In college sports it’s called “hitting the freshman wall.” Young players start the season hot, look better than their years, but then slump around the midseason mark. The reality of the season-long grind starts to set in. Production goes down. Confidence lags.
The Tucson Roadrunners aren’t amateurs, and they only carry a few rookies, but the analogy holds for them, too. Past the midway mark of their inaugural season, some reality has set in.
They are fighting through a slump.
“You have to play the right way and you have to prepare,” head coach Mark Lamb said. “It’s unacceptable how we’ve been starting games. It’s about battling for 60 minutes and we (are not doing) that.”
The Roadrunners have won just two of their last 13 games. At 22-19-5-0, the team sits in fourth place in the American Hockey League’s Pacific Division.
Scoring has come and gone for the better part of a month now, but Chris Mueller and Christian Fischer have remained steady and reliable point makers. Rookie sensation Kyle Wood’s production also slipped around the All-Star break, but he’s slowly climbed back into the scoring column, too.
Tucson started the season with a more potent offensive punch, but hasn’t recovered from the promotion of Brendan Perlini to the parent Coyotes. Perlini continues to light up the stat sheet in Glendale, and his loss to the Roadrunners created a big offensive hole that hasn’t yet been replaced.
Veteran goaltender Justin Peters was dealt to the Texas Stars, Marek Langhamer has been up and down to the Coyotes, and Adin Hill up and down to Rapid City.
Almost every AHL team deals with similar distractions, but none deal with an uncomfortable elephant in the room like Tucson’s Gem and Mineral Show. The event forced hockey out of the Tucson Arena for parts of January and February.
In a professional season that is a long and grinding road – hey, wasn’t that a Beatles song? – hockey teams that spend weeks away from home will naturally rack up losing streaks. The Roadrunners’ inaugural schedule has more unhappy surprises, too, as the team will spend the last important days of the regular season on the road. Gulp!
“If you look at the rest of our schedule, it’s going to be a tough battle,” Lamb said. “So we better start getting mentally prepared right now.”
That end-of-schedule quirk is especially troubling since Tucson appears on the playoff bubble. The top four teams from the AHL Pacific Division make the playoffs, and Tucson is currently hanging on to the final spot. The Roadrunners were in first place for much of the early season, but no experienced observer expected that grip to hold indefinitely.
Tucson must win some home games in the next month before finishing on the road. In a tight playoff race, the last place you want to find yourself is on a five-game road trip, to finish your season, needing to make up ground.
“It’s gonna be a tough go, it really is, and that’s why the preparation has to be there,” Lamb continued, noting that the time is now for his team to take that next step up in their development.
“You get a little content, you get a little arrogant, you know your goaltending is good, and that is going to be a tough learning experience.
“We need to get harder. We’re not hard enough right now.”
Hockey is about to get serious. It’s about to get real hard.
Now is when the real fun begins.
