The Tucson Roadrunners, the American Hockey League’s coldest team not all that long ago, beat the visiting Iowa Wild 5-2 on Tuesday night at Tucson Arena.
The Roadrunners — still in the playoff hunt inside a dozen games to go in the regular season — now have more wins in the last five days than they had in the prior seven weeks combined.
“Anytime you’re winning, your confidence keeps growing,” Tucson defenseman and captain Dakota Mermis said. “You put together three wins like that — two on the road, and then it’s always good to win at home — that just builds your confidence moving forward.”
Prior to a two-game road sweep of the Stockton Heat on Friday and Saturday, and then Tuesday’s performance that saw Tucson dominate virtually every facet of the game, the Roadrunners had won just twice in a 16-game span.
But now, six points in the standings later, and playing a stretch of six games in 10 days, Tucson (28-22-5-2) is still taking aim at the fourth-place Colorado Eagles in the AHL’s Pacific Division race. Colorado sits seven points up on Tucson, but the Roadrunners have played three fewer games than the Eagles to date.
The current three-game streak comes at a key time for the Roadrunners, who played the first of four games in six days Tuesday.
“At this point in the year … you want to play hockey games,” Tucson head coach Jay Varady said. “If you walked around the room and talked to guys in that room, they wouldn’t really say they wanted to practice right now. They want to play, so we’re getting a healthy dose of games right now.”
Michael Chaput, the Roadrunners’ most recent acquisition after a Feb. 25 trade between the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes and Montreal Canadiens, scored twice in the first period Tuesday to set the tone for Tucson.
“We’ve got a lot of games coming up here in a short amount of time. … “Sometimes when you practice a lot in between games, you kind of lose that little bit of confidence or edge,” Chaput said of the loaded schedule this week. “So now that we’ve won three in a row, that’s good for our confidence and if we just keep playing, I think it’s beneficial for us.”
After Iowa’s Dmitry Sokolov opened the scoring five minutes and change into the first period, Chaput gave Tucson the lead inside five minutes to go in the period with his second goal in a span of barely two minutes. Nick Merkley and Michael Bunting assisted both of Chaput’s goals.
Including Chaput’s output, Tucson scored five straight goals, with Bunting and Hudson Fasching adding second-period scores, followed by Brayden Burke in the third. Iowa’s Kyle Rau capped off the scoring by beating Tucson goaltender Adin Hill inside 10 seconds to play in the final frame.
Bunting, who went 10 games without a goal during the team’s recent skid, now has goals in four straight outings, while Lane Pederson, who added an assist for the Roadrunners on Burke’s goal, has six points in the last three games. Bunting and Pederson are tied for the team lead with 16 goals apiece. Pederson leads the Roadrunners in points with 37, with Bunting not far behind at 35.
Tucson continued its trend of outshooting its opponent by a relatively wide margin; this time it was 33-22. Hill stopped 20 of those for the Roadrunners, earning his 11th win in net on the year and lowering his goals against average to 2.50 — good for ninth overall in the AHL among qualifying netminders.
Tuesday marked the first of four games between the Roadrunners and Wild (33-19-7-5) — all coming in the final dozen games of Tucson’s season. Game two of that mix comes Wednesday at 7:05 p.m. at Tucson Arena, before the teams meet again April 2 and 3 in Iowa City.
