Hershey’s scoring struggles continue with Atlantic Division weekend ahead
With the recall of Chandler Stephenson and possibly Riley Barber in the coming hours (lol jk, it’s Anthony Peluso), the Hershey Bears offense will have to weather the storm against three major divisional opponents this weekend.
Hershey will take on Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Providence, and Hartford in their second three-in-three of this season. But with only one win in their first six games, the Bears will need to get some firepower from their forwards to start getting some W’s on the board.
“[It’s] one of the areas we’ve struggled with in the first three weeks,” said head coach Troy Mann after an optional skate Tuesday. “I felt that generating goals would be a little bit different than the last two years, but not to this extent. But we’ve got multiple guys with zeros across the board.”
Most of those zeros come from players that have been in the bottom six for Hershey to start this season. “I think it’s more of our depth scoring that needs to contribute for us to win some hockey games. Our plus-minus isn’t great, but we’ve played well defensively. We gave up 12 Grade-As Friday, nine Saturday, and nine Sunday. From a defensive side of things, the guys are competing and we’re doing our thing and trying to protect our goalies the best we can. The two areas we need more from are our depth scoring and our goaltending got to make better saves.”
Those goaltenders, Parker Milner and Adam Carlson, are Hershey’s third and fourth netminders on the depth chart as goalies Pheonix Copley and Vitek Vanecek continue to recover from injuries sustained in training camp.
“They’re both progressing,” said Mann, “but definitely not available this week again. I’m hoping a week from now maybe they get into a full practice with the team and then we’ll do another evaluation. I think Copley is a little bit ahead of Vitek. Vitek was a six-week injury and he is at five weeks today. But when I say six weeks we’re talking six weeks without competitive practice.”
Since Mann’s arrival in Hershey back in 2014, he’s been preaching one thing: Win Your Week. That message doesn’t change in a time like this. “That’s the mindset this week is try to win the week, and that means getting four out of six [points]. Every coach would love to have six out of six, but our mindset going into Rockford Sunday was ‘Hey, we have a chance to win our first week of the season.’
“Unfortunately, it didn’t go our way. Now, going into this [week], it’s the same type of thing. We get four out of six, you’re starting to feel good about your game, you’re getting your goalies back, Niskanen is getting healthy; those are all positive things that will help us down the road, but we’ve got to weather the storm here in the short term until we get a veteran-type of D back – who that is I’m not sure – but that will help our defense, and obviously Copley and Vitek will help immensely.”
Headline photo: Rockford IceHogs
