Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Todd Nelson termed it a “come-to-Jesus meeting” for his club.
Something did not seem quite right, and Nelson could sense it. Shut out in back-to-back games. A split of a two-game trip to Charlotte the following weekend. After a shootout loss Mar. 15 at Utica, he had seen enough. In Hershey, where the defending Calder Cup champion Bears are positioned to make a run at the AHL’s best regular-season record ever, a 1-2-0-2 stretch practically qualifies as a slump.
“We were playing halfway in,” Nelson said. “Just playing to play the game.”
The Bears had a lot swirling around them in March. They clinched a playoff berth a full six weeks before the end of the regular-season schedule. There was the brief assignment of NHL star Evgeny Kuznetsov by the Washington Capitals, a move that put the Bears in headlines across the hockey world. And Nelson saw the potential for problems ahead. Six weeks is a long time – too long, perhaps – for his players to tune up and tweak their individual and collective games before the postseason.
He saw the high standard that they had worked so hard to solidify now not quite up to his liking.
“We’re going to get everyone’s best game, especially this time of the year,” Nelson said. “I think that’s good for our hockey team to play these competitive games.”
Two factors went into the decision to call a meeting that also included staff and scratches.
“There was a bit of bickering going on on the bench and during practice,” Nelson elaborated. “I wanted to nip that in the bud. That was the first part.”
He also circled back to the team’s seven-game fight last June in the Calder Cup Finals against Coachella Valley.
“And the second part is – we hate to talk about last year, but we’ve always talked about how tight our dressing room was last year. That’s probably why we won the Cup. If we didn’t have a tight dressing room and didn’t love each other in there, and Coachella scores to tie it up 4-4 in Game 3 (already leading the series 2-0), the guys could have easily packed it in. But they didn’t. They stuck with it.
“We just said to everybody in there that our closeness is going to help us win games. We’re a close team. Still, there is room for improvement. [If] the guys have a tough night, we want to pick them up, help them out because not everybody’s perfect every night. We just talked about that and how important it is.”
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