pick<\/a> and stalwart for Team Canada at the U-18 and U-20 levels, making Michigan\u2019s net his own while only being a freshman. Both his .927 SV% and 1.92 average goals allowed ranked him among the conference\u2019s and country\u2019s best. He continued to show he could elevate his game for the big occasions against then-No. 2 Western Michigan and then-No. 3 Michigan State. And now, at least for the time being, he is gone.\u00a0<\/p>\nThis was a young Michigan team that had already vastly exceeded preseason expectations, ascending to the No. 1 rank thanks to a scintillating first half of the season. Michigan had an arsenal of attacking firepower, elite special teams and one of the best goaltenders in the country. But without that said netminder, things suddenly looked very grim. One could\u2019ve assumed that without Ivankovic, the Wolverines wouldn\u2019t be able to keep pace with the Spartans, or No. 2 Wisconsin or No. 8 Penn State, all of whom they will face again without him. This was going to be yet another year lost to the annals of history of a proud program, one that has watched 27 years and counting of talented teams slip by without a national championship.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And that can still happen \u2014 the future is always in motion, and none of those series have been played yet. But this past weekend could be reason for the Wolverines and their faithful to believe that it won\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Into Ivankovic\u2019s young but already big shoes stepped freshman goaltender Stephen Peck. Peck is a talented goaltender in his own right, having spent last season with the USHL champions Muskegon Lumberjacks, but he didn\u2019t have quite the pedigree of Ivankovic. Unexpectedly thrust into the net against Notre Dame, Peck was far from perfect \u2014 allowing three goals, with a save percentage of .857 \u2014 but he did enough to hold on and secure a victory.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This weekend, against the Gophers \u2014 his first series as a starter \u2014 Peck showed enough to suggest that he could be a steady pair of hands down the long road ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\u201cTough atmosphere for Pecker, but he was confident,\u201d senior forward T.J. Hughes said. \u201cI thought he played unreal. He was the backbone of the weekend for us, and credit to him, fought through it, got the nod to go with Jack going down, and he did unbelievable. So I\u2019m so happy for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peck kept his save percentage above .900 both nights. He allowed three goals and made 43 saves across the series. He came up with crucial plays when he needed to, notably at the points in the game on both nights where Minnesota had leveled the score and were knocking on the Wolverines\u2019 door with shot after shot. While he wasn\u2019t perfect \u2014 in particular, he struggled on the penalty kill, allowing two goals off Gophers power plays \u2014 he was certainly strong enough to help win both games.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His presence also meant that Michigan doesn\u2019t need to totally rethink its team-wide approach just yet. The Wolverines, up until this point, have relied on an aggressive forecheck to generate relentless offensive pressure because they knew that Ivankovic would be there to come up big if anything goes wrong in transition. And Michigan very much played the same style of hockey this weekend, racking up 100 shots across the two games. Thanks to Peck\u2019s performance, the Wolverines could stick to the same script they drew from with Ivankovic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a good hockey player, and that\u2019s why depth is so important,\u201d Naurato said. \u201cIt\u2019s just next man up, and he\u2019s been doing great.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, this can all be caveated pretty easily. There\u2019s no sugarcoating the fact that this is not the usual caliber one can expect from a Minnesota team, and Michigan needed overtime to beat it tonight. And while the Wolverines have consistently generated offensive pressure this season, it seems a bit unlikely that they\u2019re going to average 50 shots every game.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\nBut shots are shots, no matter who they\u2019re coming from. At the end of the day, Peck did a great job at keeping the puck out of the net. Michigan may not generate pressure at quite<\/em> the same rate in every game going forward, but it at least has a template that it knows it can rely on \u2014 if the Wolverines can get their offense the puck as much as possible, they just need to trust Peck to clean up whatever\u2019s left over. And as poor as this iteration of Minnesota is, this is still a place where the Wolverines haven\u2019t come away with a sweep since 2018. The Gophers are among the most storied brands in hockey, and beating them will always at least carry symbolic weight \u2014 for a team that\u2019s just lost one of its cornerstones, it could be a confidence booster.\u00a0<\/p>\nAnd there\u2019s still a lot of hockey to be played. It\u2019s possible that Peck won\u2019t be this consistent every weekend going forward, or Michigan\u2019s high offensive production will be unsustainable and that Ivankovic\u2019s loss will prove to be what derails a promising season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But for the time being, there\u2019s a sample size to suggest that, just maybe, there\u2019s still a reason to hope for the Wolverines. A reason to believe. A reason to dream.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/aside>\n
Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MINNEAPOLIS \u2014 The No. 1 Michigan hockey team\u2019s sweep over Minnesota shouldn\u2019t feel like a big cause for celebration.\u00a0 The Wolverines were the clear favorites going into the series. This is far from a vintage Golden Gophers team, who, with eight wins on the year, are on track to becoming the first Minnesota team since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4142,2114,807,222],"class_list":{"0":"post-4360","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-breathe","9":"tag-ivankovic","10":"tag-jack","11":"tag-michigan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4362,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4360\/revisions\/4362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}