Pack Bank Holiday Points

The Wolf Pack celebrated Thanksgiving with their first four-games-in-five-days stretch of the season, and they were good enough in those four contests to move into second place in the Atlantic Division.

On the good side, the Pack cashed at least a standings point in all four of the games, going 2-0-1-1, but in the glass-is-half-empty vein, they let a 2-0 lead slip away in a 3-2 shootout loss in Bridgeport Sunday, and also blew a 2-0 third-period advantage Friday against Portland, before recovering to eke out a 4-3 overtime win.

Either way, the club is now a season-high five games over .500, at 13-8-1-2 for 29 points, and has moved up into second place in the Atlantic Division. By going unbeaten in regulation during their Thanksgiving action, the Pack now have at least a standings point in eight of their last nine games (5-1-1-2), 12 of their last 14 (9-2-1-2) and 14 of their last 17 (11-3-1-2), after starting the year 2-5-0 in their first seven.

They started the week out with a workmanlike effort in Lowell on Wednesday, beating a Devil team that came into the game tied for the division lead 4-1. Last year, when Lowell finished below .500 and out of the playoffs, the Wolf Pack couldn’t do anything against the Devils, going 2-4-0-2 in the season series, and now that the Devils are pushing the division lead this season, the Pack have beaten them the first two meetings by a combined 9-3 margin. Go figure.

Go figure, also, that in the first time of the year the Pack plays four-in-five, three of the games go to overtime and the team starts to get injured.

The Wolf Pack got a couple of early goals in the Portland game and were able to play from ahead for much of it, but I didn’t think it was a very good game for the Pack. They let the quick Pirates dictate much of the action and relied too much on Chad Johnson, who was excelling in net. Sure enough, it came a cropper on them early in the third period, as Portland finally solved Johnson just 1:54 in and managed three scores in the first 8:39, to turn the 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 lead.

To the Pack’s credit, they picked up their game after frittering away the lead, but the Pirates only missed salting away the regulation win by a margin of 12.5 seconds. That was the time left on the clock when Andres Ambühl, who had hardly seen the ice in any situation, let alone in the last minute of a game with the Pack down by one, before the last week or so, hammered a beautiful shot high into the net behind Portland goaltender J.P. Lamoureux.

Having thus gotten to overtime, the Wolf Pack came right back with another fine play, a great setup by Mathieu Dandenault and a sweet finish by Dane Byers, 1:22 into the extra session.

Ironically, I thought the Pack’s best game of the weekend, if not the entire week, was the Saturday-night tilt with Providence, which they ended up losing in OT, 3-2. The Wolf Pack were crisp and fast all night, and only a crackling goaltending performance by the Bruins’ Kevin Regan, making his first start of the season, stood between the Wolf Pack and a relatively easy win. The breaks that went the Pack’s way the night before went against them, though, particularly on Mikko Lehtonen’s OT game-winner.

Lehtonen had taken a penalty while his team was a man up earlier in the overtime and was about to step out of the penalty box when the Wolf Pack’s Ilkka Heikkinen wound up for a shot. Not only did Heikkinen’s stick break right in half, but the other point man, Corey Potter, tried to block Trent Whitfield’s clearing effort and in doing so, slowed it down just enough for Lehtonen to pick up on his way out of the box. Lehtonen charged in all alone and beat Johnson, and the Bruins stopped a run of three straight losses in the season series with the Wolf Pack.

On top of not winning the game, the Wolf Pack lost Dandenault and fellow blueliner Nigel Williams to injury during the evening, and had to play with four defensemen for much of the second half of the contest. That seemed to work fine for the rest of that game, but the Pack looked like a tired group heading into Sunday’s afternoon outing in Bridgeport. Reinforcements had arrived from Charlotte, with defensemen Jared Nightingale and Mike Berube joining the Pack, but as a group the Wolf Pack appeared somewhat out of gas.

Frustratingly, the fatigue didn’t seem to hurt the team until they had built a 2-0 lead, but like Friday’s game, the Pack sagged back too much over the course of the game and it eventually caught up to them. Goals by Ambühl and Paul Crowder (his fourth in six games) were answered by Bridgeport tallies by Trevor Smith and Andrew MacDonald, and the Wolf Pack fell to 0-2 in the shootout, converting only one of six attempts against Sound Tiger goalie Scott Munroe.

Ambühl, who looked to be a good skater and a smart player right from the start, but also rarely came close to finishing any of the chances he generated for himself, all of a sudden is putting peas under the bar and into the corners, and Crowder is hanging around the net and banging in some gritty goals, after hitting the twine only twice in his first 17 games. With P.A. Parenteau and Bobby Sanguinetti having taken a significant chunk of the Pack’s offense with them to New York, guys like Ambühl and Crowder are going to need to continue filling in the gaps.

And three tough tests, along with quite a few miles in the “iron lung”, loom for the Wolf Pack this week, with a “first go north, then head south” road trip to Manchester, Wilkes-Barre and Hershey.