MADISON — Of the 14 wins the No. 10 Michigan hockey team has collected this season, five of them are overtime victories. On top of that, the Wolverines have two ties from pushing games past overtime into shootouts. Michigan has consistently shown that it can find ways to win past regulation, but struggles closing out games in 60 minutes — and that’s its problem.
If the Wolverines hope to spend the majority of March competing in the playoffs, then they have to forgo their affinity for overtime games.
The question isn’t whether the Wolverines have the skills at their disposal to win in the extra period. They have proved time and time again that in the 3-on-3 matchups, there are various players ready to jump in to finish the game and even enjoy doing it.
“Overtime is always exciting,” junior forward Josh Eernisse said Nov. 2 after beating then-No. 5 Boston University in overtime. “It favors our team, we have a lot of speed.”
While an overtime win is exciting, the novelty of those last-minute goals has worn down Michigan’s offense. Since winter break alone, the Wolverines have a record of 3-4-1. Two of those wins came in overtime, and Saturday’s shootout win against Wisconsin is the lone tie.
Though the overtime period is just five minutes, it’s five minutes each game that Michigan simply can’t afford. Throughout the season, the Wolverines struggled with keeping players healthy and have already seen two players depart from the program. Sophomore forward Tanner Rowe even transitioned into a defenseman for a few games because of the lack of blue-line players in Michigan’s locker room.
This puts even more stress and strain on the players over the season as the Wolverines continuously push past 60 minutes of play with a thin roster.
“We need a little bit more out of everybody,” Michigan coach Brandon Naurato said Saturday. “If we get the best version of everybody, we’ll be in a good spot.”
Michigan ended the first half of the season with a focus on finding a second-half push to make a playoff run in March plausible. But the Wolverines statistically hold the hardest schedule in NCAA hockey. Alongside a brutal lineup for out-of-conference games, Michigan has to face various ranked Big Ten opponents on a weekly basis. While the beginning of this schedule rewarded the Wolverines through the early parts of the season, it’s a cause for concern as they look to dig even more for their playoff hopes.
That’s not to say that these overtime wins haven’t shown Michigan’s grittiness. In their stack of extra-period triumphs, the Wolverines have conquered then-ranked No. 1 Michigan State and the Terriers.
But the overtime trend becomes an issue when Michigan can’t win in three periods versus unranked and Big Ten opponents.
Though it didn’t count in the season statistics, the Wolverines needed overtime when facing the U.S. National Team Development Program. More recently, Michigan is 1-2-1 against Wisconsin, a team that has remained unranked nearly this entire season — an important factor in Big Ten standings.
Each win in the conference gives a team three points, while an overtime win drops it down to just two points. When the Wolverines aren’t able to close out games in regulation, it pushes them lower and lower in the conference to their current standing in fifth place. If the season ended today, they wouldn’t host a home game in the first round.
Expanding past just the conference tournament, an overtime win damages Michigan in its pairwise standings as well. The Wolverines currently sit at 12th place in the pairwise, a ranking that decides their viability in the NCAA Tournament. In a different format than the Big Ten, each win counts as one point, but an overtime win counts for two thirds of a point.
In the past few years, Michigan has proved that it can string together wins at the end of the regular season to get to the Frozen Four. But those wins weren’t consistently decided in an extra five minutes of play. For the Wolverines to put together another late run, they must hold onto their early leads rather than letting the game slip through their fingers to the point of a last-minute save.
Through the overtime wins during the season, Michigan has learned it has the personnel to look to when it needs one more goal to walk away victorious. At this point in the season, the Wolverines aren’t having an issue finding players to score.
But Michigan needs its players to find a way to make 60 minutes enough rather than relying on an extra five to win games. Because winning in overtime isn’t sustainable when suddenly those extra five minutes decide the fate of its season.
The post Mackenzie Mielke: Michigan’s overtime success isn’t sustainable appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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