Re: Wisconsin Badgers 2019-2020 Season Thread
Any feedback on how they played is welcome. Is it fair tot say they played better Sunday than Saturday? MJ said after game 1 he didn't like how they played between the blue lines; they gave a lot of pucks away. That seemed to be what I saw against BSU as well. One other thing I am interested in learning more about is Norby playing with Greig. Did they spot Norby onto the 4th line? MJ has said in the past he has liked Greig's game quite a bit.
I wasn't following the Wisconsin line combos very closely, but with that caveat, I saw Grieg and G. Shirley out there with Norby a lot. It felt like the latter was getting regular shifts, but that Grieg/Shirley rotated with Schneider/Drake. Posick played little.
Wisconsin did look sloppier than I'm used to. Maybe that was just an off weekend, but I think that there are two actual issues that could be ongoing. This, of course, comes with the note that it's based off of watching only two games. The first is that, as ARM has mentioned, the back end of the defensive corps is not up to the usual standards. After Steffen and Rowe, there's a significant drop off. The S. Potomak/Heise/Zumwinkle kept finding empty space in the Badger zone and taking advantage. In a universe in which hooking and holding were penalties, they would have had a serious problem, because those were the only ways most of the defensemen could keep from getting run over by Amy Potomak. Right now, LaMantia and Buchbinder are liabilities, and Bowlby had a rough weekend. I didn't see Edwards and Grant on the ice enough to get a good feel for their games.
The second issue may not come up very often, but it did this weekend: Watts looks like an awkward fit for a Mark Johnson team. She has one elite, world class skill that I could see: she can be lethal in transition. Once Wisconsin was set up in the offensive zone, she looked good but not great. She isn't an especially good forechecker, and her play in the defensive zone is best described as "indifferent." After the first period on Saturday, Minnesota gave her very little room to operate, with Emily Brown's primary job being to be on the ice whenever Watts was and always staying between her and the net. She did a very good job of it, and Watts was quiet for the rest of the weekend, albeit at the cost of Brown not being much of a factor in the Gophers' offensive game, which a significant thing to give up.
The problem Watts causes for the Badgers is more insidious. Minnesota/Wisconsin games are typically a match to see who can force their preferred style upon the other. The Gophers can look completely lost when Wisconsin really tightens the screws and plays a lock down game. On the other hand, the Badgers get sloppy running around if Minnesota can really crank up the pace. But Daryl Watts, and to a lesser extent Sophie Shirley,
wants to play that loose, speed game and when Minnesota offered it to her, she jumped right in. As a consequence, Wisconsin's top line, which logs a ton of ice time, suffered a systems breakdown. The first four periods of the weekend were played according to the Gophers' script. In the fifth, Wisconsin kept the puck in the Minnesota zone for most of the first fifteen minutes, but struggled to get the puck into good scoring locations. By the third, both teams were exhausted and it was basically a death march to see whose errors would matter most.
Wisconsin has enough talent that they can keep things close under those conditions. Indeed, the problem won't come up very often, because there are few teams that want to play run-and-gun hockey with the Badgers. But what I saw this weekend suggests that, when they do run into a quality team that wants to, they aren't going to maximize their performance. It will be interesting to see what happens when they play BC in Nashville, and I'm now extra glad that I'm making that trip.
, I missed them the couple times I've been down. I hope to be in Madison for volleyball regionals (if WI hosts) but hockey teams are on break then. Oh well.
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