Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
“It was a satisfying weekend,” Utica Comets head coach Kevin Dineen said.
Back-to-back shutout wins – against Lehigh Valley and at Hershey – have the Comets within four points of a playoff spot in the North Division. But Dineen and his team will need to continue to work to find stronger footing in the race to the postseason.
The Comets will reconvene Thursday before their latest most-important weekend of the season. Leading off will be a visit from the Toronto Marlies on Friday night. From there they host the Belleville Senators on Saturday, before finishing the weekend with a trip west on the New York State Thruway to Rochester on Sunday.
Three opponents, three clubs that the Comets are pursuing as the AHL season moves into its stretch drive.
It won’t be easy, but there are plenty of growth opportunities for the Comets as they try to run down a playoff spot come April.
Last weekend started with Erik Källgren delivering a 28-save shutout last Friday in a 3-0 win over Lehigh Valley at the Adirondack Bank Center. It was a much-needed boost – and two points – for Källgren, who signed with the New Jersey Devils as a free agent last summer but has been limited by injury to 14 appearances for Utica this season. Friday’s win was his third in a row since returning to the lineup in mid-February.
“He just went out and worked his tail off,” Dineen said of Källgren. “At the end of it, that’s all you can ask of a guy. He waited for his time to get in the net, and we could tell he was itching to get in there. When he did, he proved what kind of potential he has as a goaltender. I’m really pleased with not only the way he’s played but the way he’s handled his adversity this year.”
While Källgren was out, the Comets turned to second-year netminder Isaac Poulter, and he has emerged as someone capable of handling a heavy AHL workload. After a long overnight trip to Hershey following the win Friday, Poulter led the Comets into Giant Center and blanked the AHL’s first-overall club with 27 stops for his fourth shutout this season. In all Poulter has played 26 games, going 15-8-1 with a 2.56 goals-against average and .912 save percentage.
New Jersey management saw enough to give him a two-year entry-level deal on Feb. 15.
Now comes this three-in-three weekend, a busy stretch that the Comets have largely been able to avoid this season. Their only previous run of three games in three days came in December; Utica defeated Bridgeport and Syracuse (twice) to sweep that weekend.
The Comets need points now to ensure that they are not simply playing out the stretch in April. To that end, Dineen consulted with the Devils organization’s deep battalion of specialists to map out this week’s plan. Along with an array of trainers, strength coaches and others, the Devils have sports scientist and performance coach Steve Nightingale along with certified sport dietitian Amy Marteney on staff. Player development is not a small operation anymore, and ample resources are put toward giving an organization’s prospects any edge possible.
So the Comets had a good practice Tuesday before taking a midweek day off for recovery.
“We’ll really get into our pace on Thursday and then just get ready to get going,” Dineen outlined. “A lot goes into what we call player loads. We have some real quality people in the organization that are able to dumb it down to us and give us good feedback, and then we come to a consensus on how we’ll handle things.”
Pressure is all around at the moment for both New Jersey and Utica. The Devils are in their own fight for a playoff spot and made a coaching change this weekend, replacing head coach Lindy Ruff with associate coach Travis Green – a Comets coaching alumnus from their days affiliated with the Vancouver Canucks. And for the Comets, an eight-game winless slide (0-5-0-3) earlier in the season has left them having to play high-pressure hockey thereafter in the tightly packed North Division race.
“We need more consistency in our game,” Dineen acknowledged. “We put ourselves in this kind of lot in life based on how we played earlier in the year. Lessons are learned. This season is still in the thick of it right now. We talk about it as a group, and we fess up on the areas that we’ve been lacking, and we hit it head-on.”
Still, there is a lot to like about where the Comets are at the moment. Along with the league’s sixth-ranked penalty kill at 84.6 percent, Utica has tightened up defensively. At the 36-game point, they were allowing 30.14 shots per game. In the 16 games since then, they have been able to hold opponents 28.8 shots per game. Dineen and the coaching staff made adjustments to the club’s coverages, and that decision has come through nicely.
“I think that’s been a real benefit for our players,” Dineen said. “I can see how [the Bears] have had the success they have had this year there. They’re very confident with the puck. They love to make plays, and I thought we did a good job minimizing that. Our players are recognizing that we’re going to be in tight games all the time. Let’s get comfortable with it and maximize taking advantage of the chances we do get.”
It has taken time, but Dineen likes where his team stands going into this critically important weekend. The first half’s hard-earned lessons are starting to take hold.
“To me,” Dineen said, “identity goes a little bit hand-in-hand with consistency because we’ve shown snap shots of it off and on. But there’s a full realization that’s driven by our veteran group. We have guys in [Joe] Gambardella, [captain Ryan] Schmelzer, [Robbie] Russo and [Tyler] Wotherspoon that are wearing letters on our team that really drive that message, and I think it’s been impactful for us.”
TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams has been on the American Hockey League beat for nearly two decades for outlets including NHL.com, Sportsnet, TSN, The Hockey News, SiriusXM NHL Network Radio and SLAM! Sports, and was most recently the co-host of The Hockey News On The ‘A’ podcast. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.
