Hershey Bears: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly From Game 1 of 76

HERSHEY, Pennsylvania --  The Hershey Bears opened their 2019-20 season at home against Atlantic Division rival Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Saturday night, dropping a 4-3 decision in regulation in front of a large crowd of fans at Giant Center.

Editor's Note: This season, Julie takes a look at the good, the bad and the ugly coming out of Hershey.

The Good

Alex Alexeyev

The rookie defender scored just over a minute into the game. Pairing him with the veteran Erik Burgdoerfer is a brilliant move by the coaching staff in Hershey, but then again, you’d expect nothing less.

You give the guy a solid-veteran on the ice to learn from and then they debrief after each shift with Patrick Weller. .

The kid isn’t a physical threat yet, but he certainly found the right spot on the ice early in the contest for his first AHL goal. He took a risk in sliding up the ice though, putting both blueliners up ice a bit more than you’d like to see, but the risk paid off - reminiscent of another Russian blueliner much (Orlov)?

The Bad

A lack of scoring from the forward lines is a bit alarming.

At times, Hershey’s forwards looked as if they had just been put together on lines before the game started, which is absolutely NOT the case.

Brutal honesty, with the amount of scoring talent lost last season and the measures taken to address that, the forward lines cannot get shut out of games.

You have to like your chances of winning games when the blueliners strike twice and the powerplay gives you a goal, but last night proved that sometimes fewer passes and more “selfish” shooting may just work out better in the end.

The Ugly

Lucas Johansen

Whoever said that one mistake does not a game make surely did not see the epic error by Lucas Johansen. With time expiring on the Hershey powerplay and Vitek Vanecek banging his stick on the ice, there simply isn’t an excuse for not getting back and protecting against an out-of-the-box goal. Not only was Johansen in a footrace, but he also gave up inside position.

Maybe next time he will just take a penalty or not find himself in that position, but that goal should never have happened, and Hershey would have escaped the night with at least a point.