The Bears face the first gauntlet in defending the latest title | TheAHL.com

Patrick WilliamsTheAHL.com Features Writer

Providence. Springfield. Providence again.

That’s what the Hershey Bears faced this weekend on their first extended road trip of the 2024-25 season. The New England swing is one of just two sets of three for the Bears, but it will be an early test for a club that has played deep each June the past two years.

Hershey’s Calder Cup triple-A bid opened with five games in nine nights, including a two-game rematch with their Eastern Conference Finals foe from Cleveland and a two-game visit from Chicago. The Bears roster includes 21 holdovers from last spring’s run, a remarkable level of stability. The head coach Todd Nelsonholder of five Calder Cup rings, knows all too well that the process of rebuilding a Champions-caliber team takes time.

“We are trying to guard [any hangover] this year,” said Nelson. “But we’ve played a lot of hockey over the last few years. Not making excuses. We have to make sure we are right. As a coaching staff we have to find ways to motivate them, make sure they play 60 minutes.”

Even with a few early setbacks, this year’s team has earned Nelson’s faith. A busy home schedule out of the gates provided an opportunity to test his team. Monsters look scary too. The Wolves’ top speed gave Hershey another metric to measure himself against.

The most notable change for the Bears has been their captain. Dylan McIlrathwho served as a captain for the past two seasons, appears to have landed a full-time role with the Washington Capitals. So this week Hershey is nominated Aaron Ness as their new captain. The nearly 750-game veteran is in his 13th AHL season and seventh in Hershey, and he’s getting plenty of respect in an already leadership-filled locker room.

Ness, who signed a contract extension to stay in Hershey through at least 2025-26, is familiar with the level of the organization, and was previously a captain with Bridgeport in 2014-15. Part of the early work for the Bears’ leadership team will be trying to navigate the team through the first third or so of the season. Any sense of a Calder Cup hangover never materialized last year, as the Bears won 18 of the first 22 games after their 2023 championship and went on to the second-best regular season in AHL history.

“We have to find ways,” said Nelson. “The players must find a way to prepare and motivate themselves, and we as coaches must do the same. But it has a slightly different feel. I’ve been on teams that have gone through this and didn’t start clicking until the end of November. But we have to find a way to be quick here.”

The intense emotional tug-of-war that goes back and forth in the Calder Cup run can be a stark contrast to the quiet, subtle, day-to-day challenges that come with the regular season. The Bears also know that, once again, they are surrounded by every opponent’s system.

Said Nelson, “We’re going to see everybody’s best game, so we have to prepare every night to play.”

In the American Hockey League for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams and currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor to SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for the league’s top scorer in 2016.