One victory away from a trip to the Calder Cup Finals, the Charlotte Checkers have a lot to be happy about these days.
That is why they intend to keep pushing and to not let up at all as they enter Game 4 against Laval tonight.
“Our guys have done it all year,” head coach Geordie Kinnear said after Sunday’s 5-1 win gave his team a 3-0 series lead. “You can talk about it, but when you’ve done it all year, and you know that as a group, I couldn’t be more proud of how consistent the group has been. They’ve done it all year.”
With the parent Florida Panthers already through to the Stanley Cup Final, the Checkers are looking to make the organization the first since Pittsburgh and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton in 2008 to reach the NHL and AHL championship rounds in the same season.
And the last time an NHL organization won the Stanley Cup and Calder Cup in the same season? That was 1995, when the New Jersey Devils and Albany River Rats pulled off the ultra-rare feat.
Thirty years ago, Kinnear was a 21-year-old defenseman with Albany. Now he is in his 22nd season behind an AHL bench, eight of them as head coach of Florida’s top prospects. Kinnear reached the conference finals as a player in 1997 and 1998 and again as an assistant coach with Charlotte in 2011, but is still searching for that second Calder Cup championship. He knows how elusive and difficult playoff success can be.
So he expects a ferocious stand by the Rocket as they attempt to save their season tonight.
“It’s a really good team,” Kinnear said of Laval. “We have our work cut out.”
One game at a time. It is a common playoff refrain, but the Rocket will start with an even smaller to-do list tonight.
There is plenty of talk about belief and maintaining a positive approach, but actually stoking that belief can be difficult when facing a 3-0 series deficit. So Laval is reframing its objectives. It’s not going to be game-to-game. The Rocket are taking it down to shift-by-shift.
“To believe, the goal has to feel attainable,” head coach Pascal Vincent said after Game 3. “We’re not going to focus on the four games we’d have to win. We’ll attack one shift at a time, one period at a time. We’ll stay focused on the present moment.”
The Rocket played Sunday without forward Laurent Dauphin, who was injured in Game 2, and defenseman Tyler Wotherspoon missed his fifth straight game.
― with files from Patrick Williams
