Before Friday’s shootout win over Belleville clinched their berth in the Calder Cup Playoffs, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins suffered some recent adversity.

Through February, the Penguins seemingly found ways to win despite constant roster fluctuations along the way. Prior to the late-season additions across the league adding new players from the NCAA, CHL and overseas, the Penguins led the American Hockey League with 48 players suiting up for at least one of the team’s opening 50 games.

Then, an overtime loss in Cleveland on Feb. 28 started a season-high, five-game winless streak that lasted until March 15. It wasn’t for lack of effort, or even large stretches of poor play, but for a multitude of reasons the Penguins struggled in that stretch.

“This stuff is going to happen,” Penguins head coach Kirk MacDonald said after last Sunday’s 3-1 win in Lehigh Valley ended the skid. “We didn’t play (poorly), just couldn’t find a way to win. We were just finding ways to lose.”

In two of those aforementioned five losses (March 4 vs. Springfield and March 14 vs Lehigh Valley), the Penguins were shorthanded 14 times — seven in each game — which certainly isn’t a recipe for success.

Things reached their boiling point after the Penguins squandered a third period lead due to some uncharacteristically selfish penalties to the Phantoms last Saturday, which included two penalties during the 3-on-3 overtime period.

“We took three penalties in the final 11 minutes of hockey. Can’t win like that,” McDonald said of last Saturday’s loss. “You can’t take that many penalties against a team like that. Their skilled players are going to figure out how to break down your penalty kill, and that’s what happened. (We) beat ourselves.”

As they’ve done mostly all season, the Penguins responded well the following afternoon in last Sunday’s rematch against the Phantoms to snap the winless skid at the tail end of a three-in-three before departing for the three-game road trip in Canada.

Still, a 5-1 loss in Laval on Wednesday night to open the team’s Canadian road trip pushed the Penguins’ record to 1-3-2 in their opening six games in March.

The Penguins did get some help in the way of Charlotte Checkers’ back-to-back regulation losses to Hartford during the week, which prevented the Checkers from gaining any ground on Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for second place in the Atlantic Division heading into this weekend’s games.

Wilkes-Barre/Scranton still controls its own destiny in terms of finishing the regular season in second place in the Atlantic Division and securing a first round bye in the 2026 Calder CupPlayoffs, and MacDonald believes that his team will be better for having gone through some adversity late in the season before the playoffs arrive, relaying a story about a team he was on in his final season of pro hockey as a player with the ECHL’s Reading Royals in 2012-13 that began the season 1-5-1 before figuring things out and going on a run to win a  championship.

“We thought the world was ending, and we had to get ourselves out of that,” MacDonald recalled. “And I remember throughout the playoffs, or end of the year, and we were like, ‘Hey, remember when we started one, five and one, and we thought the world was ending?’ You kind of can lean on those tough times and be like, OK, we’re going to find a way to get through it. If you never have to go through it, when it does happen in April or May that’s when things can go really squirrely.”