AHL Morning Skate: 5.20.22 | TheAHL.com

The Laval Rocket have their next date with an American Hockey League playoff opponent.

Laval’s Calder Cup Playoff run will continue in the North Division Finals against the Rochester Americans after the Amerks eliminated the Utica Comets with a 4-2 win in Game 5 of the teams’ North Division semifinal series last night. The Rocket, meanwhile, had to sweat out their own North Division semifinal, going to five games with the Syracuse Crunch before finally advancing with an overtime win on Tuesday night.

Back home in Laval on Thursday, Rocket head coach J-F Houle has had time to collect his thoughts.

“I think you learn from the regular season,” said Houle, “and our motto has always been never too high, never too low, and try to stay calm. It was an excellent series. It was physical. [A] really good team in Syracuse who played us really hard… We’re happy that we finished on top.”

Trailing 2-0 in Game 5, Laval tied it in the final minute of regulation before Gabriel Bourque won the game, 3-2, to earn this match-up with Rochester. Houle pointed to the regular season’s comeback wins as well as its difficult losses as lessons that have set up his club in the postseason.

“Those are all great lessons to learn,” Houle said. “You have to learn from those. I know that playoffs are different, but you still have to learn from it. I think it worked in our favor. For sure, we’d like it easy, but you can always learn from adversity.”

The Rochester-Utica winner had not yet been determined Thursday morning, but Houle has his own team to manage anyway.

“We try not to worry too much about the other team,” Houle said. “We want to play the way we play and make sure we’re at the top of our game. I think that’s what’s most important. Right now practicing with the players at this time of the year is not that easy. The players just want to play games. So practices are very short, right to the point.

“We try not to keep the guys too long at the rink so when they come for the game they’re at their prime.”

His suit a bit wet, always-chatty Rochester head coach Seth Appert had plenty more to say about his team’s Game 5 win at Utica last night.

“We told our guys heading into the third that, ‘We’re outplaying them, and we just have to keep our foot on the gas,’” Appert told reporters after the game.

They did that, and now they will begin preparing for a trip to Laval for Sunday’s Game 1 match-up. To earn that trip to Place Bell, the Amerks had to get past the stubborn Belleville Senators in a physical opening-round series, winning twice in overtime, and then knock off the Comets, who had the Eastern Conference’s top regular-season record, hammering out two road victories in one of the most difficult visiting environments in the entire AHL.

“The resilience of this group is pretty special,” Appert said. “This group loves each other. They love playing for each other. They love playing for Rochester.

“Team bonding is through shared adversity. You have to go through shared adversity together, and then you have to not quit on each other during that shared adversity, and then come out on the other side. I told them I loved them. I love coaching this team.”

Sean Malone, who scored the game-winning goal 6:45 into the third period of Game 5, marveled at his team’s never-quit attitude.

“Everyone was playing their hearts out,” Malone told reporters. “We were playing for each other.”

Bridgeport Islanders head coach Brent Thompson plans on picking up the phone this summer and catching up with some colleagues.

Bridgeport swept the Providence Bruins in the teams’ opening-round series before the Islanders fell in four games to the Charlotte Checkers in the Atlantic Division semifinals. Bridgeport’s series win was the first for the club since 2003.

With a background in hockey dating back more than 30 years, Thompson’s list of contacts is long. The 51-year-old former AHL captain has coached Bridgeport since 2014 (as well as in 2011-12), but he plans to continue his own learning process.

“It’s always good to talk and see how [other head coaches] handle a situation,” Thompson said Thursday. “I have communication with a lot of different coaches through the course of [the] summer. Not so much during the season. But during the summers, you kind of bounce ideas off and talk about things.”

As the business of player development has changed, the hard-nosed Thompson has had to evolve with it.

“I think it’s just more of the relationship-building [work],” Thompson expanded. “I think that’s a key piece and just being yourself. At the end of the day, you’re just yourself. I’m happy with the progression that our team has taken and the relationships that I’ve built with our players, and I’m looking forward to continuing to build them.”

― Patrick Williams