-The Charlotte Checkers didn’t have an excellent start to the season. Now they are only a few points away from a fourth straight year of making the playoffs.
The Charlotte Checkers are the defending Calder Cup Champions. However unlike in the NHL where dynasties can be built by ensuring the players that were there to help you win that Championship stay with the team while making moves to improve the team, AHL teams can quickly lose those good teams to NHL Free Agency, trades, and Call ups.
The Charlotte Checkers were no exception. Players like Martin Necas and Haydn Fleury found themselves with permanent vocations with the Carolina Hurricanes while others like Nicholas Roy, Aleksi Saarela, and Trevor Carrick went along with trades out of the Hurricanes system. Others like Patrick Brown found themselves new homes in free agency seeking NHL starts.
That meant that the Charlotte Checkers were looking at a completely new roster going into the season. To top it all, legendary coach Mike Vellucci went to a rival in hopes of ensuring himself an NHL coaching job in the future realising that Rod Brind’amour is probably not going anywhere. With very few elements of the championship team remaining, a repeat seemed unlikely.
So it was no surprise when the Checkers started the season 8-9-3 through the first two months of the season. With so much turnover and players going and coming for the injured forwards on the Carolina Hurricanes roster, that entire locker room was simply a bunch of strangers (this is a terrible shirt idea by the way).
That changed going into December. There they had a much better month going 8-4-0 in the 12 games in that month. Fueled by seven home games and some of their best players like Julien Gauthier no longer serving time with the big club, the team began to surge back into better positioning.
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Then the new year came around and so far in the month of January they have been on fire. With another twelve games on the docket they have so far gone 8-3-0 after losing the most recent pair of games to Vellucci and the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. Before that pair of games they were on a tear that saw them win 11 of 12 games!
That gave their season a much needed boost and has sent them skyrocketing up the standings where they now only sit a single point (51 pts) behind the final playoff spot in the Atlantic Division. The good news is that they hold at least one game in hand on each of the teams ahead of them in the standings and three games in hand on the Springfield Thunderbirds (52 pts) and the Providence Bruins (55 pts).
That gives the Charlotte Checkers the opportunity to leapfrog both those teams and start building another run at the Calder Cup.
The bad news is that meanwhile the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins are right on their tail with an equal amount of points after having a decisive weekend and stealing away four points from Charlotte. The only relief here is that the Penguins have played an extra two games to get there.
The Charlotte Checkers are well on their way to another storybook season capped off with another Calder Cup Championship win. But to do that they need to buckle down and finish off their season better than they started it. They do that and the Queen City might just get itself another reason to throw a parade.
Question For CC Readers: Where do you think the Checkers will end up come playoff time?