AHL IceCaps need more than a hot streak

They also require a couple of other teams to go into a deep freeze

The St. John’s IceCaps have gone 17-12-2 in 2015.

Pro-rated over the course of an entire season, it’s the sort of win-loss ratio that would easily get the IceCaps into the American Hockey League’s Calder Cup playoffs next month.

But there’s that “2014” part of the 2014-2015 AHL campaign that’s been hanging like lead weight on the team as it tries to climb the ladder in the AHL’s Eastern Conference.

The IceCaps went 12-15-6 in October, November and December, and while those numbers didn’t seem atrocious at the time, in reality, they represented a well-dug and deep hole.

St. John’s continues its extrication process tonight as it begins its final road trip of the season — a six-game New England swing — in Worcester, Mass., with a game against the Sharks, who happen to be a team they need to climb over if they are to make one last run at a post-season po- sition. The IceCaps (29-27-8) are in 10th place in the conference, four points behind Worcester, which has three games in hand.

St. John’s has seven points to make up if it is to catch the Springfield Falcons, who hold eighth place and what would be the final playoff spot in the conference.

The Falcons have a game in hand on the IceCaps.

Earlier this week, after his team had finished up a disappointing 2-3 homestand with a loss to the Manchester Monarchs, IceCaps’ captain Jason Jaffray outlined the two-part scenario that might get St. John’s into the Calder Cup playdowns: a hot streak for the IceCaps and a chill to descend over the teams just ahead of them in the standings.

We’re talking extreme temperatures here.

Say that St. John’s went 10-2 over its remaining dozen regular-season games. That would give the IceCaps 86 points. The Sharks could equal that by playing just better than .500 hockey in the 15 games they have left to play. The Falcons could do the same with a win-one, lose-one pace between now and the middle of April.

What’s more, it’s unlikely St. John’s would emerge the winner in any situation where it would end the season tied with one or more teams for eighth place. The first determining tiebreaker is the total of regulation and overtime wins (ROW) by the teams involved, in other words, each club’s win total minus shootout victories.

Heading into today, Worcester’s ROW total was 31, Springfield’s sat at 29 and St. John’s was at 25.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the IceCaps in their quest: in this six-game road trip, they play the Sharks and the sixth-place Portland Pirates (eight points ahead of St. John’s) twice each. Fourpoint wins will certainly keep the hope quotient higher.

••• There’s been a lot of speculation about how the distraction of the impending off-season fran- chise shuffle affected the IceCaps in that recent homestand, with players possibly losing focus wondering how they might be affected when the Jets move their minor-league operations to Winnipeg.

If that was the case, it may not be as much of a negative factor during much of this road trip. Things might equal out. That’s because players in Worcester and Portland will also be affected by off-season moves. The NHL Sharks are moving their AHL team from Worcester to San Jose, while the Pirates are switching NHL partners from the Arizona Coyotes to the Florida Panthers.

And the Monarchs, who will be St. John’s opponents on Saturday, will be out of the AHL come this fall, with the Los Angeles Kings also taking its farm club out west.

Only the Providence Bruins, who will host the IceCaps Sunday afternoon, are being spared a similar upheaval.