“I believe, and our team believes, that we can beat anybody in one game,” Monsters head coach Trent Vogelhuber told reporters after Thursday’s 3-2 win against Hershey in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
Facing elimination, the Monsters proved Vogelhuber’s words to be true. Now they have a chance to do it again tonight in Game 5, still down 3-1 in the series.
As he always does, Vogelhuber will continue to stress a shift-by-shift approach for his players. To win this series, Cleveland will have to defeat the AHL regular-season champion Bears three more times. The second-year coach, who won a Calder Cup playing for the Monsters in 2016, prefers to break down that massive task to something much more manageable.
“You look at the big picture, and it seems insurmountable,” Vogelhuber said. “Stick to shift by shift, period to period, game by game…”
The Monsters made a change to their defensive corps in Game 4 as 2022 first-round pick Denton Mateychuk made his pro debut. The Western Hockey League defenseman of the year fit in well on a blue line that has been without regulars Jake Christiansen and Cole Clayton.
The coaches’ message to Mateychuk?
“‘Be yourself and play your game,’” he said. “‘You don’t have to make that special play just because you’re up here. Just be you.’”
Five times this postseason the Admirals have been on the brink of elimination, and five times they have delivered a win, most recently in Thursday’s 7-2 win over the Firebirds to cut the Western Conference Finals deficit to 3-1.
“They just want to continue the season,” head coach Karl Taylor said of his close-knit club in his postgame media session. “There’s a lot of desperation in the room. This is a group that is really tight. They don’t want it to end, so there’s a level of desperation and a care for each other that you saw come out.”
Taylor felt that the Admirals were able to channel their energy and emotion productively in Game 4. And after the potent Coachella Valley attack produced 12 first-period shots, Milwaukee limited the visitors to just 13 in the final two periods.
“We were able to play with some structure, and that’s the balance,” Taylor added. “You can’t just run around.”
Said forward Phil Tomasino, “I thought as the game went on our whole group didn’t give them an inch.”
Only three teams in AHL history have won a best-of-seven series after trailing 3-0, but that number jumps to 18 teams who have done it after being down 3-1.
The most recent team to accomplish the feat was the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in 2013, who like Cleveland and Milwaukee lost the first three games before coming all the way back. Before that, the Manitoba Moose and Binghamton Senators both completed comebacks from 3-1 deficits in 2011.
The Monsters and Admirals have already bucked one trend: of the 140 previous teams to be down three games to none, only 35 percent had even managed to force a Game 5.
― with files from Patrick Williams
