The first professional playing season for Tyler Kelleher has been bittersweet. He had an amazing showing during the Nashville Predators Rookie Development Camp, continued that form into Pre-Season Training Camp, and hit the ground running with the Milwaukee Admirals. Unfortunately he has lost over a month’s time due to a knee injury.
Kelleher is on the comeback trial right now. He is slowly edging towards a return in the coming weeks. When he gets back to the ice it will be a great boost for the Admirals. The future is a bright one for the 5’6″ forward from Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
The Milwaukee Admirals 2017-18 season is officially at its halfway point. It’s been a difficult season to really gauge. October was great. November and December saw a nonstop sequence of ups-and-downs. Lately, things have started to turn for the better. Based on the two months previous to this upward trend it only feels hard to trust that this form will last. Hopefully time will tell.
The Admirals record is 20-14-4-0 (44 points, 0.579 points percentage). They are currently second in the Central Division and fourth in the Western Conference standings. For right now: that’s good. It has been a slightly turbulent season as the results have shaken out but -if- the lessons learned from those down moments are learned from it could mean good things for the second half of the season. The Admirals have a really young defense At times the team’s performance appears to reflect just how well or not well that young defense plays. These early experiences can go a long way into making the overall team stronger.
The Milwaukee Admirals trend of ups and downs continued from November into December. If anything, they picked up a brand new habit of playing games beyond regulation. The Admirals played 13 games in December and logged 7 games that went to overtime. Their record this past month was 5-4-4-0 (14 points, 0.538 points percentage). It was up from November (0.500) and still far off of how good they started in October (0.714).
It’s in moments such as the last two months when the choices for top performers feel limited. It isn’t the quality that is suspect it is just the consistency of that quality that makes things difficult. Luckily for Admirals fans, and myself giving the monthly award, the choice for The Real Estate Center‘s Admiral of the Month Award for the past two months has actually been quite easy. The most consistent and best player for the Admirals right now is Anders Lindbäck. It’s not even close. And that is why he is the Admiral of the Month for December.
It ’tis the season where we take a step back and check in on a good few former Milwaukee Admirals players. As we can often find ourselves in our own organizational bubble, myself included, it can be a bit of surprise to see how well or now well so many of these players have been performing. Let’s check in on last year’s departures and a good handful of others.
When pulling back from a distance and reviewing this past weekend for the Milwaukee Admirals it’s hard to put a finger on where the team is right now. They traveled up North and played against one of the hottest teams in the AHL currently, the Manitoba Moose, and expectations following a lackluster 5-2 defeat on home ice against the not hottest team in the AHL, the San Diego Gulls, made things feel bleak. And then Saturday happens.
The Admirals started out with a poor opening period but they managed to rally back from down 3-1 and earn a victory over the Moose in a shootout. It was gritty. It was a gusty effort from numerous individuals. To accomplish that battle back on a team as good as the Moose and end their nine-game winning streak seemed like the sort of result that could change the tide. It appeared to follow into the opening period of the Sunday clash. It then sharply collapsed until the Moose had themselves a 6-1 win.
These were two games with two completely different outcomes and two entirely different impressions left once the game came to a crashing halt. It was as though we all received a microcosm of what the Admirals have been doing in the 2017-18 season. No one good result appears to be followed up by another and another. In fact, having one good period followed up by another tends to be a stretch. Is this bipolar stretch of hot and could simply an AHL standard of a young team getting on the same page all at once or is this really just a now expected norm from now until the season ends? The longer things drag on such as this the more it seems the Admirals are sort of stuck in this place.
Before the Nashville Predators would play against the Anaheim Ducks in their first ever Western Conference Finals appearance there was some news in the organizational ladder. The Norfolk Admirals were announced as the Predators brand new ECHL affiliate beginning with the 2017-18 season. The Predators would continue on towards their first ever Stanley Cup Finals appearance. An ECHL alumni named Frédérick Gaudreau could be seen scoring goals along the way for the Predators after time spent working through the entire developmental process as an undrafted talent. This all seemed to be a promising fit. Until it clearly wasn’t.
Last week the Nashville Predators terminated their ECHL affiliation agreement with the Norfolk Admirals. The agreement which was announced back on 4 May, 2017 lasted less than two full months into the 2017-18 season before being utterly dissolved. What happened? Why did it happen? And what happens next?
The Milwaukee Admirals are now through two months of the 2017-18 season. While there was plenty to be upbeat about in October the same couldn’t be said in November. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It was just a constant of ups and downs which ended in a record of 6-6-0-0 (12 points, 0.500 points percentage). Yet, even in some of the rough stretches, it is hard to argue against who the best performer was in November. And that is why The Real Estate Center‘s Admiral of the Month Award for November belongs to Anders Lindbäck.
The Milwaukee Admirals are nearly through the opening two months of the 2017-18 season. They hold a 10-8-0-0 record (20 points, 0.556 points percentage) and are currently fourth in the Central Division and eighth in the Western Conference standings. The Admirals might have started off the season winning four straight games but they have only won consecutive games on one occasion since then – and that came this past week in a shootout and overtime win. It has been a stop-start, lose-win vortex in which the Admirals can’t really get on a roll.
Though, despite this up-and-down start, there has been a real constant throughout the Admirals season: Anders Lindbäck. The 29-year old from Gävle, Sweden has been brilliant from the start of the season and has been the best and most consistent player in Milwaukee by a good margin.
A season ago he only had a PTO contract with the Ontario Reign to get himself going and found himself needing to return back to the Swedish ranks of hockey after 4 games in the AHL. Come one-year later he has made 14 starts in the AHL and has a 2.35 goals against average, 0.923 save percentage, and shutout to his name. Plus, Lindbäck is currently tied with Garret Sparks of the Toronto Marlies for the most wins by a goaltender (10) in the entire league.
It begs the question. Why isn’t Lindbäck the goaltender of choice right now to be the back-up goaltender of the Nashville Predators?
When the rosters in the AHL switch from one season to the next it can be amusing to see those who cross enemy lines within the same division. Lately, it has been fascinating to see the exodus from the Rockford IceHogs to the Milwaukee Admirals. In the last three years there have been three players making the leap: Cody Bass (2015-16), Mike Liambas (2016-17), and Pierre-Cédric Labrie (2017-18). For Liambas it was a one-year pit stop around time with the Admirals. For Bass he was a one and done guy within the Chicago Blackhawks organization. But Labrie was competing against the Admirals with the IceHogs the last three seasons. It hasn’t taken him long to blend into Milwaukee.
Last season, I wanted fan requests to determine who and when players of your choice would be heard from in Fifteen. It worked a treat. We heard from several different people and had a lot of laughs. There was just one problem: the most requested player and most frequently referred to as the funniest player Admirals teammates had played with, Harry Zolnierczyk, was recalled by the Nashville Predators moments after being named Admiral of the Month last December and Milwaukee didn’t see him again. That’s the bad news. The good news? Harry Z re-signed with the Predators before the start of the 2017-18 season.
Admirals Roundtable 