Andrew Cristall notched his seventh career multi-point game and lit the lamp for the first time since December 21 in the Hershey Bears’ 3-2 overtime loss to the Hartford Wolf Pack, Wednesday.
Cristall first got on the board with 10 seconds remaining in the first period, earning a secondary assist on David Gucciardi’s second goal of the year — a wrist shot from the point. The tally gave the Bears a 1-0 lead.
Cristall made it 2-0 at 4:02 of the second period. AC authored a give-and-go with Bogdan Trineyev, beating Wolf Pack goaltender Callum Tung on his backhand. The tally was Cristall’s sixth of the season.
The two-point game put Cristall, who skated on the first line with Ilya Protas and Bogdan Trineyev, back into sole possession of the team’s scoring lead with 28 points (6g, 22a) on the season.
Screenshot: TheAHL.com
Though things weren’t all smiles for the Bears.
After jumping out to a two-goal lead, the team took its foot off the gas pedal, allowing three unanswered tallies to Hartford.
The Wolf Pack’s Dylan Roobroeck got on the board for Hartford first after a cross-ice pass by Ivan Miroshnichenko was behind Graeme Clarke.
With 5:44 remaining in the second period, Brett Berard tied the game, skating to the middle of the ice and beating Clay Stevenson over the glove.
Berard added his second in overtime after a scramble in front of the net to win the game for Hartford.
“I didn’t like my team tonight,” Bears head coach Derek King said. “We played solid hockey for 10 minutes of the second period, and we were all over them. We had a fragile team on the ropes. They had nothing going, and then we just backed off. And then we just, we did not play. We stood still, we slapped pucks away, we didn’t break out clean, we were not good.
“They weren’t moving,” he added. “Their brains were shut off. And like I said, the 10 minutes of the second period was good hockey. We were jumping, we were on the forecheck, we were holding on to pucks, we were low to high, we were getting bodies to the net, we were putting pucks to the net, and it worked. And then they decided that it’s not going to work anymore, so they’ll just stop skating and turn pucks over. And we had – not everybody – probably half the team worked, and the other half were just, I don’t know what their problem was, but I’ll figure it out.”
Coming into the game, the Wolf Pack were last in the Atlantic Division.
Hershey will now set back on the road where they’ll have back-to-back games against the Charlotte Checkers at Bojangles Coliseum.