^ Posted by Patrick Williams
The winner-takes-all game started to feel increasingly likely and uncomfortable for the Hershey Bears last week.
After two effective road wins to start the Atlantic’s best-of-five semifinal series with the Charlotte Checkers, the Bears ran into some serious resistance trying to finish the series back on home ice. A 2-1 loss in the third game left a normally accustomed coach Todd Nelson on the steam.
Nelson called it “a very ugly game for our hockey team”.
The first period of Game 4 did nothing to lift Nelson’s mood, let alone the increasingly restless and rowdy Giant Center crowd. Charlotte took a 2-0 lead in the opening 7:54 and shorted the Bears on all first half shots. Relentless on the puck throughout Game 3, Charlotte continued to get faster feet, better back pressure and stronger reloads in Game 4, and every Hershey can feel that.
Fourteen minutes into the first half and with one shot on the scoreboard for the Bears, a routine porter pass was skipped. Beck MallensteinThe stick is just inside the neutral zone, just once again in a missed streak of passes and fumbled knocks that have plagued the Bears. Mallenstein continued the defensive checkers man Santo Kinonen into the loose puck left corner and unleashed a jab that lifted Kinonen off his skates and dislodged a pane of glass behind Charlotte’s net.
“Hopefully this will excite the other 19 players,” Bears color commentator and AHL Hall of Fame member said Mitch Lamoureux He said on the team’s radio broadcast.
I finally did. First, however, came the boos from the home crowd at the end of the opening period.
“The first period wasn’t pretty at all,” said Nelson. It was a continuation of [Game 3]. “
But the Bears stuck to the game despite their many frustrations. Ten minutes from the middle of the period, forward Mason Morelli Cutting the left side, Charlotte fought off the defender Lucas Carlsondrove the network, somehow squeezed puck bypass netminder Mac guzda.
Some of the pent-up tension finally left the building. for a few minutes at least.
But then Hershey’s back-to-back minors left Charlotte with an opportunity to crack the game open late in the period and get the game’s energy back. With powerful checkers featuring the likes of Carlson, Corey Conacher And Jerry MayhewThe game can quickly become elusive.
Instead, the Bears managed to block Charlotte’s push, limiting the checkers to four shots, and killing four minutes of the shortened time. carries forward Joe Snelly, who had taken those two late kicks, pulled out of the box into Hershey’s territory, forced a turnover, and sent the Bears on the ice. With Mayhew only returning to defend a two-on-one opportunity, Snively won the puck battle at center ice and fuzzed to field a pass. That pass managed to reach Malenstyn on the blue line in Charlotte, and he ended the breakaway, catching from the side of the shot blocker past Guzda for a 2-2 game with 15.5 seconds left in the second period.
Those shrugs are long gone at this break.
“I think Beck Mallenstein turned the game around for us,” said Nelson. “Going through the bodies, hitting hard, then killing four penalty kicks late in the second and making that goal, was a great effort by him.”
Back from the mother of the Calder Cup playoffs, the Washington Capitals forward Alexi Brutas He hit third period goals with 1:58 to spare giving the Bears an eventual 6-2 victory and putting Charlotte finally behind them.
“We went from being booed on the ice in the first period to being champs in the second and third,” Nelson quipped. “It was a relief, but a little bit of a relief, to be completely honest. No one wants to go to a playoff.
“I think it’s a good learning process for the team. Over the course of the regular season, you have those situations where you come back from a deficit, but the game where you can close a series… I think we grew tonight. I think the guys definitely grew through that process.”
Mallenstein said, “We’ve been through a lot this year. We’ve got a lot of skill in that room. I think we just needed to take a breath. That was the biggest thing. We reset after that first stint. I thought we could get out in the second round and start turning that around.” the match.
“It’s a great experience for us to deal with that. It’s something we’ll definitely be able to count on going forward. I think it’s been a big test for our group. Having that little bit of adversity early on really kind of shows what the playoffs are going to be like.”
The Bears are sure to face many of those tests if this Calder Cup playoff run is going anywhere. With Providence, the team that frustrated the Bears all season, eliminated, Hershey is the highest remaining seed in the Eastern Conference and will have home ice advantage through at least the Conference Finals. But first they have to get past the Hartford Wolf Pack, who knocked out Springfield and Providence, in a best-of-five Atlantic Division Finals series that opens tonight.
Brotas played just nine regular season games with the Bears and spent most of the second half in Washington before returning to Hershey. But he can sense what the Bears are going through inside their locker room.
“This is one of the greatest groups of people,” Brutus said. “I haven’t been here in a while, but I can see how tight this group is, how close these guys are together, and it’s fun to play with these guys.”
They will need that textured feel to continue building. Nelson won a Calder Cup as a player and assistant coach, and most recently as a head coach with the Grand Rapids Griffins in 2017. He saw all that a Calder Cup playoff team could offer a young team. If the Bears are to make the same journey this spring, he knows these early tests will be just the beginning.
“I think it’s a good thing we got through this,” Nelson said. “I really do. I want them to learn how hard it is.”
Patrick Williams has been in the American Hockey League for nearly two decades for outlets including NHL.com, Sportsnet, TSN, The Hockey News, SiriusXM NHL Network Radio, and SLAM! Sports, and she is currently the co-host of Hockey news on the “A” podcast. He was awarded the James H. Ellery Memorial Award from the AHL for his excellent coverage of the league in 2016.