Even with the optimism surrounding John Beilein’s cagers, the last month of Michigan athletics has been one of the bleakest in recent or distant memory. While the collapse of the Wolverines’ football team hasn’t been a total surprise, the early season struggles of the Maize and Blue icers—normally the campus bright spot—have Ann Arbor sports fans shaking their heads in disbelief.

Michigan started the season respectably, winning four of six with the losses coming on the road against Alaska during the Kendall Hockey Classic in Anchorage and at Boston University. But the past two weekends have been less fruitful, as the Wolverines dropped into the CCHA’s bottom three after being swept by Miami and Michigan State consecutively.

Captain Chris Summers and Michigan will try to snap a four-game losing streak this weekend against Bowling Green.

What’s worse is that three of the four losses came at the usually impenetrable fortress known as Yost Ice Arena—perhaps a harbinger of a long year to come.

Despite the early season struggles, coach Red Berenson and Captain Chris Summers are optimistic that Michigan can turn things around and avoid becoming this year’s Michigan State.

“I don’t think that we’re far off the mark, but the margin for error has been so slim,” Berenson said. “We played Miami, the best team in the country, and we gave up a bad goal in each game and that was the difference in each game.”

The obvious problem for Michigan has been scoring goals, as the team has averaged just one per game during its four-game slide. Junior forward Louie Caporusso, who had scored nine goals at this point last season en route to 24 total markers, has scored only once thus far. After finally cracking the score sheet in the season’s fifth game, Caporusso and his teammates were hoping he could keep finding the back of the net, but he has now been held scoreless in five consecutive contests.

In addition to Caporusso, sophomore forward David Wohlberg, a 15-goal scorer last year, also has only a single marker thus far, and several other potential scorers are struggling a well.

It would be easy to write the year off and suggest that Michigan may never find its way, but a look at last year’s North Dakota team that started with a 4-6-0 mark and eventually made the NCAA tournament—almost advancing to the second round in a wild contest against New Hampshire—after finishing the regular season 22-12-4 suggests that a turnaround is possible with the right attitude.

To bounce back in similar fashion, the goals will have to come, but another key component will be the defense—an extremely deep and experienced unit—cutting down on turnovers in the transition game. Against Michigan State, Berenson was extremely frustrated to see two turnovers at the blue line result in Spartan goals.

“The team that wins the games on most nights is the one with the best defense and the one that can get the puck out of the zone,” Berenson said. “We’ve been really inconsistent in that area. We gave MSU the puck coming out of the zone twice, and gave up two goals—that’s absurd.”

Compounding the transition game struggles has been a few costly mistakes by the reliable Bryan Hogan in net, who has committed some rare but deadly turnovers himself. Summers is confident that Hogan, who he describes as a “championship-caliber” goaltender, can bounce back and eliminate some of these mistakes, and Berenson admits that his defense needs to help offset these mistakes.

“(Hogan) definitely looked okay in the early game, but then he went through a stretch where we gave up one bad goal a game,” Berenson said. “And those goals cost us against BU and Miami. He has given us a chance every night, we’re just not used to him giving up a bad goal—we’ve been spoiled.”

Should Michigan clean up their home-zone game and develop some improved offensive chemistry, perhaps these early season struggles will help inspire a hunger that the Wolverines have seemed to lack come tournament time the past few years.

While Michigan arguably outplayed Air Force in a disappointing loss during the first round of the NCAA tournament last year and played well in a run to the Frozen Four the year before, the few years before left a lot to be desired.

Those teams, stacked with skaters who are now everyday NHL players, cruised through the regular season, finishing near the top of the CCHA standings easily.

Might the present adversity help this year’s cast of Wolverines—complete with 12 NHL draft picks—avoid a similar fate come April?

“I think that we’re a team that expects to do well,” Berenson said. “But maybe we haven’t had to pay the price to do well.”