2024 Calder Cup champions! Hershey Bears win second consecutive AHL championship
HERSHEY — Numbers can tell how many goals a team scored, how many games the team won, or even the championships it has claimed.
But numbers cannot tell the different emotions experienced by the Hershey Bears in the moment they won their 13th Calder Cup.
On Monday night, the Hershey Bears experienced a goal, a victory and emotions that are rare, even on the championship level of professional sport.
The Bears won their second-consecutive Calder Cup after Matt Strome scored 1:08 into overtime to defeat Coachella Valley 5-4 in Game 6 of the championship series.
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The winning goal started when the Firebirds muffed the puck near their own blue line. Bogdan Trineyev tapped it to Riley Sutter, who set up Strome moving to the net for the championship-clinching score.
Strome’s goal, just his second of the playoffs, capped off the third straight win for the Bears, who came back from a 2-1 series deficit. The last 182 minutes of the series were played either with tie scores or one-goal differences.
“It’s right there,” Strome said of the Bears’ mentality coming back. “Just keep with it. Just keep with it.”
The celebration for the Bears touched off different feelings for different players. Some, like playoff MVP Hendrix Lapierre, had the opportunity to feel a new way holding the Calder Cup at Giant Center, after carrying it in Coachella Valley after last year’s Game 7 win.
“It’s different, especially after the overtime winner in front of a super loud crowd,” said Lapierre, the Jack A. Butterfield Trophy winner after scoring seven goals and tallying 15 assists in the postseason. “It was super special.”
But though the Bears went back-to-back, the first back-to-back AHL champions since Hershey did it in 2009 and 2010, not every single Bear who grabbed hold of the trophy Monday night had done it before. Jimmy Huntington, for example, had been on the Milwaukee Admirals last year. His season last year was halted in the Western Conference Finals by the Firebirds.
“This year, we kept saying the job’s not done,” said Huntington, who had an assist in Game 6 and two goals in Hershey’s Game 5 win. “Now, the job is done. … I owed [Coachella Valley] one, and I think I got that one. Give them credit, they’re a good team, but with the season we had, we deserve to be back-to-back champs.”
The Bears, who had a league-best 111 points in the regular season, were in great position to win the game and series in regulation. They went ahead 4-3 on Pierrick Dube’s third goal of the game. Hats floated down to the ice from the franchise-record crowd of 11,013 with 11:04 left in regulation. The go-ahead score started with a takeaway in the offensive zone by Alex Limoges, who set up Dube to the left of the net.
Lapierre almost sealed the game on a breakaway with 3:10 on the clock, but Firebirds goalie Chris Driedger was equal to the challenge. Then Cale Fleury converted on the other end to even the score 4-4 with 2:55 remaining. It was the fifth time that the Bears went to overtime in the playoffs after allowing a goal in the last six minutes of the contest. However, Hershey was 4-1 in those overtime contests.
The Firebirds took the Giant Center crowd out of the game a little with a goal just 1:37 into the contest when Ryan Winterton scored after a pass from behind the net from Cameronn Hughes.
But the Bears carried play after that through the rest of the opening stanza. Dube scored with a slapshot on Hershey’s first power play to tie the game with 15:33 left in the period. Lapierre and Joe Snively assisted.
Hershey took its first lead with Lapierre’s tip in of a Chase Priskie shot with 36 seconds left in the first.
Though the Bears had the 2-1 lead after one period, it was the Firebirds who had momentum in the second period. Marian Studenic scored another early goal for Coachella Valley, tying the game 2-2 just 1:51 into the period. That goal came during a 4-on-4 stretch due to penalties after the first period expired.
Winterton scored his second goal by flipping the puck from the edge of the crease under the crossbar, putting the Firebirds ahead 3-2 with 12:01 left in the middle act.
Coachella Valley goalie Chris Driedger preserved that advantage briefly when he stopped a Hershey 2-on-1 moments after the Winterton goal. But the Bears evened the score 3-3 when Dube scored his second goal of the game. He was assisted from behind the net by Limoges, with Jimmy Huntington notching the secondary assist.
Hunter Shepard made 17 saves while earning his third straight win in goal, after being pulled during the third period of a 6-2 loss in Game 3.
Driedger made 17 saves as well.