How is Michigan going to fit its roster into 19 lineup spots?
My thoughts on the talent on the roster, where they might fit, and how this could all come together.
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I planned to release this Sunday morning, but I finished it right at intermission of the Penguins/Canadiens game, so here it is a bit early!
In recent days, more and more reports have come out that 2021 draft eligible forward Matt Beniers may be flipping his commitment from Harvard to Michigan given the uncertainty surrounding the Ivy League’s sports plans this year.
When I saw the speculation on Thursday, the first thought that crossed my mind was where on earth will Michigan find lineup spots for its incredibly talented incoming class?
Then I started thinking about how to answer that question, and while I don’t think I’ve got it solved, here are some of my thoughts and opinions. Just a quick disclaimer: I know it’s way too early to be thinking about this stuff, and I know there’s a much larger than non-zero chance that the season doesn’t happen. This is just for fun and it gave me something to do while I watched an unhealthy amount of hockey. Don’t take it too seriously.
Goaltending
I’m starting here because it’s the most straightforward. Strauss Mann had an excellent 2019-20 season, finishing second in the nation in save percentage at .934, sixth in goals against average at 1.85 goals per game and was a finalist for the Richter. Barring something crazy happening, he will be Michigan’s starter to kick off the 2020-21 season — if and when that actually happens.
But Mann doesn’t have much room to slip in form, because the Wolverines are bringing in 2019 Buffalo Sabres third-round draft pick Erik Portillo, who is the reigning USHL Goaltender of the Year after a stellar year with the Dubuque Fighting Saints. I don’t expect him to come in and supplant Mann as the starter, but he’ll be waiting in the wings if anything happens.
Jack Leavy enters his third season on the roster and has yet to appear in a game. I presume he’d be fine if needed, but I wouldn’t expect him to see any playing time.
Defense
Michigan lost Luke Martin, Griffin Luce and Shane Switzer on the back end and brings in Owen Power, Jacob Truscott and Steve Holtz.
I wrote about Michigan’s incoming class for The Michigan Daily back in March, so I won’t repeat myself here. The basics are that Power will start his college hockey career at just 17 years old and excelled last year in the USHL with the Chicago Steel and was named the USHL’s defenseman of the year. He’s currently in the conversation to go in the top five to ten in the 2021 draft.
Truscott comes from the NTDP, and I liked what I saw from him in my one viewing in January. Holtz is an overager who played two years in the USHL, one year in the BCHL and seems to have just discovered his offensive touch this past year with Penticton in the BCHL.
These three newcomers will join Jack Summers, Nick Blankenburg, Jake Gingell, Cam York, Keaton Pehrson and Jay Keranen to make up Michigan’s defensive group.
Last season, the Wolverines most commonly lined up as follows:
York - Martin
Luce - Blankenburg
Summers - Pehrson
Martin and Luce are gone, leaving a hole on the right side with York and on the left side with Blankenburg. I wouldn’t expect Mel Pearson to pair York and Blankenburg together, as they’re both a bit undersized (York is 5’11, Blankenburg is 5’9) and Pearson likes to pair an offensive or two-way defenseman with a more stay-at-home blueliner. He also strongly prefers to play his defensemen on their strong side when at all possible, which is where this gets interesting.
Michigan has six left-handed defensemen (Summers, Gingell, York, Pehrson, Keranen, Power and Truscott) and just three righties (Blankenburg, Pehrson and Holtz). If Pearson keeps the handedness to his preference, that leaves three lefties without a role on any given night.
The Summers-Pehrson pair was effective this past year and they looked comfortable together, so I wouldn’t expect that to change right away, if at all. Gingell and Keranen are typically healthy scratches, so I’d expect that to remain the same as well. That leaves something like this:
York - Holtz
Power/Truscott - Blankenburg
Summers - Pehrson
On any given night, one of Power or Truscott would be out of the lineup under this plan. I don’t expect that to happen. I could envision a situation in which Holtz, as an overager who just found a scoring touch this past season while playing in a notably offensive league, sits out at the beginning of the year in favor of playing Power or Truscott with York. Of the two, I’d probably put Power with York and put Truscott with Blankenburg. Call it a gut feeling on that one, because I have no real evidence or explanation for why I’d pick that rather than the other way around. At the same time, Blankenburg is one of the most versatile players on the team — he even played a few games at forward in his freshman year — so it wouldn’t shock me to see him play on the left side.
Given the depth on the left side of the blueline and the relative thinness on the right, it’ll be interesting to see if Pearson sticks to playing his defensemen on their strong sides or if he mixes things up.
Forwards
Y’all, this one makes my head hurt. There is so much talent coming into this team. Again, I wrote about the incoming class in March, so I’ll point you there for more detail on these players.
Michigan is bringing in Kent Johnson, Philippe Lapointe, Brendan Brisson, Thomas Bordeleau and Josh Groll at forward. If they do add Beniers, who Pronman and Wheeler both have high on their 2021 lists, things get even more interesting.
Johnson lit up the BCHL this past year with 101 points in 52 games — at just 17 years old. He’ll be another one of the youngest players in college hockey and, again, Pronman and Wheeler both have him in their top five to ten for 2021. Lapointe played with Johnson for the Trail Smoke Eaters in the BCHL and had 55 points in 36 games after missing the early part of the season with an injury.
Brisson was teammates with Power in Chicago in the USHL and finished second on the team in points with 59. He’s 2020 draft eligible and is expected to go in the late first round. Bordeleau comes from the NTDP and was impressive in the one viewing I had — and he led the U18 team in points. Groll spent this last season with Lincoln in the USHL and notched just above a point per game.
Beniers would be a unique addition, as he finished second to Bordeleau in points for the NTDP while being almost an entire year younger than his teammates.
These five (or six) skaters added to Michigan’s current roster gives them 16 or 17 forwards for a maximum of 13 lineup spots.
This was Michigan’s lineup in the last game of the season:
Jacob Hayhurst - Johnny Beecher - Will Lockwood
Jake Slaker - Luke Morgan - Nick Granowicz
Dakota Raabe - Garrett Van Wyhe - Nolan Moyle
Mike Pastujov - Jack Becker - Nick Pastujov
Jimmy Lambert
Of those, Hayhurst, Lockwood, Slaker and Nick Pastujov are gone. For those keeping track, that’s only four spots opening up and there are five or six players coming in — all of whom have a legitimate case to play.
Counting the new freshmen, this is how the roster shakes out positionally:
Left wing: Mike Pastujov, Dakota Raabe, Emil Öhrwall, Josh Groll
Center: Garrett Van Wyhe, Jimmy Lambert*, Johnny Beecher, Kent Johnson, Brendan Brisson, Thomas Bordeleau, Matt Beniers
Right wing: Luke Morgan*, Jack Becker, Nolan Moyle, Eric Ciccolini, Nick Granowicz, Philippe Lapointe
(Note: for the freshmen, I used the position listed on Elite Prospects, working under the assumption that players just labeled F, as opposed to C, are typically wingers)
Morgan and Lambert have asterisks, which indicates that they’ve played both at center and on the wing at Michigan. Morgan was playing center at the end of the year while Lambert recovered from an injury, but he’s more comfortable on the wing, so I’ve listed him as a winger. Lambert, on the other hand, is better at center, so I put him in that group.
Clearly, some of the players who have been at center previously in their careers will have to move to the wing. There are only four spots for centers in a lineup, and Michigan has six (or seven with Beniers) viable options.
Van Wyhe hasn’t missed a game in his career with the Wolverines and anchored one of the best fourth lines I’ve seen. They didn’t always score a lot, but they just looked like a pain to play against. Lambert was really finding his stride at center before getting hurt at the end of the season. Beecher, a first-round pick of the Bruins in 2019, was probably Michigan’s most dynamic offensive player this past year and developed his ability to find his teammates in scoring position as the year went along.
Then the five freshmen are all first-round caliber talent, some even top five pick caliber talent. I don’t know what you do with that — other than move a couple to the wing.
Much like with his defensemen, Pearson likes to have a left-shot forward at left wing and a right-shot forward at right wing. You’ll occasionally see him move people around depending on available personnel, but my belief is if all goes according to plan, everyone plays on their strong side.
In all honesty, I tried to come up with some projected line charts and it made my brain hurt. Figuring out who to leave off, who to move positions and who to pair with whom melted my brain a little, so feel free to send me your combinations and I’ll give my thoughts, but you will not see projected lines from me yet!
Instead, let’s talk about who’s a candidate to sit out to get Michigan to 13 forwards. Right off the top, I’m looking Pastujov, Moyle and Raabe as potential options. All three have had stretches of high-level play, particularly Pastujov and Raabe, but all three have also been healthy scratches on multiple occasions because of effort level issues. If I need to take some bodies out of the lineup, I’d probably look there first.
Next I would look at Öhrwall and Ciccolini. Pearson wasn’t thrilled with Öhrwall’s skating at the beginning of last year, and while it appeared to improve throughout the season, he only appeared in 15 games and his offensive impact wasn’t quite what was expected after he put up 63 points in 59 games in the USHL the previous year.
Ciccolini also makes the potential list of scratches, through no real fault of his own. He played through repeated shoulder dislocations for most of the season and had season-ending surgery in February. Pearson expected him at the time to be ready to go for the fall, and a likely delayed season will give him even more time to recover, but it wouldn’t be shocking if he wasn’t fully ready to go at the beginning of the season.
I do want to be clear: All of the players I mentioned as potential scratches have played, and mostly played well, at the Division I level. There are a lot of other teams in the country where these players would be at the top of the lineup. But Michigan’s roster is getting crowded and incredibly competitive, so it wouldn’t be crazy to see some of these players come out of the lineup.
I also wouldn’t assume that the lesser-known freshmen, like Groll and Lapointe, will play right away, but I don’t feel like I know enough about who they are as players to make real claims about that.
I wish I had better answers or something valuable to add here about how the forwards will line up this year, but honestly, I don’t have the answers. I can logic my way through how the defensive pairs might look, but the forwards are a complete mystery. The one thing that’s for sure, though, is this team is loaded with talent and will be very, very interesting to watch.
For those of you who read the whole way through this, I’ll give a sneak peek at my next project. I’m working on a (very simplistic) game score calculation and will be combining that data with shift-by-shift video breakdowns of some of Michigan’s key players. I can’t wait to share it!
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