Hartford Wolf Pack back at home, looking to keep AHL playoff hopes flickering
HARTFORD — Twice, the Wolf Pack have had to pick themselves up off the ice, regroup and scrap to keep their season alive. Do they have one more comeback in them?
“It always comes down to the old adage, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,'” head coach Steve Smith said. “We’ve dealt with some adversity in the playoffs, we’ve dealt with adversity in both series. It’s a resilient group, it’s a driven group, there is still enough youthful exuberance that I feel we’re going to have some energy going into Wednesday’s game and we’ve got some veteran presence that will help those guys funnel down the right path.”
Hartford lost the first two game of its best-of-five AHL Atlantic Division finals in Hersey, 6-1 and 4-2. Now, facing elimination, the Pack will be back on home ice at the XL Center for Game 3 at 7 p.m.
The players were wearing T-shirts with the slogan “One team. One man. One job,” after practice this week.
“There’s kind of a bunch of words we came up with as a team,” goalie Dylan Garand said. “These are three of them. It’s definitely the identity we’ve had in the playoffs. It’s not easy, the further you go, the teams are better and the games get harder. We’re going to have to dig deep, come together as a team, rely on each other and all do our jobs. It’s not going to be easy, but we’re excited to get back home, play in front of our own fans in our own rink.”
The Wolf Pack, the Rangers’ affiliate, have surged into the Calder Cup playoffs two years in a row, and crowds at the XL Center have swelled along with them, especially toward the weekends. They had to play their first series completely on the road at Charlotte, a team to which they lost seven in a row during the regular season. Hartford lost the first game, 3-1 with a short-handed goal playing into it, then tied the series with an overtime win and clinched it in Game 3.
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Against Providence in the next round, Hartford split two on the road, but lost the second game, 6-1. Home came the Wolf Pack to win Game 3, before 4,262, and Game 4, before 6,003, both in overtime.
Hartford was without Garand when they faced the Bears, the Washington Capitals’ affiliate, in Game 1. The Rangers summoned him to North Carolina to be the emergency goalie for Game 6 of their series against the Hurricanes. Garand returned to the Wolf Pack for Game 2, and Hartford was much better, but ultimately broke down over a 5-on-3 situation.
REMINDER
The first 1,000 fans in attendance at tomorrow's (5/22) game will receive a Wolf Pack beverage stick! These fans will be able to go to any stand on the concourse and get $4 draft beers and $2 sodas to fill their stick up with until puck drop at 7 PM.#BackThePack pic.twitter.com/AIL59SVgDF
— x – Hartford Wolf Pack (@WolfPackAHL) May 21, 2024
“We didn’t play very well in the first game, I felt we were actually the better team in the second game,” Smith said. “We did a lot of good things, they took advantage of a couple of breakdowns we had in the second game, but I didn’t see us having many breakdowns. We were pretty efficient defensively, moved the the puck out of our zone pretty efficiently. They were very aggressive, which was something our guys hadn’t seen in the past and they broke us down.”
The Wolf Pack, 34-28 with seven OT losses and three shootout losses, lost one of their top players, Riley Nash, to injury during the series against Providence. Alex Belzile, Brennan Othmann and Brett Berard were their top scorers in the regular season. Jake Leschyshyn is their leader in the playoffs with five goals in nine games. Garand was in goal for 16 wins, with a 3.03 goals-against average during the season.
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Smith, who helped win three Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s, has a long resume of playing, coaching and scouting. He joined Hartford as an assistant last season and took over the Pack when Kris Knoblauch was hired by the Oilers, now in the Western Conference Finals, in November.
“Guys have really embraced him,” Leschyshyn said. “It’s nice having a familiar face step into a bigger role rather than a completely new guy coming during the season, so guys were comfortable with him. He’s done a great job of stepping up and really being a leader for us.”
Hershey, 53-14 with five shootout losses, won the Atlantic Division in the regular season. Former Quinnipiac standout Chase Priskie had eight goals, 26 assists during the season for the Bears, and scored the first goal of this series against Hartford.