Moose confident heading into crucial six-game homestand

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/02/2024 (591 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The next six games for the Manitoba Moose should reveal a lot about the club’s trajectory for the remainder of the season.

The youthful American Hockey League squad sits near the bottom of the standings but has plenty of life after going 6-2-1 on its recent nine-game road trip.

Now the Moose (18-25-1-1) are back in friendlier confines for a six-game homestand that begins against the division-leading Milwaukee Admirals on Saturday at 2 p.m. Manitoba will play three sets of back-to-backs against Milwaukee (32-10-1-0), Calgary (25-16-3-2) and Texas (22-17-3-2) at the downtown rink.

“Very important, especially once you start playing better and you start getting some results,” said head coach Mark Morrison after Friday’s skate at the Hockey For All Centre. “I think the confidence level is up and players are starting to feel better about themselves. There’s a lot of emotion in the dressing room now compared to what it was like a month ago, it was fairly quiet.”

A club that began the season with eight Winnipeg Jets prospects drafted in the first three rounds since 2019 meant some turbulence was to be expected as the group got acclimated to pro hockey.

That didn’t make it any easier when the world was falling around them as the calendar flipped.

Therein lay a spiralling group that had lost a franchise-record 11 consecutive contests and had to stay motivated for a 21-day road trip. The team showed some fight and has come out the other side better for it, now clinging to the fifth and final playoff spot in the Central Division.

“That’s pro hockey,” said Kyle Capobianco, who is tied for the league lead in points among defencemen with 34. “You’ve got to learn to lose and you got to take the learning curve that comes with it. I think as the season goes on, there’s almost two seasons — there’s the start of the season and then the second half is when teams really dial it in.

“So I think with the young guys, (they get to) learn that it’s getting to playoff hockey right now and games are going to be close.”

The effort of the group was never in question, Morrison said, but its execution had to be better and it has been over the last nine contests.

“You always need your veteran group to be the backbone of those situations when your team is down, but I just felt like our young guys also learned a lot about themselves and about this league and about how hard pro hockey is and I think the combination of both the veteran players and the young players both responded very well,” Morrison said.

“Those are learning curves for the young guys and I thought that they were just as responsible for helping us get through this as anybody.”

Brad Lambert, a 2022 first-round pick, and Nikita Chibrikov, a 2021 second-round pick, entered their first pro seasons under some of the most watchful eyes and have delivered thus far. Despite missing five games, Lambert is fourth among rookies with 15 goals and Chibrikov is right behind him with 14.

“The beginning of the season was a little bit hard because I tried to translate my game to North America,” said the Russian-born Chibrikov, who is also fourth among all rookies in points. “The first games here, I was a little bit nervous but I think after 10 games I felt good and now I try to keep going with my health and to be better every day.

“It was hard times for us but we found the right way from this. We’re not losing our mental and we keep working now and I think we’re in the playoffs now and keep moving forward.”

The club has also rallied around rookie goaltender Thomas Milic. The fifth-round pick has bounced between the Moose and the East Cost Hockey League this season but doesn’t look to be going anywhere after getting the bulk of the workload and going 4-1-1 on the road trip.

Equally important, the Moose enter the home stretch healthy and have added veteran reinforcements to help their cause, with the likes of David Gustafsson, Dominic Toninato and Axel Jonsson-Fjallby being sent down by the Winnipeg Jets.

“It’s hard, that 11-game skid that we had,” Capobianco said, “but it was the adversity that we needed as a young team and we faced it at the right time and now going forward it looks like we’re going to keep going and we got the momentum.”

jfreysam@freepress.mb.ca

X: @jfreysam