Whaddya Mean That's It?

So this is what it feels like not to make playoffs…

I asked Ken Gernander a little while back, when it became clear that it was an extreme longshot for the Wolf Pack to make the postseason, when the last time was that a team of his missed playoffs, and his reply was, “eighth-grade football”.

Gernander had been to the postseason in every one of his 18 years as a pro player or coach, and in all four of his college seasons as well. I too have been very lucky in that regard, as the AHL teams I have been with had been to the playoffs in each and every one of the 21 previous years I have worked in the league, and in the four years I was at Harvard, the team made the NCAA tournament each year and went to the Final Four twice.

A very strange feeling this past week for those of us who have come to count on the Wolf Pack being in the postseason as a fact of life. After the Wolf Pack were officially eliminated Friday night, I found myself being repeatedly stunned by the fact that I knew for sure that the season was ending on Sunday. I had never before experienced being able to say exactly when the last game was going to be.

And to jump into Wolf Pack apologist mode, let me say that the more I thought about it this week, the clearer it became to me that the fact that the Wolf Pack did not make the playoffs this year is a lot less amazing than the fact that they were able to find their way into the postseason 12 years straight. In today’s AHL, with 29 teams in the league, the NHL operating under a salary cap and the players by and large being so young, that’s a heck of an accomplishment.

Consider that, among teams currently in the AHL, only the historic Hershey Bears and Rochester Americans franchises have ever had streaks of making the playoffs longer than the Pack’s 12 consecutive years, and Hershey’s streak of 17 straight seasons was accomplished quite a long time ago, 1960-61 through 1976-77, when the league was a lot different than it is today. Here, in fact, since I have time to research such things now, are the longest runs of consecutive years in the playoffs, for each current AHL franchise that has been around long enough for such a number to have any real meaning. As you can see, precious few of these numbers approach the Wolf Pack’s streak of an even dozen:

Adirondack/Philadelphia – 6
Albany – 7
Binghamton – 3
Bridgeport – 3
Chicago – 4
Grand Rapids – 3
Hamilton – 4
Hershey – 17
Houston – 5
Manchester – 7
Manitoba – 6
Milwaukee – 8
Norfolk – 7
Portland – 5
Providence – 11
Rochester – 16
San Antonio – 1
Springfield – 5
Syracuse – 3
Toronto – 2
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton – 8

The fact that the Pack, through their entire existence, had never experienced a season-killing slump like this year’s 3-12-5-1 drought in late January through early March, to me is truly remarkable. In my admittedly Wolf Pack-colored judgment, that speaks much more to the acumen and dedication of the coaches that we have had here, and the Ranger management that has dictated the player personnel on the Wolf Pack roster, than this season’s playoff miss does to any lack thereof.

Another thing to hang our collective hats on during what is going to be an unusually long offseason is the fact that even though the Pack fell short of grabbing a postseason spot, they made a pretty darned solid effort at it, particularly considering the key performers they lost during their final stretch run.

I freely admit, when I heard that the Wolf Pack had lost both P.A. Parenteau and Anders Eriksson to recall the morning of the Pack’s home game Friday, March 26 vs. Adirondack, I wondered if the team would win another game all season. Well, they beat the Phantoms that night, 3-2 in a shootout, and would ultimately triumph in six of their final nine games without those two stalwarts in their lineup. What’s more, they had to play three of those nine also missing Corey Locke, and the last four, three of which they won, without Dale Weise.

They squeezed two goals, and three points, out of Chris McKelvie, fresh out of Bemidji State, in the last three games. Andres Ambühl bolstered a right side decimated by the losses of Parenteau and Weise, with as many points (7) in his last nine games as he had totaled in his first 57 games of the year. Ryan Garlock finished the season with five points in his last six games, including the third-period game-winner in Sunday’s season-finishing 2-1 win in Bridgeport that gave the Wolf Pack the GEICO Connecticut Cup title over the Sound Tigers. And Chad Johnson recaptured much of the savvy that had carried him into the top five in AHL goals-against average earlier in the season, winning his last five outings and eight of his last 10.

The fact is, with the glaring exception of Wednesday night’s no-show of a 9-2 home smoking by Worcester, the Wolf Pack made a really strong account of themselves the last couple of weeks, in some pretty tough circumstances. The hole they dug for themselves during that three-wins-in-21-games swoon, though, was just too deep to dig out of.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll get into all the stuff like whose contracts are up, and all that kind of offseason stuff, in this space, but for right now I’ve got to work on getting my mind around the fact that for this year, 80 games is it…there’s no more. Uncharted territory…