Well, that happened. At the first least that opening sentence was my game recap for most of the night as the Milwaukee Admirals were shutout 1-0 by the Cleveland Monsters. Oddly, it is amazing to think how marginal of a scoreline that is and how big of a difference things feel if the result goes one way versus the other. If it was an Admirals shutout? We’d be thinking the defense was phenomenal. It wasn’t. And that really shouldn’t detract from what was still a very nice effort. The Monsters just won by an odd bounce that made its way to the tape of Zac Dalpe.

What I want to feel more than anything is that the Admirals still played a playoff style hockey game and, regardless of the result, that creates challenges and obstacles that need to be learned from immediately. It is very positive for the Admirals to have these sorts of games right now and have an ability to correct or learn to adjust through problems that are coming up in these regular season games as opposed to being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs – once again.

The Admirals haven’t made it past the opening round of the playoffs since the 2011 AHL Calder Cup Playoffs. In their last four appearances – they have only one a single playoff game. That needs to change. And the process to learn how to change it in playoff style atmosphere is being presented by games like that which the Monsters threw at the Admirals. The examples are there. Things just need to be cleaned up, simplified, and improved moving forward. There isn’t an awful lot of time left before the playoffs begin and mistakes can’t be corrected.

After the game I spoke with Milwaukee Admirals head coach Dean Evason as well as Marek Mazanec, Anthony Richard, Samuel Girard, and Justin Kirkland. These were the post-game comments after the Admirals shutout loss to the Monsters.

Comments on the comments? Despite the loss, do you rather the Milwaukee Admirals go through games such as this now rather than run into a buzzsaw such as this in the first round of the playoffs once again?

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