Marcantuoni is Gone

From the Sault Star:

 

The Toronto Marlboros centre's lack of enthusiasm for the OHL — he told almost everyone he had a serious interest in playing NCAA hockey at the University of Michigan — scared off the majority of teams in Saturday's draft.

Except. . . the Rangers, who selected Marcantuoni 18th overall.

And wouldn't you know it?

On Sunday, the six-foot, 180-pounder told the Kitchener Record: "The only team I would play for is Kitchener."

Boo.

More Details About "The Big Chill"

Great find by a commenter on my last post: AthleticBusiness.com has a fantastic story about The Big Chill at The Big House, which includes several comments from Mike Stevenson. In there, he mentions that the Wolverines will be wearing 1940s-style throwbacks for the game. Awesome!!

So, which ones will they be? A quick query of the Bentley Historical Library's image archive has a few choices:



My vote is for the white ones, because they're the goofiest-looking, and therefore the coolest to have as a throwback.

There's a lot more in the article than just talk about our jerseys, however. There's great stuff in there about the process of setting up the rink, the financial considerations, even why you'd want to rent a separate Zamboni from the one used in your arena.

Stevenson also talks about wanting to get the "Big Chill" graphic on the ice, even though it's typically not recommended due to dark spots attracting sunlight. Michigan may take a creative approach however:

"One of the options we're looking into is whether we can project that logo on the ice from some type of a light system and not have it actually in the ice," he says.

I'm curious how that would work and not annoy the players. It'd be kind of sweet though.

It's a really great read. Another very cool revelation is that if the ground is frozen, they may plow the golf course and let cars park on it. How awesome would it be to tailgate on the golf course before a hockey game at Michigan Stadium?

OHL Stuff and the New Playoff Format

The OHL Draft was today and Bob Miller had a great thread on The Wolverine about it. The quick version: Boo Nieves went to Niagara in the 10th round and that's a good sign since "if anything was in the works they would've taken him WAY earlier".

Matia Marcantuoni went to Kitchner in the first round and that's probably not a good sign for him eventually donning the Maize and Blue. He dropped farther than you'd typically expect and that likely means he was telling some teams he wasn't going to the OHL, but is that true or positioning to play for a team? I'm not taking that as good news, though it would be phenomenal if he ended up at Michigan.

Kitchner also took target Jacob Trouba in the third round, which isn't bad but not necessarily a good thing either. Goalie target Dalton Izyk didn't go until the 11th round. Good sign for him playing college hockey. Commit Connor Carrick also didn't go until the 11th round, to Guelph.

There are some other names thrown around in that thread, including a few other players that Michigan could ultimately be interested in.

MGoBlog has an early look at next year's forwards, including some good stuff about Moffatt and Fallon's draft status. Interesting that Fallon is pretty well thought of, despite some off-ice issues and not a ton of on-ice production.

The only real point of contention: I think Glendening was too good last year to be relegated to the fourth line. Even if Moffatt and Fallon both show up and make a heavy-impact offensively--which I don't think is a lock--I don't see him falling lower than the third line. He fit right in in our top six last year. I don't think you can relegate a twenty point scorer who constantly does good things down to the fourth line.

I like the pick of Chris Brown to "break out", if you can break out after a 28 point freshman season. I fully expect a monster year out of Brown.

And yes, Carl Hagelin is going to be so, so awesome next year. I'd be very surprised if he doesn't find himself in the mix to be a Hobey finalist. There aren't too many players in the country who bring as much to the table as he does.

Moffatt and Merrill won gold at the U-18 World Championships. Merrill has apparently seen his draft stock go through the roof. He was picked as one of the three best players on Team USA.

Michigan has now sold 92,839 tickets for The Big Chill at The Big House. It won't be too much longer until they crack six figures. Ridiculousness. They've just launched an additional site for the "after party" where apparently area restaurants will be serving "Big Chill" themed eats and drinks. There's not much on there yet, but it bares watching in the future. All I want to see is that we're doing an open-skate like they did at Camp Randall. That was so full of win.

No shocker, but INCH has Carl Hagelin on their list of the top ten returning players for next season. Tommy Wingels is the only other representative from the CCHA.

Lastly, the CCHA said, "Hey, the Big Ten has 11 teams, we have 11 teams. Let's adopt their tournament format." The top five teams will get byes in the first round, while 6-11, 7-10, and 8-9 play each other. In the second round they'll re-seed as usual. The 4 and 5 seeds from the regular season know they'll be playing each other. And the four winners in the second-round go to the Joe.