Saturday, December 27, 2008

Cory Clouston Update




As per a request, I have received a message from former ICE Head Coach Cory Clouston who is in his 2nd year with the AHL's Binghamton Senators.

We have been playing well as of late(7-1-3) last 11 games. We play 6 games in 8 nights right after christmas.
We currently sit 16-9-6. We play Hershey(Washington) and Wilkes Barre(Pitsburgh) tonight and tomorrow. Both are very good teams with a lot of depth and talent. Both organizations have drafted well over the last few years. It is not by luck that one team went to the Stanley Cup finals last year and one team isnear the top[ this year. We have made very big strides over the last year and a half. Ottawa completely overhauled their team here in Binghamton starting last season. We began with only 3 players from the previous season. We improved the team by 27 points last year finishing 2 games above .500 from 25 games below .500. This years draft appears to have been a very good one but we will not see the benefits for another couple of years.
With Ottawa struggling they have used a lot of our players. As many as 5 have been up at a time. They currently have 4 players that have played a large role here. Bell, Lee, Zubov, and Bass are all up with Ottawa. We went through a period of two weeks where we were playing with 8 players out due to injury and call-ups.

We played against Hamilton which Ryan Russell and Ben Maxwell both play for and are both playing well. We fortunately won both games of the home and home series. The second game was played in Montreal with a crowd over 14 000.
Best of luck to everyone back home
Happy Holidays
Cory