Wranglers back in the saddle atop Pacific Division | TheAHL.com

Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer

Are the Calgary Wranglers back? It sure seems that way.

Playing in Stockton in 2021-22, the Calgary Flames’ top development affiliate reached the AHL’s Western Conference Finals. In the Wranglers’ inaugural season of 2022-23, the team finished atop the overall standings. But they slipped to 35-28-6-3 last season, good for just seventh place in the Pacific Division.

Now, despite all-everything goaltender Dustin Wolf having graduated to the Flames and much of the rest of their core scattering throughout hockey, the Wranglers are back to their winning habits. After a season-opening loss to Abbotsford, the Wranglers have won eight in a row and already sit six points clear of the rest of the Pacific pack.

Wolf, who had collected an armful of awards during his three AHL seasons, provided his teammates with consistently elite goaltending. With the 23-year-old now firmly in an NHL crease, the Wranglers have turned to Devin Cooley for that reliability. After a 42-save performance in last night’s 4-3 victory over San Diego, Cooley is 6-1-0 with a 1.82 goals-against average and a .946 save percentage through his first seven appearances this season. Calgary management homed in on Cooley on the first day of free agency this past July, bringing him into the organization on a two-year deal.

A fifth-year pro out of the University of Denver, Cooley helped the Milwaukee Admirals reach the conference finals in 2023, and a trade-deadline deal last March sent him to the San Jose Sharks and enabled him to play his first six NHL games – and do so close to his native Los Gatos, Calif.

Cooley’s quick start with Calgary already includes four outings in which he has stopped 37 or more shots. On the back end of an opening-weekend home series with Abbotsford, Cooley delivered a 44-save afternoon for his first Wranglers win. Then on a road trip through Coachella Valley, Henderson and Bakersfield, he stopped 98 of the 100 shots that he faced. This past weekend with Colorado visiting for a pair of games, he split the work with intriguing newcomer Waltteri Ignatjew, a 24-year-old Helsinki native who was named the top goaltender in Sweden’s second-tier HockeyAllsvenskan last season.

In his second season behind the Wranglers bench, head coach Trent Cull thinks that going out on a week-long road trip so early could prove helpful down the road.

“It [was] kind of nice getting together on the road there for a bit,” Cull told reporters after Sunday afternoon’s home win over Colorado. “Quiet some of the outside noise, get to playing our game, and they’ve kind of brought that back.”

Ask any AHL head coach, and strong early-season goaltending is vital. Like any of the 32 teams in this league, the Wranglers are attempting to work in a mix of new faces into their lineup. It takes time for those players to adjust, for systems to become second nature, and for a team to begin to shape the sort of identity that it seeks. Strong goaltending buys some for that process to play out successfully, something that Cull knows quite well.

“I think we’re doing well a lot of the things we talked about,” Cull said. “The group deserves a lot of credit. They’ve grasped the idea of how we want to play, and they’ve done that fairly quickly.”

The most notable new face in Calgary is forward Martin Frk, a former 40-goal scorer who got on the board for the first time this season on Sunday.

“It was just a matter of time,” Cull said with a smile.

Frk, a Calder Cup winner with Grand Rapids in 2017, can heat up quickly: in 2022-23 with Springfield he managed one goal in his first 11 games before finishing with 30 tallies on the year.

Forwards Rory Kerins (8-2-10), Jakob Pelletier (0-10-10), Walker Duehr (5-4-9), Clark Bishop (5-3-8) and Dryden Hunt (1-7-8) all rank among the AHL’s leading scorers this season. Kerins’ league-high eight goals are already half of his total from all of last season. Pelletier is back to form following an injury-interrupted 2023-24 season. And Duehr brings his forceful game back to the Wranglers after playing 40 games last season with the Flames.

The AHL club also received Matt Coronato back last week. A 2021 first-round draft pick and an AHL All-Star as a rookie last season, Coronato scored twice in last night’s victory.

On defense, returnees Jonathan Aspirot, Ilya Solovyov, Yan Kuznetsov, Artem Grushnikov and Jeremie Poirier are joined by Jarred Tinordi, a late-summer signing who brings more than 200 games of NHL experience to the blue line.

The Wranglers have played a league-high nine games over the first 19 days of the season, but Cooley is OK with that.

“You’ve got to look at [the schedule] and be like, ‘OK, it’s just one giant game,’” Cooley told reporters on Sunday. “If you play one game…it’s like [the result] doesn’t really matter because you’ve got to go play the next one in a few days. You can’t ever let your foot off the gas. I’m trying to see this season as one giant game, and I’m just really excited to get back out there again.”

On the American Hockey League beat for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.