Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Bit by bit, the San Diego Gulls are beginning to find their way.
Josh Lopina and Pavol Regenda are the only two regulars remaining from the 2022-23 team that finished with a league-low 43 points. Matt McIlvane arrived as head coach before last season, which saw a 20-point improvement – but still only good for ninth in the 10-team Pacific Division.
So a 4-12-1-1 start could have buried this team. A “here we go again” feeling could have been understandable.
Instead, the Gulls have shown some fight. They won four of their first five outings in December, including two victories over a quality San Jose Barracuda club. They re-established a presence on home ice, too, with points in four straight games at Pechanga Arena.
The Anaheim Ducks went out in the offseason and added several new veteran pieces to provide depth and help guide their prospects, including forwards Ryan Carpenter, Jansen Harkins and Carson Meyer; defensemen Roland McKeown and Dillon Heatherington; and netminder Oscar Dansk, who came aboard in September after an ACL injury sidelined promising prospect Tomas Suchanek for six to eight months.
Still, at some point it becomes important to hand over some of the responsibilities and burdens to the younger players. Anaheim, which has not made the NHL playoffs since 2018, has stockpiled draft picks over the last several years. These young Gulls very much needed to see their work start to pay off in wins and points.
Rookie Sam Colangelo, who has played eight games for the Anaheim Ducks this season, leads the Gulls with 10 goals. Another first-year forward, Yegor Sidorov, has nine points in his last five games and is the reigning Howies Hockey Tape/AHL Player of the Week. With Suchanek out, 22-year-old Calle Clang has taken the majority of work in the San Diego net and has won four consecutive starts, including making 28 saves in Saturday’s 5-2 decision against the Barracuda – a game in which 2022 first-round draft pick Nathan Gaucher chipped in his first goal of the season.
Last night’s 2-0 setback in Tucson began an important four-game week that continues against the Roadrunners on Wednesday before a two-game visit to Colorado. Then it’s back home for meetings with Ontario and Bakersfield before a New Year’s Day rematch with San Jose.
With under three minutes to go in the third period of Saturday’s win, the Gulls had seen a 4-0 lead shrink to 4-2. A young San Diego team had to figure out how to protect a lead and close out the game against a potent San Jose offense.
They did. Colangelo finished off the win with an empty-netter.
“We could sense a little bit of our youth in the third,” McIlvane said after the contest. “Trying to figure out how to manage a game like this… It’s a new situation for us, but the guys hunkered down and obviously got the job done.”
On the American Hockey League beat for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.
