contending for championships on an annual basis. Red deserves monumental accolades on March 11 at Yost, along with a 5-minute standing ovation. He brought us back to the top. Time to turn a new page.

lhglrkwg

December 7th, 2016 at 1:22 PM ^

As we're on the wrong side of that streak now, it becomes more and more impressive. It can be hard to make the tourney, especially as a program with a lot of NHL talent that is proone to sudden departures, people never arriving, and relying on freshman to be key contributors. Watching us fight desperately for bids for the last 5 years has made me appreciate how incredible it is to go 22 years without a single off year.

Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 1:42 PM ^

The absolutely amazing thing about what he did--and nobody comments on this--is that the team improved in some respect every year for 12 straight years.  Every season from 1986-87 through 1997-98, Michigan did something more impressive than they had done the year before.  In 10 of those 12 years, the winning percentage was better than the year prior.  I defy you to point to a single team anywhere that can say that.

1986/87:  improved their winning percentage from .316 to .363.

1987/88:  improved to .537

1988/89:  improved to .585

1989/90:  improved to .643, advanced to CCHA final four for the first time ever

1990/91:  improved to .755, NCAA playoff team for the first time in 14 years

1991/92:  improved to .761, CCHA Champion, Frozen Four

1992/93:  improved to .788, Frozen Four

1993/94:  improved to .817, CCHA Tournament Champion

1994/95:  Frozen Four

1995/96:  NCAA Champion

1996/97:  improved to .860, best record since the '40s, overall #1 entering tournament

1997/98:  NCAA Champion

That's the sort of slow, steady, improvement that shows what a masterful job he did of not just creating a winning team but a winning program. 

Let's not look at the last 12 years, though, okay?

Alton

December 7th, 2016 at 1:58 PM ^

College hockey changed on that day.  On March 27, 1997, when Michigan lost to Boston University, that was the end of the high-scoring era of the 1990s and the beginning of the "trap era."  Ron Mason learned his lesson when sitting at home watching that game, and he and his colleagues made their teams better and changed the game for the worse. 

All credit in the world to Jack Parker.  He knew how to beat the best team in college hockey (probably the second best team of the decade, after Paul Kariya's Maine team), and he did it.

Oh, well, all the more reason to celebrate what Michigan had last season.  You don't get a season full of wide-open hockey games like that any more.

theytookourjobs

December 7th, 2016 at 12:55 PM ^

in sports, and life in general.  Often when a person builds something out of nothing or restores something to it's former glory, they can't let go of it and end up damaging it again.

True Blue Grit

December 7th, 2016 at 12:57 PM ^

when even iconic coaches are allowed to stay too long.  Eventually, the game and coaching gets too much for them to handle any more.  I'm very thankful for all Red's done for Michigan Hockey, but he needs to go.  Hopefully, we already have someone that we can hire very soon.

Brian

December 7th, 2016 at 1:39 PM ^

They've fallen behind with various advances in technology and scouting, per a couple sources. Losing Mel was a big blow. And the number of incidents seems to be going up as guys lose their fear of God. 

Also, he's old. It happens.  For every Bill Snyder there's a dozen Bobby Bowdens and Joe Paternos. 

stephenrjking

December 7th, 2016 at 1:59 PM ^

I'm curious how much of Michigan's ability to adapt and play a game suited to its talent (2003's great forechecking team that pounded that astonishing, high-flying CC team and came this close to winning it all, vs. 2011's astonishing defensive masterpiece that also came this close to winning it all) was a result of Red's smart choices and how much was a result of Mel Pearson. 2011 was a coaching masterpiece... but Mel Pearson may have been the one with the paintbrush.

"Guys losing their fear of God" seems to be a nice way of suggesting that playing for Michigan isn't all that pleasant. I don't know if Red knows how to deal with modern athletes, and there doesn't seem to be enough leadership in the locker room to overcome it.

Sac Fly

December 7th, 2016 at 1:08 PM ^

Red started to slip around 2005. It was gradual but looking back you can see it pretty clearly.

Angry Red was something of legend. If one of his teams gave up 58 shots in one game they would have gotten the ass ripping of a lifetime followed by a bagskate like they've never seen before.

Now he's much more detached. He doesn't yell, he's much less involved on the bench. We've seen cancers like Guptill and Clare do whatever they wanted, shit on the program and leave. Old Red would have never put up with that.