Michigan 16, Lindenwood 8

This game certainly didn’t start out as expected, with Lindenwood taking a 3-2 lead and Michigan only building up a 2-goal lead by halftime. However, the Wolverines turned it on after the break, and a 4-0 third quarter opened up a lead that they would never relinquish on the way to a comfortable victory.

Tempo-Free

From the official game recap, here’s your tempo-free breakdown:

On a tempo-free basis, this was a decent game for Michigan, but not as dominant as they’re capable of being. Part of that is surely because they have to play 4 games in 5 days to have a chance at the National Championship.

The faceoffs were good-not-great, which has sort of been the story of the year, aside from a few really good performances and a couple less-impressive outings. Still, when a team is as good in all other phases of the game as Michigan is, doing better than .500 on draws should be enough to win.

The ride was suffocating, as Lindenwood was able to clear only 42% of the time. The Wolverines’ ride hasn’t been nearly as impressive on paper this year as it has been in the past couple seasons, so to see a performance like this is encouraging for the final games of the year. The clearing was good-not-great, as it has been against competent competition this season.

In all, Michigan finished their chances, and scoring goals is how you win lacrosse games (or so I’ve been told). The final efficiency margin could have been uglier, but for a 3-goal Lindenwood run in the fourth. That brought LU within 3 goals, and Michigan put their foot back on the gas and closed out with a 6-1 run.

Notes

Trevor Yealy hasn’t been stuffing the stat sheet this year like he has over the past three seasons, but he’s turning it on when the team needs him most. After a huge game against Michigan State in the CCLA finals, he poured in a double hat trick and even added an assist(!) against Lindenwood. No other Wolverine had more than two points, as Alex Vasileff and Joe Hrusovsky each had a pair of goals, Thomas Paras had two assists, and Ryan Dutton-O’Hara had one of each.

Brian Greiner went 15-25 on faceoffs, the other lost attempt was credited to Edward Ernst. Greiner finished with 11 GBs on the day, a solid performance (especially since Yealy has seemed to get more faceoff GBs this season, in my estimation).

The standard goalie swap happened at halftime. Stone saw a ton more action with 11 shots on goal (4 of which got past him) in the first half. Fowler allowed 4 goals as well, but made only 2 saves.

Lindenwood threw the kitchen sink at Michigan, no surprise given that it’s probably each team’s last MCLA Tournament. Quoth JP:

We had to settle down our offense and figure out how to attack what they were doing because they were switching between man and zone. When teams throw a zone at you it takes a little while to figure out how to attack a zone because every zone is different but once we started to get comfortable with what kind of zone they were running then our offense started to execute better.

Seeing a bunch of different defenses in round 1 can help the team be a little more comfortable should opponents in later rounds mix it up as well.

Up Next

Michigan takes on Oregon at 4PM Mountain Time (6 real life time) tonight at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. The game will stream live online at CollegeLax.tv. Preview forthcoming… as soon as I can get it written.