Back to .500

The Wolf Pack tasted a pretty bitter low this past week, but then bounced back strongly to finish on a real high.

It doesn’t get much uglier than Friday’s 6-0 loss to Hershey, which matched the worst home shutout loss in Wolf Pack history. The Pack fell behind in the first period on the team’s first shorthanded goal-against on the season, and never seemed to recover from that. They put precious little pressure on Bear goaltender Jason Bacashihua, and allowed a very good group of Hershey forwards basically to dictate most of the play in the Wolf Pack zone.

There weren’t a ton of shots against—the Pack actually outshot the Bears, 26-24—but many of the chances the Wolf Pack gave up were good-quality ones, and goaltenders Miika Wiikman and Chad Johnson didn’t have much of a chance on any of the goals that went in.

It was pretty much a total team breakdown, but, in one of the good things about the AHL schedule, the Pack had a chance to come right back the next night and wipe out the memory of it, and to their credit that’s exactly what they did…and how!

Mark Bailey and I were saying on Friday’s postgame show that, well, tonight was terrible, but if the Pack shake it off and win the next two, they’re back to .500, 4-1-0 on their five-game homestand and everything would look pretty good. After the way things went against Hershey, I don’t know if we really thought that was a realistic expectation at all, but as it turns out, that’s just what happened.

Everything that went wrong Friday night went right on Saturday, and the Wolf Pack found themselves on the good end of a lopsided shutout, a 7-0 drubbing of the Providence Bruins. It tells you all you need to know about how dominant the Pack was in that game that Johnson, who pitched his first career shutout in the win, wasn’t even one of the Three Stars. The Wolf Pack outshot the Bruins 48-17 in the game, including 18-3 in the first period and 17-4 in the third.

The Pack looked like an energized team, and I chalk a lot of that up to a major roster shakeup that occurred that day. Two players, Miika Wiikman and Ryan Hillier, were dispatched to Charlotte, and three new forwards, Ryan Garlock, Derek Couture and Chris Chappell, were brought in from the Checkers. I don’t think you could have blamed much of Friday’s loss on either Wiikman or Hillier, but with three new guys coming in and being inserted immediately into the lineup, I think a message was sent to the entire team that if things aren’t going the way they need to be, then immediate changes will be made.

The three new guys seemed to add a nice element of size and grit to the lineup, and a couple of individuals who had suffered through real rough nights on Friday were tremendous against the P-Bruins. Bobby Sanguinetti was -4 in the Hershey game, and then came back with a pro career-high four points, including his first two-goal game as a pro, Saturday, and then for good measure tacked on a goal and an assist in Sunday afternoon’s 3-2 overtime win over Manchester. And Corey Locke struggled to a -3 against Hershey, before torching Providence for a goal and three assists and chipping in on all three Pack goals Sunday. He scored the biggest one, of course, managing to poke the puck over the goal line behind Monarch goaltender Jonathan Bernier just before the horn sounded to send the game to a shootout. Check out the great photos by Wolf Pack team photographer Chris Rutsch on the front page of www.hartfordwolfpack.com, of both teams’ reactions to that amazing ending.

Old friend Alex Giroux certainly didn’t pout Friday, upon finding himself back in the Hershey lineup after an NHL tour with Washington, lighting his old Wolf Pack team up for two goals and two assists. And P.A. Parenteau was similarly NHL-like in his return to the Wolf Pack Sunday, assisting on two first-period goals. Parenteau had to be a little disappointed at being back down after he made a pretty good statement in two games with the big club, but he played like he was going to get right back to the dominating level that got him the call to New York in the first place. Give fellow veteran Locke credit, too, for seeing that Parenteau earned himself a shot by helping to carry the Wolf Pack and turning his own production up a notch. If Locke has a few more games like he put together Saturday and Sunday, it’s going to be tough for the big club to keep him out of the NHL too.

Dane Byers, for his part, made the trip with the Rangers out to the West Coast, so that will likely ensure him of staying on the NHL roster at least through Saturday, when the Blueshirts conclude a three-game Western swing in Calgary. Real nice week for Ranger callups, with Parenteau scoring his first NHL goal in his Ranger debut Wednesday on Long Island and Byers denting the twine for his first in the NHL Friday in Minnesota.