ALLENTOWN, PA — Hundreds of traveling Hershey Bears fans made the trek to PPL Center hoping to see the defending Calder Cup champions eliminate the Lehigh Valley Phantoms in the Atlantic Division semifinals on Wednesday night. A mix of Philly orange and chocolate brown filled the arena three-quarters full. Just after puck drop, an audible “Let’s go Bears” chant could be heard in the upper deck.
But even with that crowd support, the short travel (an approximately 90-minute bus ride), and the opportunity to move on quickly to the third round of the AHL playoffs, the Bears came out flat and lost to Lehigh Valley 2-0 in Game 3. They were seemingly never a threat to score most of the night, throwing only five and six shots on net in the second and third periods respectively.
The Bears gave up two power-play goals to the Phantoms’ Emil Andrae and Olle Lycksell in the first 7:28 of the game with Dylan McIlrath and Hendrix Lapierre in the box.
Despite outscoring Lehigh Valley in the first two games of the best-of-five series, 7-2, at home, the Bears could not pierce Phantoms goaltender Cal Petersen even with all of the star power on their roster.
For the best Bears team in franchise history, the lack of fight and resilience bothered Hershey head coach Todd Nelson.
“[I’m] very disappointed in our group,” Nelson said. “Very disappointed we didn’t get — we weren’t prepared right away. We talked about being ready for the first five minutes to ten minutes of the game. The game was lost right there. Special teams were horrendous. We’ve got to be better in those areas. Then the biggest thing was compete. Lack of compete. Nobody finished their checks out there. They just wanted to play the game. We expected them to give it to us. We have to take it if we want to win this series.”
“They were more desperate than us, obviously,” McIlrath, the team’s captain, added. “We were sloppy, don’t know why. Maybe [it was] nerves to close out the series, but yeah, it’s unacceptable the way we started that game. And unfortunately, it carried over into the rest of the game.”
With the Phantoms’ season on the line, the Bears expected a big push from Lehigh Valley to force a Game 4. Special teams played a major role in the final score, as the Bears went 0 for 5 on the power play while the Phantoms went 2 for 3. When asked if those struggles on the PP and PK were strategy or effort-based, Nelson picked effort.
“Didn’t want to shoot the puck,” Nelson said. “Power play wasn’t very good tonight. The guys weren’t good in general as a group. I can’t point to one or two guys saying they didn’t have a good night — the whole team wasn’t very good. And you know what? I do give Lehigh a lot of credit because they came to play and they played hard. But the power play opportunities we don’t score, the first two penalty kills, we allowed two goals. We had the best penalty kill all year. Uncharacteristic of our team. It was won by effort and some special teams tonight.
“They came out. They executed their game plan real well. They out-competed us. We started getting things going a bit at the end of the first period. And we had two breakaways early in the game that we didn’t capitalize on. Could have been two-nothing us but it didn’t work out that way. I thought it started coming on but — we expected a game, or at least the coaching staff did, we expected them to come out and play desperate and they did.”
Part of Nelson’s frustration and heightened concern comes due to the scheduling of the five-game series. Game 4 is on Saturday night at PPL Center, where the Phantoms are expecting a big and loud crowd, and then, if necessary, Game 5, is on Sunday at Giant Center, where anything could happen with two tired teams playing a back-to-back.
“If it goes the distance, it goes the distance,” Nelson said. “We’re playing against a very good hockey team. They work hard, they play heavy, and they wanted it more than us. So we’ll talk about it as a group. We’ve got to make sure [the guys] prepare themselves the right way and we have to come up with a lot better effort on Saturday. Our best players have to be our best players and tonight that was not the case.”
So far through three games, the Bears have been led primarily by strong performances from first and fourth-line players. But several of the team’s big-name forwards in the middle six have not tallied a point yet including Mike Vecchione, Matthew Phillips, Pierrick Dubé, and Ivan Miroshnichenko.
The Bears bussed home on Thursday night and got back to Hershey around midnight. They had the day off the ice on Thursday and will skate Friday morning at Giant Center before traveling back up to Allentown that afternoon.
“I don’t think the guys need much more of a spark,” Nelson said. “Just look what happened tonight. They played against a group of men that played like men and we were like little boys.”
