The defending back-to-back Calder Cup champion Hershey Bears played some inspired hockey on Tuesday night against the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins after one of their worst losses of the season over the weekend irked head coach Todd Nelson.
The Bears recalled four players from the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays ahead of puck drop, including Capitals prospects Alexander Suzdalev and Ryan Hofer. And when the game started, the Bears’ lineup featured eight regulars out due to illness, injury, or personal reasons — a list that included the team’s second and third-best goal-scorers last season, Pierrick Dubé and Alex Limoges.
- Jake Massie (lower body)
- Alex Limoges (lower body)
- Pierrick Dubé (lower body)
- Mike Sgarbossa (illness)
- Henrik Rybinski (upper body)
- Bogdan Trineyev (illness)
- Jon McDonald (illness)
- Brad Hunt (personal)
Matt Strome, Brennan Saulnier, and Hudson Thornton were the healthy-scratches.
“We made quite a few changes since the last game,” Nelson said per the Bears. “I know some guys are sick but this was the lineup we were going to go with anyways. And they came out and played a really good game. The guys we inserted played outstanding.”
One of the call-ups from the Stingrays, defenseman Andrew Perrott, was signed to an AHL contract for the rest of the season on February 7.
Days later, the 5-foot-10 rearguard opened the scoring for the Bears, scoring the team’s first goal in 10 days. Off a clean Garrett Roe faceoff win, Perrott unleashed a huge slapshot that clanged off the post and in 4:40 into the first period.
Shortly after the Penguins’ Emil Bemstrom tied it up 1-1 and Hendrix Lapierre and Ethan Bear gave Hershey back a 3-1 lead, the two teams had a huge showdown that could be a moment Hershey looks back on that turned around their up-and-down season.
A near-line brawl was sparked by Penguins forward Vasily Ponomarev brutally boarding Bears forward Dalton Smith with 4:09 remaining in the period. The illegal hit caused four different players to be ejected and four fighting majors to be doled out.
The major aggressors in the dust-up were Hershey’s Smith, Justin Nachbaur, and Aaron Ness. On the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton side, Ponomarev was ejected for his hit, while Nikolai Knyzhov, Ville Koivunen, and Dan Renouf got involved in the after-whistle rough stuff.
Smith, Nachbaur, and Knyzhov were all ejected for getting into “secondary altercations.” Nachbaur’s fight with Knyzhov was his second in as many games for the Bears since recently being recalled by the club from the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays.
After the dust settled and the two clubs headed into their locker rooms for the first intermission, 89 penalty minutes had been assessed by the on-ice officials.
An additional 10 PIMs would be added in the latter two periods, leaving the game one minute short of an even 100 penalty minutes.
Hershey ended up 5-4 victors, surviving a furious late-game comeback by the Penguins. WBS appeared to tie with 2 seconds remaining, but the goal was wiped out because the puck appeared to be redirected by a Penguins’ high stick on its way into the net.
In the win, the Bears also got tallies from Mike Vecchione and Spencer Smallman. Hunter Shepard made 25 stops to earn his 18th win of the season. Lapierre had two points (1g, 1a).
“Play like men, come out, and work hard, outwork your opponent, win puck battles,” Nelson said. “We played a really strong game and I thought we deserved it. They’re a good hockey team over there. You can’t let up on them, but the game was probably closer than it should have been.”
Nelson also praised all five recent players called up from the Stingrays who were inserted into different spots of the lineup.
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“Suzdalev was great, Hofer was outstanding, Nachbaur and Smith, they did their job. Perrot, excellent,” Nelson said.
The hard-fought victory came after a 5-0 shutout loss on February 8 to the Syracuse Crunch, where Hershey suited up only 17 skaters due to a flu bug going around the team. The game was the team’s first after returning from last week’s AHL All-Star break.
“Well, I definitely didn’t expect that,” Nelson said after the loss on Saturday per the Bears. “The guys had four days off, we had two really good practices, I felt good about the game tonight, a lot of energy, and we were dead from [the beginning] – just no life, it was truly an embarrassing effort.
“It’s unacceptable and it’s happened now twice in the last couple weeks. I’m not going to use an excuse, the flu bug going around or we played short tonight – I don’t care. The bottom line is that the guys that we count upon to go out there and do a job to provide offense for us were not even in the building tonight. They didn’t even show up – our best player was [Justin] Nachbaur tonight – he got called up from South Carolina, played like he cared, and nobody else did. I was looking for guys to throw on the ice in the third period, and nobody wanted to be on there. It’s embarrassing. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.”
The rough loss also came less than two weeks after a shocking 9-0 defeat to the Penguins on January 29 — the team’s worst defeat since 1993 when they fell 11-0 to the Cornwall Aces.
The Bears have not been the same this year after having one of the most dominant seasons in AHL history in 2023-24. The team has seen two of their staples, captain Dylan McIlrath and Ethen Frank, graduate full-time to the Washington Capitals. Hershey cut ties with Calder Cup champion defensemen Logan Day and Hardy Häman Aktell. They also traded Dmitry Osipov in late November. While the Bears are tied with the Laval Rocket for the most points in the Eastern Conference with 63, they’ve struggled to play with consistency.
“All I’m looking for is for 20 guys to go out there, work hard, and do their job,” Nelson told Hershey’s Zack Fisch before Tuesday’s game.
He got his wish.
