Resurgent Rocket eyeing strong second half | TheAHL.com

📝 by Patrick Williams

The road has been filled with plenty of twists, turns, and detours, along with a few false starts.

But at long last the Laval Rocket appear to have found their way.

After a start in which they won just seven of their first 24 games and found themselves in a deep North Division hole, the Rocket are firmly in contention for a return to the Calder Cup Playoffs. Amid a crush of injuries and recalls to the parent Montreal Canadiens, head coach J.F. Houle’s club is unbeaten in regulation in its last seven outings (4-0-2-1), its best run of the season.

“I feel like we’re turning the corner,” Houle said.

The top five clubs in the North Division will make the postseason cut, and the 17-18-6-2 Rocket are now five points clear of that dividing line. They do yield three games in hand to their closest pursuer, the Cleveland Monsters, but they gained at least a bit of extra room by taking three of a possible four points in a two-game visit to Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse this past weekend.

Considering that early open to their season, the Rocket will take it.

Laval became one of the AHL’s top stories last spring, securing their first-ever playoff berth over the second-to-last weekend of the regular season before outlasting Syracuse in a best-of-five fight that required a come-from-behind Game 5 overtime victory on the road. They needed triple overtime to close out a sweep of Rochester in the division finals, and went the distance in the Eastern Conference Finals before their season finally ended in a Game 7 loss to Springfield.

All along the way, the Rocket continued to build their place on the Montreal sports scene. Just a short ride from downtown Montreal’s Bell Centre, a place that Rocket prospects hope to one day call their full-time home, Laval’s Place Bell was packed each night and made the building a gauntlet for visiting opponents.

But the summer hit the Rocket roster hard. Those strong individual performances opened opportunities in other NHL organizations for several key players. The Montreal organization lost several players, including high-scoring forward Jean-Sebastien Dea and Rocket captain Xavier Ouellet, to opportunities elsewhere. And as the Rocket struggled for much of the first half of 2022-23, that playoff run suddenly felt quite distant.

Gaining even this bit of breathing room recently has been a long road. Goaltender Cayden Primeau, a key story from the postseason run, played just once for the Rocket in a…