The Coaches, The Memes and a Look at the Past

I was reminded as I watched practice yesterday just how fortunate the Allen Americans are to have coach's that are willing to help out. If you go to any Allen practice you may see Kevin Colley, Luke Chilcott or Chris Johansen on the ice helping Steve Martinson. There are few if any ECHL teams that can say they have a skating coach, a goalie coach and an assistant coach with five years experience as a head coach in the ECHL. Yesterday skating coach, Luke Chilcott, stopped by to work with the Allen defensemen for 30 minutes before the full practice started. If you have never watched Luke work with these pro athletes, it is quite the show and you can see how quickly he can help players improve their skating technique.

Skating coach Luke Chilcott working with defensemen

 

- I have talked about these coaches in the past but it is worth revisiting the talent that Steve Martinson has assembled to help out:

Kevin Colley -  Kevin comes from a skating family. His mom was a figure skating champion and his dad had his #9 retired by the AHL New Haven Nighthawks. Kevin was an assistant coach in Allen in 2015-16 when the Americans won the Kelly Cup and is back helping Steve Martinson this season. Kevin played in 214 AHL games and 16 NHL games with the New York Islanders during his playing career. He won the Kelly Cup in 2003 playing for Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies and was selected as the playoff MVP scoring 20 points in 14 games (7G, 13A). Kevin was the head coach of the Utah Grizzlies for five seasons (2008-13) and never missed the playoffs.

 

Luke Chilcott - Luke is the son of two skating coaches and has been the Allen Americans skating coach since 2015. Luke as well as his parents were figure skating champions in Great Britain. Luke represented Great Britian in the world figure skating championships in 2011-12. After an injury in 2012 he created Chilcott Skating Mechanics (CSM) and has worked with NHL (San Jose Sharks) and AHL (San Jose Barracuda, Texas Stars) teams. Watching Luke skate and work with the Americans at practice is a fun experience for sure.

 

Chris Johansen -  Chris has been the goalie coach for the Americans since 2017. He is Director of Goalie Development for the McKinney North Stars Hockey Club which has nine travel hockey teams in all age groups. Chris does individualized training and has worked with goalies from the AHL, ECHL and NCAA as well as numerous youth goalies. 

 

- A big thanks to these coaches who help out Steve Martinson and the Allen Americans players. It is a great tool for general manager Steve Martinson to have in his tool box when recruiting and developing players.

 

- Seven players that have played for Allen this season have a points per game average above 1.00. Some have been in Allen all season and some for only a few games. Here is the list with games played in parenthesis. Would be nice to see all six of these players in the Allen lineup at the same time:

• 2.00 - Luke Henman (3 games)
• 1.33 - Ryan Lohin (6 games)
• 1.20 - Jack Combs (40 games)
• 1.18 - Chad Costello (50 games)
• 1.13 - Gavin Gould (23 games)
• 1.03 - Branden Troock (32 games) 

- I will have a complete preview tomorrow on the upcoming games against Idaho, but one stat that sticks out is the Allen penalty kill against the Steelheads. The Americans have allowed a power play goal in all six games against Idaho this season. The Idaho power play is one on the best in the ECHL, ranked #4 at 22.3%. The Americans will have to pay special attention to this on Friday and Saturday. 

- I was looking back at the blog posts from March of 2014 trying to find some content I could talk about today. It was the final year of the CHL and Allen was already preparing for the playoffs as the third seed, behind #1 Missouri and #2 Denver. Allen's opponent wasn't decided until the last game of the season. The Americans were hoping to play Tulsa in the first round because of travel and cost savings. What happened was Tulsa lost and Brampton won on the final day of the season and Allen's first round opponent went from Tulsa to Brampton. The Americans blew through the three rounds in the playoffs in 2014, on the way to their second championship and the final championship in Central Hockey League history. 

• Quarterfinals: 4-1 over Brampton
• Semi-Finals: 4-2 over Quad City
• Championship Finals: 4-1 over Denver

 

- The other thing that struck me from the blog posts at that time is I was enamored with memes and used them frequently. Must have been my passive-aggressive approach to CHL officiating and CHL TV. Some still make me chuckle. I am sure those of you that were around during the CHL days will get a kick out of some of these.

 

DID YOU KNOW: Since I was wading through the archives for content I decided to pull the "Did You Know" from five years ago today and just see what came up. It is still appropriate today.

Whenever you compare how a player scores in the AHL versus the ECHL there are a couple of factors to take into consideration. To start with players in the AHL are generally bigger, faster and quicker than the players in the ECHL so that makes it harder to score. A more important factor, however, has to do with ice time and what line you play on. Top scorers in Allen get lots of ice time and power play opportunity. When they are loaned to AHL teams they are usually on the third or fourth line and do not get power play opportunities. Many times the fourth line gets few or no shifts in the third period. Here are the average points per game for Allen's top scorers for games played in the ECHL versus the AHL. These are career statistics with the first number being average points per game in the ECHL and the second number being the average points per game in the AHL.

Chad Costello -       1.60 vs .43
Greger Hanson -     1.16 vs .26
Bryan Moore -         1.05 vs .29
Spencer Asuchak - .93 vs .20
Gary Steffes -         .75 vs .30