The Wolverine

November 2013

The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports

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top line late in the 2013 campaign, providing consistent scoring — the three combined for 17 goals and 17 assists in U-M final 10 games — and the ability to match up with an opponent's best forwards. "The general consensus in hockey is your center needs to be reliable defensively, and that is something our coaches really emphasize here at Michigan," Copp said. "There are some teams that have high-flying centermen, but no team I've played on has let their centers float. "I like playing a full two-way game, especially in our system, to play down low against the other teams' No. 1 lines where I can use my size and physicality to knock guys off pucks. "Coach puts a lot of responsibility on his centers, and I love that." Times Are Changing Inundated by the videos of Gretzky, and subscribing to oldschool thoughts on the matter, many youth coaches steered their best players to the center position, believing like a quarterback in football or a point guard in basketball, a center would be in a position to make a greater impact than the wingers. "A lot of kids get pigeon-holed because the image of a centerman in hockey is that he's going to have the puck more and he's going to make plays to the wingers, and he's going to be the leader of the line," Berenson said. "When you look at the NHL, though, that's not always the way. You can be a great winger, like Brendan Shananan, Brett Hull, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull. "Outside of taking faceoffs, the centerman is not a key player in our system. The first guy on the puck in the forecheck is not necessarily the center. Everyone has to backcheck, and all three forwards play off each other. "There is a lot less classic-center hockey than there used to be when kids all grew up wanting to play center and they did get the puck more, and you had three-on-two rushes, with the center distributing the puck and making those decisions. It doesn't work that way now." Michigan's first first-team AllAmerican forward under Berenson was in fact a wing, Denny Felsner in 1992, and over the past five seasons, a wing has led the Wolverines in scoring four times, not the center. "If it was the case that the best players played center, that wasn't what happened when I was growing up," said Nieves, born January 1994. "A lot of the best players I played with were left or right wingers, and I think you see that in college now, too." "It's really incumbent on all three forwards to be capable of breaking the puck out," Wiseman added. "Since we require our centerman to be down low defensively, he may be the third forward rushing up the ice, and so he's not going to be the guy that is carrying the puck through the neutral zone. He might even be the fourth guy up the ice if a defenseman breaks out before him. "So the idea of a centerman as the center of everything compared to the

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