Bears Tangle with Wolf Pack

On Thursday night at Giant Center, the AHL Hershey Bears will host the Hartford Wolf Pack in Game 1 of the Atlantic Division Final series. After vanquishing the Charlotte Checkers in four games in a best-of-five set in the division semis, the Bears now seek to push their way to the Eastern Conference final as they prepare for another best-of-five set, this one against the New York Rangers' AHL affiliate.

Hershey will also host Game 2 on Saturday night at Giant Center. The series then shifts to Hartford on Wednesday, May 17 and - if necessary - Friday, May 19. If a deciding Game 5 is needed, it will be played at Giant Center on Tuesday, May 23.

While the Bears earned a bye in the first round, Hartford quickly ousted Springfield, sweeping a best-of-three set in two games. The Wolf Pack then bounced the Providence Bruins in four games in the second round. Hartford also finished the regular season with eight wins in its final nine games, so as the Wolf Pack enters the series with Hershey, it has won 13 of its last 15 games overall. Hershey had the best of Hartford in six regular season meetings, going 4-2-0-0.

In getting past the Checkers in the previous playoff round, the Bears shook off nearly two weeks of game inactivity between the end of the 2022-23 regular season and the beginning of that series. Hershey put an early chokehold on the series, winning the first two games of the set on back-to-back nights in Charlotte, but the Bears ran into some adversity when they returned home with that 2-0 lead. Charlotte skated to a 2-1 win in Game 3 of the set in Hershey, and the Checkers roared out to a 2-0 lead after 20 minutes of play in Game 4 the following night.

But the Bears would not be denied. They righted the ship with six answered goals - scoring twice in the second period and four times in the third - to send the Checkers home for the summer with a 6-2 victory on May 4. Exactly a week later, they're ready to take on the Wolf Pack.

In their four games against the Checkers, the Bears outscored Charlotte by a combined total of 17-7. Sixteen different Bears skaters picked up at least a point, and Hershey featured a dozen different goal scorers in the first round.

Down 2-0 going into the second period of Game 4, Mason Morelli got the Bears on the board midway through the middle frame, and they got the tying tally from Beck Malenstyn in the waning seconds of the second.

"Well, it didn't start off very good tonight, obviously," said Bears coach Todd Nelson after last Thursday's clincher over the Checkers. "We went from getting booed off the ice in the first period to being heroes in the second and third.

"It was a funny game. The first period was a continuation of [Game 3] and then once [Morelli] scored that goal, and then obviously the Malenstyn goal really gave us a lift to the third period. And from there, it was like the guys just wanted to keep on going, and we played hard throughout the rest of the game."

In the third, Aliaksei Protas scored twice in less than two minutes in the middle of the frame to give the Bears their first lead of the night and add on an insurance goal. Riley Sutter and Bears' captain Dylan McIlrath closed out the scoring and the series with a pair of late empty-net goals.

Although the Bears were wobbly in Game 3 and early in Game 4, they were well aware of that fact, and they straightened out nicely over the final 40 minutes of last Thursday's clinching contest. Following Game 3, Nelson wasn't shy about suggesting his best players had more to give.

"That was a pretty ugly game for our hockey team," said Nelson in the aftermath of Game 3. "We weren't executing. We knew Charlotte was going to come out and make a big push, and they did. But we weren't executing very well at all, right from the drop of the puck.

"The guys will see themselves on video, and when they watch it, some guys might be pretty embarrassed. The bottom line is that our best players have to be our best players, and right now I don't see that. And they know that. It's tighter checking out there, but we have to break through and win our puck battles and go from there. We have to get back to what we did down in Charlotte."

Playing Game 4 less than 24 hours after the end of Game 3 may have been a blessing for the Bears.

"We're not going to hang our heads on this; it's just one game," said Hershey's Sam Anas after the Game 3 setback. "We're going to come in, we're confident in ourselves and we know that if we play the way we can play that we should come out on top. I think we have to come in confident, but hungry to play.

"We're excited. I'm happy that we play tomorrow because I don't want to sit on this, and we can just turn it around right away."

With six points (two goals, four assists) in Hershey's four games in the 2023 Calder Cup playoffs, Anas is Hershey's leading scorer in the postseason. The Potomac, Md. native is one of a few Hershey vets with the experience of a deep playoff run. Last spring, Anas put up 15 points (four goals, 11 assists) in an 18-game postseason run with the Springfield Thunderbirds, advancing to the Calder Cup Final before falling to Chicago in five games.

Anas supplied the primary helper on each of Protas' third-period goals in Game 4, and Beck Malenstyn made his presence felt as well, laying a huge hit on Charlotte's Santtu Kinnunen in the back half of the first period, a blow that led to a rink repair delay to replace a shattered pane of glass.

"It was better tonight," said a relieved Nelson after the clincher. "We had some huge contributions, obviously Protas with the two goals, two big goals. But I think Beck Malenstyn turned the game around for us. He's going through bodies and hard hitting, and then killing off four minutes of penalties late in the second and getting that goal. It was an outstanding effort by him."

McIlrath's empty-net goal filled out the six-pack for Hershey, and his teammates were thrilled for the rugged blueliner, who won a Calder Cup championship with Grand Rapids in 2017, a team that Nelson also coached.

"I'm really happy for him," said Malenstyn of McIlrath. "That guy wears his heart on his sleeve. He has the 'C' on his chest for our group for a reason. Every single night, whether it's blocking shots, being physical, winning puck battles, winning battles around the net, he is the heart and soul of our group. And to see him go the entire regular season without a goal was unfortunate, because he definitely earned more than that. But to have a big goal to close out a series in the first round of the playoffs, I don't think we could have drawn it up any better for him, so I was just really happy to see that."

In addition to that Cup title six years ago, Nelson owns the unique distinction of claiming the Calder as a player with Portland in 1994 and as an assistant coach with Chicago in 2008. He clearly knows what's ahead for his hockey team and how much heavy lifting still remains.

"I wouldn't necessarily say that sweeping the first round would have been a positive for us," says the Bears' bench boss. "Having that little bit of adversity early on really shows you what the playoffs are going to be like. Losing that first game at home and then coming out here [in Game 4] and being down two after the first period, that's not something that's easy to come back from. It would have been really easy to get into a shell. I thought we were able to find our way through that, just relax as a group, start playing our brand of hockey and turn the tides."

The current affiliation between the Capitals and the Bears extends back to 2005-06. Hershey won the Calder Cup that season, the first of three Cups and five trips to the Calder Cup Final during the current iteration of the affiliation between the Caps and Bears. Over that time frame, a total of 27 players drafted by the Caps have played playoff hockey with both teams, and another 10 players that weren't Washington draftees also played playoff hockey for both teams.

Those 37 players have combined for 22 Calder Cup rings over that span, and 25 of those players arrived in Washington with at least double-digit totals of Calder Cup playoff games on their résumés. For the better part of two decades now, deep playoff runs - and championships - have been an integral part of the development of Washington's draftees and other prospects. But there were no Calder Cup playoffs in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Hershey's foray into the postseason lasted just three games last season.

A lengthy postseason run would benefit both the Caps' and Bears' organizations; Hershey's most recent ride to the Cup Final came in 2016 when Lake Erie swept Hershey in four games.

"I think it's a good thing we went through this, I really do," says Nelson of the speed bumps in the Charlotte series. "We fought some adversity just by losing [Game 3] the way we did. And then also, coming back [in Game 4] we had some adversity and we had to overcome it.

"It's just learning from what we went through here. It's not going to be easy. Everybody has to tug at the rope, it can't be one line. But we've talked about our depth. On any given night, some guys break through and it's going to take a total team effort. But the guys have to understand it's going to be really tough."

So far, so good. The Bears have played well defensively, they've had strong goaltending, and they've had a bevy of offensive contributors up and down the lineup. But they've got a long way to go, and another formidable foe just ahead in Hartford.

"We can't take games off or nights off," said Protas. "We've got to play every game a full 60 [minutes]. We can't give them life; we've got play every game like it's our last game. And we will have success if we play like that."