If you ever played Little League Baseball, you probably remember someone telling you that "winning isn't everything".
So far this season, no philosophy means more for the Hartford Wolf Pack than that one.
In case you haven't heard, the Wolf Pack are the youngest team in the AHL this season. With an average age of 22 years, 10 months, the team's inexperience is showing in the early going this season. The team currently is in last place in the Atlantic Division with a less than stellar 4-9-1-0 record. Collectively, the team hasn't clicked yet.
Hardly a reason to panic.
Fourteen games into the season, and the Wolf Pack have scored 32 times. That averages out to about 2.29 goals per game. Now, if you factor out the nine-spot that the Wolf Pack put up against San Antonio on Saturday, and you have a team that has scored 23 times in 13 games. If you do the math, you get an average of 1.76 goals per game.
The reason?
I'm willing to say it's a lack of veteran leadership. We've already established that the Pack are the youngest team in the AHL. Dale Purinton is the resident elder on the team, with goaltender Steve Valiquette close behind him. Czech defenseman Martin Richter, tough guy Francis Lessard , and hard-hitting winger Craig Weller round out the list of Pack players who are 25 years old. None are playing well.
Valiquette had been steady in goal for the Pack up until the past couple of games. Then, he started letting in real soft goals. It wasn’t noticeable in Saturday’s game vs. San Antonio because the Pack scored nine times, but on Sunday vs. Lowell it was pretty evident.
Dale is Dale. He’s not going to score goals, or create plays... because he can’t from the penalty box. Entering Sunday’s game vs. Lowell, Dale had accumulated more penalty minutes than anyone in the AHL (58). He’s accumulated six fighting majors so far, and one misconduct. The rest were minors.
Lessard, who is currently injured, has only played in four games this season. Weller hasn’t been himself. He’s had one good game so far this year, that being the Pack’s 4-3 victory over Portland where he scored twice. That was the only game I can safely say that Captain Craig came to play.
As far as Martin Richter goes, he’s underachieving. I doubt the Rangers brought him back to North America to do absolutely nothing -- in which case he’d be doing an excellent job. As it stands, Richter has been barely noticeable on the ice this season.
All the top teams in the AHL -- Portland, Hershey, Wilkes-Barre, Rochester, Omaha, Chicago -- have veteran players who help ease the transition of young players into the pro game. That, and their leaders are producing. If the Pack had a veteran to lead the way, I think their record would be much better than 4-9-1-0.
Maybe I’m wrong.
However, the Pack’s poor record is not necessarily an indicator of how the kids are playing. In fact, many of them actually are playing quite well. It’s just a matter of getting them to play well together that they’re still working on. Some have really stood out and have showed a great deal of promise, others have been less than great. For the record, the stats I’m referring to from this point on are all entering Sunday’s game vs. Lowell.
Al Montoya is perhaps the epitome of the Wolf Pack’s struggles this season. Individually, he’s been phenomenal. He’s the #8 goalie in the entire AHL with a 2.32 goals against average and a 91.9% save percentage. However, his record is 1-6. He just hasn’t gotten great offensive support in the games that he’s played in. On October 21st, he stopped all but one of 32 Portland shots. The result? A 1-0 loss. He’s played a lot better than he has last season, making several key stops on breakaways which he wouldn’t have stopped last season. The effort and performance are there, the results aren’t.
Go figure.
Marvin Degon, who joined the Pack on an Amateur Tryout at the end of last season, has played very well for the Pack so far this year. Not only is he shooting the puck a lot more (he registered seven shots on goal last Wednesday vs. Wilkes-Barre), but he’s also putting up decent numbers on offense for this team. I said in my first article that he was going to have to help produce on offense with the departure of Thomas Pock. Sure enough, he has. He and Dan Girardi are the two main guys who quarterback the powerplay, Girardi tends to pass more (as evidenced by his five assists on Saturday vs. San Antonio), Degon is the one more likely to shoot. If people got to the rebounds, the Pack would be a lot better off. Problem is, they can never seem to find the rebounds of anyone’s shot.
Jarkko Immonen hasn’t found the scoring touch that he had last season, though I highly doubt that he has lost it all together. His teammates are trying to set him up, he just can’t seem to put the puck past the goalie. He is putting the puck on net though -- in four games this season he’s had five or more shots. Like the rest of the team though, there’s no real reason to panic. Everyone’s struggling at the moment, and once they click, you’ll start to see results.
Lee Falardeau has been a lot more physical this year than he has in the past. He doesn’t seem to have a problem laying people out, dishing the rough stuff, and getting involved in the gritty side of the game. Another player I’ve noticed has gotten slightly more gritty is Greg Moore. He’s pretty strong on the puck, and he’s made a couple of real strong moves driving to the net. However, he’s also made some rookie mistakes. On Sunday in the game vs. Lowell he led a Wolf Pack odd man rush out of the zone in the third period, only to have the puck slide off his stick and right to a Lowell defender. Like everyone, they’ve got some work to do.
The four best Wolf Pack players out on the ice on a given night so far have been Ryan Callahan, Dane Byers, Lauri Korpikoski, and Brandon Dubinsky.
Callahan, like everyone else on the team, started the season off slow. Then, he caught fire. Beginning with the Wolf Pack’s trip to Norfolk, he’s scored nine goals in his last nine games -- including a hat trick in Saturday’s defeat of San Antonio. I said last month that he was going to have to fill the void left by Nigel Dawes, and he’s done pretty much exactly what Dawes did last year. Both of them started off slow, only to wind up leading the team. Callahan is undoubtedly the best player the Wolf Pack have iced this season. He’s tough to knock off the puck, isn’t afraid to dig pucks out of the corners, and has a cannon of a shot. He seems to be everywhere on the ice -- he’s always involved in the play.
Dane Byers, who I was skeptical about early on in the year after a lackluster performance at the end of last season, has really turned a lot of heads in Hartford. Not only is he very physical, but he’s turned into a decent point producer. There is one play in particular that stands out in my mind when I think about Dane Byers, and it happened at the end of the second period in the game vs. Wilkes-Barre. After narrowly missing a scoring chance, Byers was drilled from behind into the boards by Marc-Antoine Pouliot. The referee was going to call a penalty, but Byers decided to take things into his own hands. He instantly dropped his gloves and gave Pouliot a major league beating. Byers wound up getting the extra penalty on the play, but there is no way in my mind that that was the correct call. Byers doesn’t back down from anything. He’s far from an enforcer, but he’ll drop the gloves if he has to.
Korpikoski reminds me of Jozef Balej. He’s strong on the puck, has good hands, and can shoot. His only drawback is that he holds on to the puck too long, and tries to make a lot of stuff look pretty when it doesn’t have to. He’ll also throw his weight and size around, but he’s not one to drop the gloves. He has before, but it didn’t go so great. He’s also a great skater, and can move quickly and get just about anywhere on the ice in a matter of seconds. The biggest knock on him is he holds on to the puck too long. He can pass well, shoot well... it’s just that when he does it it’s usually too late.
The last guy I’m going to touch on is Brandon Dubinsky. The stats don’t say much at all, I realize that. He’s got two goals and an assist in 11 games so far this season, but I mentioned before effort doesn’t necessarily generate results. He’s playing a great deal with Dane Byers and Craig Weller, so that might explain it. However, the kid is tough. I remember in the Wilkes-Barre game, a Penguins player was skating in on Montoya. Montoya made the save and the Penguins player kept on skating and got right up against Montoya as the ref blew his whistle. Dubinsky wouldn't stand for it, and he came right in and grabbed the guy and took him down to the ice. It was good seeing him stick up for Montoya like that. Also, although his offensive production isn’t there -- and realistically only Ryan Callahan’s is -- he’s made some strong power moves to the net. In the game vs. Lowell he jumped around two or three guys to get to the puck in the corner.
Bottom line, the guys are young. They’ll get better over time. You can’t expect instant gratification from a group of prospects. At this point, winning is not everything. It’s not like they’re completely lost out there -- they know what they have to get done and they’re putting the effort in, they just haven’t clicked on a regular basis.
The recent addition of Nigel Dawes can only help. If he can kick start either Jarkko Immonen or Dwight Helminen, the entire team’s offense is bound to improve.
When they do finally click, this team will be even more fun to watch.
- Calder
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