Houston News Blog

Photo courtesy Jason Villanueva/Houston Aeros

​On Sunday, the Houston Aeros went to the dogs, somewhat literally, as the Toyota Center was opened up to allow people to bring their dogs to the game. And while the dogs might have had a good time, it's questionable if the fans did as the Aeros lost their second game in a row and their fourth in five games.

The Aeros won the game against the Peoria Rivermen on Wednesday 1-0 as goalie Anton Khudobin and the Aeros defense shut down one of the better offenses in the AHL. The Aeros offense didn't show up until about midway through the third period on Friday as the Aeros lost 3-2 to the Milwaukee Admirals, and except for the final three seconds of the second period on Sunday, the Aeros offense failed to appear at all as the Aeros lost 2-1 in overtime.

But the Aeros have been a damaged team this past week. Damaged in the sense that injuries in Houston and injuries in Minnesota have kept the Aeros playing with a shortened roster and with little room for error.

"We played every healthy body we have tonight," head coach Kevin Constantine said after Wednesday's game. "Including two natural defensemen at forward between [Jamie] Fraser and [Brandon] Rogers. So it's just kind of all-hands-on-deck."

Photo by Fred Trask

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The Houston Aeros caught a wave late in the regular season last year, made it into the playoffs, and went on a run that nearly carried the team to the AHL Calder Cup. After the season, new management took over the Minnesota Wild, the parent club of the Aeros, and the new management made lots of changes, especially here in Houston where many of last year's key players were allowed to depart for various other clubs.

One of those players, a man who quickly became a fan favorite last season, was Mitch Love who, tomorrow night, returns to Houston with his new team, the Peoria Rivermen, to engage the Aeros in a rematch of teams from last year's first round playoff pairing.

"We had a great bunch of guys last year," Love told Hair Balls. "A real unique group. Probably the closest bunch I've played with since juniors, and I think that all became pretty evident when it mattered most in the playoffs. The coaches were the kind that players love playing for. Easy to communicate with and honest. That's all you want when you do anything."

The old joke goes that a guy went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out. Saturday night, the people in attendance for the Aeros game at Toyota Center got to watch that come true as fight after fight after fight broke out, in between what was some of the Aeros best play of the season.

But fights aside, Saturday was the second game in a row that the Aeros played some exceptional hockey, helped in part by the play of Hair Balls subject Danny Irmen, who scored two goals on Thursday night and set up a fantastic short-handed goal on Saturday night to further cement his standing as the team's best special-teams player.

Irmen refused to take the credit for his goals in Thursday's 4-1 victory over Manitoba, crediting his teammates for the points. "I could have scored that [first] goal blind," Irmen told Hair Balls, of a goal that resulted when Stoner faked out a defenseman and the goalie and fed Irmen the puck for the goal. "I sat my stick on the ice and he put it on there and it went in. It was a great play by [Stoner]."

​The Houston Aeros are returning home tonight to face the Manitoba Moose at Toyota Center at 7:05 p.m. They spent the past week on the road where they went 0-3 while losing twice in Grand Rapids and once to  the Texas Stars in Austin on Sunday. But despite the team's inability to get its offense working properly, the Aeros still find themselves hanging around the top of the Western Division standings.

One of the reasons for this has been the team's consistently outstanding penalty kill, which has been a rather commonplace occurrence the past several years. There have been two consistent influences to the Aeros penalty kill over the past three years. Head coach Kevin Constantine has a reputation for having a good penalty kill with all of his teams. The other consistent influence is right wing Danny Irmen.

Constantine stresses the penalty kill because he believes that a good penalty kill not only prevents the opponent from scoring, it provides energy for the rest of the team and can help change the momentum of a game. And no one on the Aeros is better at this than Irmen.

"We've had a really good penalty [kill] three years in a row," Constantine tells Hair Balls. "It's either been two to five in the regular season and one or two in the playoffs. And [Irmen is] one of the four featured penalty killers every year. He's done a good job with that every year."

Photo by Jason Villenanueva/Houston Aeros

​Last Wednesday, the Houston Aeros lost a tough 1-0 game to the Lake Erie Monsters at Toyota Center. It was disappointing not only because of the loss, but because it dropped the team below the .500 mark on the young season.

Worse, the team appeared to be lost, drifting about in search of an identity. Veteran Peter Zingoni took the loss hard, claiming that he and his fellow vets weren't getting the job done. "I think as a whole, as a team, I think we're trying to get a little too cute," he said. "We're turning the puck over too much on line rushes as well. Myself included."

Zingoni put the blame on the team trying to be too cute. Trying to make the extra pass instead of taking the open shot.

"This is kind of the time when hockey sense is going to have to take over," he said. "Our coaches do enough for us preparation-wise, and we practice these drills in practice everyday. It comes to a point where we're really going to have to respond."

Photo by Jason Villanueva/Houston Aeros

​The Houston Aeros are consistent about two things this season. They've played six games this season. All six games have been on the weekend. The Aeros have won three of those games, and they've lost three of those games. They're also consistent about the fact that when it comes to the second period of games, the Aeros are better off just skipping the action.

The Aeros won Friday night's contest with the San Antonio Rampage 5-2, but not before struggling through a second period that saw the team surrender an early 1-0 lead and fall behind 2-1 before the San Antonio goalie lost his composure and proceeded to help cost his team the game with two penalties in a matter of minutes that led to a game-tying goal.

The Aeros lost 5-1 to the Texas Stars on Saturday as they gave up four goals in the second period to fall hopelessly behind 4-0. Aeros coach Kevin Constantine switched out his goalies in the middle of the game, and even went so far as to pull his goalie with over seven minutes left in the game on Saturday in hopes of generating some kind of intensity. Hopes which were in vain.

​Because the Houston Aeros prefer having easy access to the Toyota Center ice, they use the locker room that, during Rocket games, is used by the Power Dancers cheer squad. So the locker room tends to be a bit cramped under normal circumstances. This past weekend, with about eight more players than normal still hanging around the squad, the locker room was so crowded that not all of the players had lockers or places to sit.

But as disjointed and cramped as the locker room appeared, nothing compared with how the team looked on the ice as head coach Kevin Constantine juggled his playing roster from game to game against the Texas Stars on Friday and Saturday night.

The number of players benched and replaced was so large that it prompted one of my fellow press-row scribes to quip to the team's GM, Jim Mill, that there must have been a lot of injuries. The problem wasn't injuries The problem was a large roster that Constantine was still trying to figure out.

"We purposely held guys around longer than normal just to be real thorough in evaluation of who we want to play and who should make the team," Constantine said following Saturday's 2-1 shootout victory. "There's a negative to that as it's kind of hard to become a team and work with individual guys. The positive of that is that your decisions are better."

​The time has come Aeros fans. The time for the team's first home game of the season. They open the home portion of their schedule against the expansion Texas Stars at 7:35 p.m. at Toyota Center. They opened the season last weekend in Winnipeg where they split two games with the Moose.

"I saw for sure in game one everything that I've seen every year I've coached," head coach Kevin Constantine said of the team's 4-2 game one loss. "If you took a look at the game that would least likely predict where'll you be as a team as the season wears on, you can throw a game one out. It doesn't mean that you're going to be good or bad based on how you play."

But the team won game two of the season, and Constantine was happy with what he saw, saying "What I did like from the weekend was that there was a quick acceptance by the players that we hadn't played very good....we had an unbelievable positive response from game one to game two and we played a very solid game two and got a nice road victory."

​As hard as it might be to believe, hockey season starts tonight. And for the Houston Aeros, this season starts in the same place that last season's ended. In Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The 2009-10 Aeros are going to be a rather different looking team than what you saw on the ice last year. Krys Kolanos, Corey Locke, Jesse Schultz, and the rest of the team's key offensive talent from last year are gone. Goalie Nolan Schaefer has departed for Russia. As for their replacements, well, decisions are still being made by the Aeros and the Minnesota Wild, so it's probably going to be a few weeks before the final roster is completely and totally in place.

Coming into the season, head coach Kevin Constantine says it's an unknown. There are just so many new players that, right now, it's hard to make a judgment about what the team will be like this season.

"If you look at our team, the goaltending is somewhat the same -- two of the three goalies are the same and [new goalie Wade Dubielewicz and former goalie Nolan Schaefer] have similar resumes experience-wise -- so that should make our goaltending pretty similar," Constantine tells Hair Balls.

​Difficult as it may be for some to believe, hockey season is fast approaching.

The Houston Aeros are currently holding their training camp in Sugar Land, and more and more players are arriving in camp from Minnesota after being sent there by the parent club. Head coach Kevin Constantine returns to the team this year, and at the moment, he's working to learn all of the new guys while trying to determine his roster for this upcoming season.

One of the new players is center Peter Zingoni, who suffered through an injury-plagued season with the Norfolk Admirals last season. Zingoni likes what he has seen of the team, and he is eager for the season to start so that he can show he's healthy and primed for a breakout season.

"I bring a lot of energy, a lot of passion to the game," he said after practice yesterday. "Hopefully I contribute a lot in the goal department. Score some goals and create a lot of opportunities."