Sam Colangelo (23) has yo-yoed a bit from the NHL to the AHL in his first professional season after a four-year NCAA career.
The Anaheim Ducks recalled him twice from the San Diego Gulls of the AHL. He’s played 12 games with the “big club” in the NHL, but he’s scored just one goal.
With Anaheim, he was recalled in late November and was held off the scoresheet for eight games while playing a fourth-line role before he was reassigned to San Diego.
“He’s an interesting player because he can score,” Ducks head coach Greg Cronin said during that time. “He’s had a history of scoring; I think he was definitely a top five or six goal scorer in college.
“He can skate, and our adage is: if you’re getting hits and you’re getting sticks into battles, you’re skating there, right? If you’re not on that spreadsheet, you’re probably not skating fast enough.
“He’s a player that can connect himself to those stats symbolically and make that just a reflection of his ability to get up and down the ice and finish checks. Which is not in the same bubble as a goal scorer, but he knows he has to do that to play in the lineup.”
In the 2023-24 season, he tallied 43 points (24-29=43) in 38 games for Western Michigan in his senior year of college before making his professional hockey debut in April. He scored four points (1-3=4) in four games with the Gulls and finished the season with one point, his first NHL goal, in three games with the Ducks.
He was the oldest skater at Ducks rookie camp and performed well at the ensuing 2024 training camp, but the Ducks had a virtually set top nine and thought it best to send him to the AHL to start the season.
Colangelo was the Gulls’ representative at the AHL All-Star weekend and currently co-leads (Sasha Pastujov) the team in scoring with 33 points (18-15=33) in 34 games.
“Try to stick to that mindset that I developed when I transferred to Western, just get better every day,” Colangelo said of his thought process after he was sent to San Diego in October. “When I got sent down, it was a tough day or two. I just wanted to go down there and try to keep working and get back up here.”
Colangelo was recalled for the Ducks’ season-long six-game road trip in January, a trip that very well may have cost the team a true spot in a playoff race where they went 1-4-1. Due to an injury to Trevor Zegras and an absence from Troy Terry, Colangelo suited up for four games in that stretch and played a true top-nine role.
He scored a goal…