Before Friday\u2019s shootout win over Belleville clinched their berth in the Calder Cup Playoffs, the Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton Penguins suffered some recent adversity.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s opening 50 games.<\/p>\n
Then, an overtime loss in Cleveland on Feb. 28 started a season-high, five-game winless streak that lasted until March 15. It wasn\u2019t for lack of effort, or even large stretches of poor play, but for a multitude of reasons the Penguins struggled in that stretch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis stuff is going to happen,\u201d Penguins head coach Kirk MacDonald said after last Sunday\u2019s 3-1 win in Lehigh Valley ended the skid. \u201cWe didn\u2019t play (poorly), just couldn\u2019t find a way to win. We were just finding ways to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n
In two of those aforementioned five losses (March 4 vs. Springfield and March 14 vs Lehigh Valley), the Penguins were shorthanded 14 times \u2014 seven in each game \u2014 which certainly isn\u2019t a recipe for success.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took three penalties in the final 11 minutes of hockey. Can\u2019t win like that,\u201d McDonald said of last Saturday\u2019s loss. \u201cYou can\u2019t 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\u2019s what happened. (We) beat ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they\u2019ve done mostly all season, the Penguins responded well the following afternoon in last Sunday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Still, a 5-1 loss in Laval on Wednesday night to open the team\u2019s Canadian road trip pushed the Penguins\u2019 record to 1-3-2 in their opening six games in March.<\/p>\n
The Penguins did get some help in the way of Charlotte Checkers\u2019 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\u2019s games.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Reading Royals in 2012-13 that began the season 1-5-1 before figuring things out and going on a run to win a\u00a0 championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought the world was ending, and we had to get ourselves out of that,\u201d MacDonald recalled. \u201cAnd I remember throughout the playoffs, or end of the year, and we were like, \u2018Hey, remember when we started one, five and one, and we thought the world was ending?\u2019 You kind of can lean on those tough times and be like, OK, we\u2019re 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\u2019s when things can go really squirrely.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Friday\u2019s shootout win over Belleville clinched their berth in the Calder Cup Playoffs, the Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton Penguins suffered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1902,178,180,179,726],"class_list":["post-145440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-penguins","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}