August 1, 2023
The
Hershey Bears franchise waited nearly 60 years to claim their first victory in The Golden State, which they accomplished in dramatic overtime fashion during the Calder Cup Finals’ Game 7 with a 3-2 victory. Their previous California triumph occurred on December 10, 1965, against the Los Angeles Blades; also by the same 3-2 count.
And while the bouts of adversity that Mike Vecchione, Sam Anas, and Garrett Pilon had to overcome to achieve personal vindication in helping the Chocolate and White to their 12th title pale in comparison to that 50-plus year drought, their stories of perseverance in pursuit of the top prize in the American Hockey League are impressive nonetheless.
Vecchione, who scored the Bears’ first game-winner of the regular season on opening night in addition to netting their first of the goal of the playoffs, also authored their last with his fifth foray into the goal scoring column in the postseason. Previously in the season, Vecchione had suffered a prolonged drought which consisted of nine straight contests in which he failed to light the lamp, but he endured the ordeal with a super-supportive cast of teammates.
“It is tough when you produce all year, and you realize guys are counting on you (to score goals), and that’s kind of my role,” Vecchione said “It starts to add up and you build, and the pressure starts to weigh on you, but the guys kept it very light. I watched videos with the coaches to see if I could do anything different. I was playing good hockey and getting my chances, but they just weren’t going in. So, it was very difficult, but the boys were carrying the slack, saying things like ‘you're playing great and it’s going to come.’”
Vecchione, whose Calder Cup-winning Game 7 overtime tally was only the second such strike in the AHL’s 80-plus year history, and the first since the Cleveland Barons stung the Pittsburgh Hornets, which featured future Bears legends Willie Marshall and Frank Mathers in their lineup, on April 17, 1953, continued.
“Nine games without a point sucked, but at the end of the day, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It was just sweeter that way. You don’t produce for that long, and then have a great game four, and then score the OT winner. Again, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that I didn’t score for nine games. The guys took care of it and carried me on their shoulders. I’m just fortunate enough to have been able to produce a little bit in the finals and the Game 7 winner.”
Anas, a Potomac, Maryland native who was a big Washington Capitals fan in his youth and signed a one-year pact with the Bears prior to the 2022-23 season, underwent abdominal surgery on January 6th and subsequently missed the following 26 games on the Bears’ schedule. However, he scored in his return to their lineup on March 17th at Lehigh Valley and also garnered the club’s last road game-winner which came at the expense of his previous club, the Springfield Thunderbirds.
In his one and only season with the T-Birds, Anas led the club in scoring in the regular season and helped the club to the Calder Cup Finals. Along the way, Anas, an alternate captain with the club, started out as a house on fire by scoring four times in Springfield’s first four post-season outings. Unfortunately, he was ice-cold the rest of the way and finished up the playoffs mired in a Death Valley-like 14-game goal-scoring drought.
Happily, Anas’ futility of a playoff season ago, which was still fresh in his mind, came in handy for the Bears as Anas, an honorary leader in the club, lent his experience to his mates who had to be questioning themselves and wondering what it was going to take to score against Coachella Valley’s keeper, Joey Daccord, who had collected back-to-back shutouts in Games 1 and 2 in California.
“We made a few minor adjustments (in Coachella Valley), but I think we just had to stick to it. We really didn’t have much puck luck out there, and we knew that it was going to come, and when it did it felt great.”
Anas, who recently signed to play in the KHL next season and who had netted a goal in three of Hershey’s four rounds of the playoffs continued, “Any sort of experience, being in that situation and going through it makes you realize how hard it is and all that it takes to really get the job done. Mac (captain, Dylan McIlrath) has won it and (Aaron Ness) have been to the finals, so there were a handful of us who had been there, but it just felt awesome to win it.”
For Pilon, whom the Capitals selected in the third round with the 87th overall pick in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft only five picks behind Coachella Valley’s Carsen Twarynski, the indoctrination to the pro ranks and the organization began with a 24-game goal drought in his 2018-19 rookie season. This humbling experience ultimately benefited both him and the Bears in a mighty way down the road.
“It feels like that was a lifetime ago,” said Pilon, who wore uniform number 18 for the Bears throughout his five full seasons in the organization. “You go through highs and lows as a rookie, and you have to adapt. It’s a new style of play, so it’s definitely hard on guys having to go through those sorts of things. Back then, we learned to lean on a lot of good vets who had obviously been through it a couple of times. That's the whole thing with experience: once you’ve been through it, you know how to handle it better.”
The Bears’ boosters saw tremendous growth from Pilon during his 259-game Hershey career, which officially came to an end when he signed with the Ottawa Senators. That growth didn’t come in the physical nature, nor did it present in the goal-scoring column, where he averaged 14 tallies per season in his four full non-Covid campaigns. It came in the forms of his overall game, at both ends of the rink, and in the faceoff dot.
“Something I’ve worked on a lot since being in the AHL is execution, and I think that is something that people don’t think of. They might say your skating’s improved or something like that, but I think that’s something that I’ve strived to work on to make sure that I’m executing plays. I think as you get older your physicality gets better, so I think that’s something I’ve definitely improved on since from when I was rookie, being able to hit a lit bit more and be more aggressive,” said Pilon, who played in the Bears’ final 40 games of the regular season in addition to appearing in all of their postseason matchups after missing 18 straight games from mid-November through the end of the 2022 calendar year.
The aggressiveness that Pilon spoke of was of the physical variety, but anyone with a keen eye for the finer points of the game would undoubtedly notice the development and subtle aggressiveness with the puck, particularly in one-on-one situations that has evolved in the game of the man they call “Peels.” Those skills were very much in evidence in the latter stages of the finals with all the eyes of the AHL hockey world looking on.
In the third period of Game 3, and less than a minute after a Twarynski tickling of the twine brought the Firebirds within a goal in the third period, Pilon stole the puck along the right wing boards high in the offensive zone. He circled near the blue line before finally cutting a path towards the Coachella Valley goal and sliced his way through three defenders along the way before finally firing a rooftop wrister by the glove of Daccord to give the Bears a two-goal cushion that they ultimately squandered before prevailing in overtime when Riley Sutter saved the day.
Then, in Game 5 and in overtime, with the game scoreless and the Bears halfway through a power play that lacked any spark in the first minute of it, Pilon took to the ice, a man on a mission, with only one thing on his mind-and it wasn’t that this could be his last shift on
Giant Center ice as a Hershey Bear.
“Once you get past the first five minutes of overtime, I think that you know it can either end right away, or it can last a while. You just go out there shift-by-shift and try to get into the rhythm of things. That whole shift was littered with great plays,” said Pilon, whose dad Rich, a 14-year NHL veteran who played two full seasons of junior hockey as a teammate of the Bears’ winning head coach, Todd Nelson.
Twice during his historic last shift, Pilon, while quarterbacking the Bears’ second power play unit with a commanding confidence, twice kept the puck in himself when it looked like the Firebirds would clear it out of their defensive zone. He rotated numerous times between the point position and just above the goal line before ultimately wheeling off the boards high in the offensive zone and once again blowing a wrister by the glove hand of Daccord to move the Bears within a game of a championship.
“Logan Day made a great play at the blueline to keep that puck in, and Morelli came in and helped and made a nice drop pass to me, and went right to the front of the net and got a good screen on,” Pilon said “For me, it was the end of the power play and I just thought I wanted to make sure that I could get the shot on net. There were a lot of things that had to happen for the puck to go into the back of the net, but at the end of the day, it worked out."
This article is by John Sparenberg, guest contributor to HersheyBears.com.
