AMERKS FACING ‘REALLY HARD TRIP’ TO GET BACK ON TRACK
Rochester's trek through the Atlantic Division continues this week with stops in Springfield, Hartford and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
Dec 12, 2023 
By Andrew Mossbrooks | @Mossbrooks48
Nobody was happy in the Rochester Americans’ locker room Friday night. That feeling extended into the stands at Blue Cross Arena, where 6,553 fans watched the Charlotte Checkers skate away with a 6-1 win.
“The competitiveness wasn’t as high as it needed to be against our opponent,” said Amerks head coach Seth Appert. “I told our guys before the game that I think Charlotte is one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference. They had lost a few in a row and I knew it was going to be on. I didn’t do a good enough job of getting our guys to understand that. They were just much firmer and harder on the puck. They won far too many puck battles against us on Friday.”
The Amerks have lost three of their last four games. Despite holding a solid record (11-7-2-0), the team occupies the fifth seed in the uber-competitive North Division standings. The top five make the playoffs, and Utica is on the outside looking in, nipping at the heels of the Amerks while sitting just a point back.
Good news: Rochester has games in hand on every other team in its division.
Bad news: They’ll make up some of those games this week facing three Atlantic Division teams currently in playoff positioning.
Wednesday sees the Amerks visit Springfield, then take a short bus ride to Hartford where they’ll tangle with the Wolf Pack on Friday, then follow that with a long bus ride to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for a Saturday night showdown against the Penguins.
“This is a really hard trip that we’re on right now. Springfield has a really good team. Obviously, we’re familiar with their goalie (former Amerk Malcolm Subban). It’ll be great to see ‘Subby’, but probably not great to play against him. Hartford is off to a great start (15-5-3-0) and Wilkes-Barre is always a demanding team and a hard place to play.”
To spell it out further, the Thunderbirds were Eastern Conference Champions in 2022. The team features veteran Nathan Walker, who ranks fourth in league scoring with 25 points (11+14). Hartford sits second in the Atlantic with 33 points, trailing only Hershey.
The Wolf Pack own the third-most points in the AHL and experienced goaltender Louie Domingue ranks fifth in goals-against-average through the first quarter of the season (2.18).
Then there’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, a team coming off missing the playoffs for just the second time in the last two decades (pandemic-effected seasons withstanding).
Sure doesn’t sound like a vacation for the traveling Amerks.
“Every game is challenging,” said Americans captain Michael Mersch. “We haven’t played a lot in the last couple weeks. It’s important for us to get back on track and find a rhythm to start climbing back up in the standings.”
Getting back on track may have already started for the Amerks. After an atypical weekend of no games either Saturday or Sunday, the team returned to the ice for what felt like one of the more intense practices of the season.
“Yeah, I think so,” said goaltender Dustin Tokarski when asked if Monday’s practice felt more intense. “That’s kind of the nature of the game, though. You get pushed around a little bit and lose in your home building, so you get a little upset and want to come in and put in a good, aggressive, hard-nosed practice to get a little bit of that game-like mentality and compete level back. I thought the guys did a good job of that today.”
“I think everybody was dialed in,” said Mersch. “We wanted to get back on the right course and the staff does a great job of putting practices together that are going to help us get better.”
Three games in four nights. Six points on the line. A chance for the Amerks to correct their course and catapult back towards the top of their division.
That’s the big picture. The smaller and more immediate view, however, is turning the team’s attention to Springfield.
“I’m not worried about the trip, I’m worried about Wednesday,” said Appert. “Playing good doesn’t guarantee anything, but you raise your competitive level, you raise your willingness and ability to win puck battles to get your team on offense, you defend with a little more vigor, and you do everything you can to put your team in a position to win on Wednesday. We’ll go from there.”
“We just got to be ready to go right off the bat,” said Tokarski, who will face two of his former teams on this week’s trip in both Hartford and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, where he went 12-16-7 with one shutout last season . “We have to manage the ups and downs of the game. Whether we score first or get scored on first, just stick to our game plan. I think the key we have to work on is just putting together a full 60 (minutes). We’ve had some good spurts this year, but we need to put together a full 60 so we can look back and say we played a complete game, and the results should follow.”
“We need to win puck battles and focus on simple stuff,” said Mersch. “We need to make good changes, play smart, play aggressive, hunt more, and do all the stuff that winning hockey teams do. It’s not a magic recipe. It’s just competing and working hard to play to our team identity.”