Travis Boyd/Special to the Daily News / USA TODAY NETWORK
There are enough on-the-nose context clues sprinkled throughout Hershey, Pa., that it doesn’t take a Mensa member to decipher the town’s chief commodity.
To wit, a jaunt down West Chocolate Avenue, with its Hershey Kiss-shaped streetlights, to Cocoa Avenue provides one key to this particular mystery, while a quick stroll along Chocolate World Way likewise serves as a dead giveaway. Of course, if you’re still not getting the hint, a venture down Hersheypark Drive, which borders the confection-centric theme park, provides a sense of what Hershey is all about. But if the sights are of little help, the distinct aroma wafting its way through town – yes, this is, in fact, a regular occurrence – removes any doubt: Hershey is America’s home of chocolate.
Ask around the nation’s capital, though, and you’ll bump into folks who argue that Hershey’s greatest export ends up not on candy-store shelves but at Capital One Arena, darting around the ice in red-and-white wrapping. Because while most know Hershey as Chocolatetown, Capitals faithful call it Bears Country. And the real sweetest smell in the rural Pennsylvania community? Calder Cup success.
While it’s true the Bears have had plenty to celebrate throughout their long history, the past two decades as the top affiliate of the Capitals have been particularly fruitful for Hershey. Among the top three tiers of professional hockey in North America – the NHL, AHL and ECHL – no team has hosted more championship parades in the time since Hershey and Washington joined forces in 2005-06. The Bears captured a Calder Cup in the first season of the affiliation, and they have since followed up with another six appearances in the final and four additional AHL crowns.
And the Bears’ success, as well as the Capitals’ part in it, is by design. In an era when the AHL is arguably seen more as a talent incubator than a high-stakes hockey battleground, Washington and Hershey have taken a different tack, one which sees the Capitals make a meaningful effort to ensure the Bears consistently remain more than an also-ran. “That’s kind of the crux of our philosophy,” said Capitals GM Chris Patrick. “We want our players, our prospects, playing meaningful games against good competition. So, one of the better ways to do that is to have playoff experience and long playoff runs, if possible. Looking at our series in the last couple years, as we’ve won Calder Cups, as you’re getting into the conference final and the final, it’s a high level of hockey, and the players on the other side that you’re playing against, a bunch of them are going to end up in the NHL very soon.”
This is how Washington and Hershey operate, and the symbiosis and the success on the farm that’s been intrinsic to the partnership between the two clubs isn’t novel. It has been a central part of the Capitals’ development model. Consider Washington’s 2018 Stanley Cup-winning team.
While key members such as Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and Evgeny Kuznetsov skipped over the AHL en route to NHL stardom, the rest of the championship roster was dotted with former Bears. In total, nine players who saw more than a dozen playoff games during the Cup run had come through Hershey. Among those were John Carlson and Jay Beagle, members of the Bears’ 2009 and 2010 championship teams, and Braden Holtby, who was with Hershey for the latter title.
But maintaining a winning AHL culture isn’t always easy. Despite the aforementioned Calder Cup victories, counted among which are two sets of back-to-back titles, including the 2023 and 2024 championships, the Bears haven’t entirely avoided down years. From 2010 to 2015, the franchise won just a single playoff round. And that 2018 Cup-winning Capitals campaign? It coincided with the worst season Hershey has seen since the early 1990s. Unsurprisingly, it was also a year in which the Bears were faced with the realities of feeding the big-league beast, as several Hershey mainstays from the season prior had graduated to the NHL.
But it’s in the aftermath of those rare bottom-feeding Bears campaigns where the reciprocity between the two organizations becomes increasingly evident.
Though Patrick wasn’t in the big chair in 2018 – he was the Capitals’ director of player personnel, rising to assistant GM in 2021 before being promoted to GM this summer – the relationship that has been built with Hershey and, in turn, with Bears vice-president of hockey operations Bryan Helmer, is based on respect for what the other is trying to accomplish. “He understands our goals, understands, like any AHL team at times, there are things the NHL club has to do that are going to directly harm the AHL team’s ability to win games,” Patrick said. “He gets it. He’s been around, and he has faith in us that we’re going to do whatever we can to make up for that and help Hershey win games.”
That help can come in a number of ways, not least of which is personnel decisions. Among the biggest changes that Patrick and Helmer have seen, however, is in the resources provided to not just prospects but the entire Bears roster and staff.
Helmer, a veteran of 1,117 AHL games (the third-most in league history), remembers a time when a skating coach was a novelty, not a necessity, in the minors. He can’t readily recall a time when members of the NHL team’s front office were dropping in to check on and chat with the AHL talent. And development personnel? Forget it. It was nothing like today, where former NHLers Olaf Kolzig, Brooks Orpik and Jim Slater are among those the Capitals enlist as development coaches.
“We want our players, our prospects, playing meaningful games against good competition.” – Capitals GM Chris Patrick
As for Patrick, whose on-ice career concluded after four NCAA seasons at Princeton, he had a front-row seat as change swept in. In one of his first gigs with the Capitals in the late 2000s, Patrick assisted the player-development staff. He recalls the Bears working with what these days would be seen as a skeleton staff – a coach and one assistant. Now, Hershey coach Todd Nelson patrols the bench alongside two assistants, and the staff is supported by a goaltending coach and a video coach.
And that’s just scratching the surface of what’s available to the Bears these days.
“Any week in Hershey, one of our guys is there and getting on the ice with the prospects or the older guys who want to work with them and work on skills and situational things,” Patrick said. “Nutrition has become a lot more of an important factor in the AHL now. On the strength-and-conditioning, we have a full-time strength-and-conditioning coach and two trainers versus one in the past. We have catered meals on practice days and things like that. It’s the amount of resources we put into the players in the AHL that has probably been the biggest change since I started.”
And the importance of the investment can’t be overstated.
Given the Capitals’ near perpetual playoff-contender status – with playoff appearances in all but two of the past 17 seasons – Washington has made just one top-10 draft choice in the past 15 years. As a result, and in order to stay competitive, demands on the Capitals’ front office and backroom staff have been twofold. First, a premium has been put on talent identification. Then, those who are selected must be nurtured properly. As it pertains to the former, there is a reliance on management and the scouting staff to do their due diligence. There is also trust put into the analytics team, which Patrick has overseen in the past while on his rise to the GM’s chair.
Where analytics are most valuable come draft day, he said, isn’t necessarily in striking gold with every pick but determining the best way to support a player once he arrives. In the past, a prospect might be drafted as a future first-line center when his true ceiling was as a penalty-killing specialist. The breadth of information now available helps mitigate misidentification, Patrick said. That leads to better development programs, which is where the support provided to the Bears comes to roost. “The guys you bring into Hershey, you need to have a relatively higher hit rate on these guys,” Patrick said. “There is a premium and a lot more time spent on giving these players all the resources they can have to help make them successful.”
That being the case, the Capitals are sure getting a good return on their investment. Last season, the Capitals, at one time or another, dressed 16 players who had ties to Hershey. True, the likes of Carlson and Tom Wilson, whose minor-league days have long since passed, qualify for that list, but 10 of those former Bears were part of one or both of the team’s recent set of back-to-back titles. That includes Connor McMichael.
A first-round pick, 25th overall, in 2019, McMichael seemed on the fast track to the NHL, especially after a 102-point explosion with the OHL’s London Knights in his post-draft campaign boosted his stock. And his standing only rose higher as a result of the pandemic throwing the hockey world into disarray.
Among the handful of players who benefitted from a temporary tweak in the AHL’s eligibility rules following the OHL’s pandemic-related shutdown, McMichael landed with the Bears as a 19-year-old. What he experienced in Hershey was a crash course in professional hockey, and he handled himself with brilliance. He led the Bears in goals during the shortened 2020-21 season, made the AHL all-rookie team and found himself in Washington for the duration of the 2021-22 campaign. But he wasn’t there to stay. A difficult nine-goal, 18-point performance in his NHL rookie season resulted in McMichael being returned to the AHL for all but six games in 2022-23.
Though the demotion stung, it is perhaps why McMichael is the current Capital most representative of the premium the organization puts on spending time not just in the AHL but as part of a winning program.
Upon his return to Hershey, he worked to round out his game. The growth was noticeable. And while McMichael’s per-game production dipped in the regular season, he was a standout when the chips were down in the post-season. He led the 2023 Calder Cup-winning Bears with six goals. Included among those was the goal that sparked Hershey’s offense – and eventual victory – in a winner-take-all Game 7 over the Coachella Valley Firebirds. That run served as the precursor to McMichael’s return to the NHL last season, where he finished sixth in Capitals scoring and sixth in average ice time among Washington’s forwards. “There’s a kid that really benefitted from the process,” Helmer said.
“One thing that I like about Washington is that they just don’t hand their young guys anything. They have to earn it.” – Hershey vice-president of hockey operations Bryan Helmer
If McMichael is most representative of the process, though, Hendrix Lapierre might be the next-best indication of how the Bears are building better big-leaguers.
The Capitals’ top pick, 22nd overall, in the 2020 draft, Lapierre arrived in Hershey with plenty of fanfare, and he delivered. In his first 22 games, he scored seven goals and 16 points. But the rigors of the professional ranks can take a toll on even the most gifted rookies, and Lapierre hit a wall. “Right around Christmastime, he started to falter,” Helmer said. “In junior, he got hurt, so he didn’t play as many games. Now, he’s played a bunch of games, professional games, and I think it caught up to him a bit. That’s when we sat him out, recharged his batteries, watched a game, and then, he just took off.”
By season’s end, Lapierre had 30 points, making him Hershey’s sixth-best scorer, and his playoff performance was all the more indicative of his growth. Like McMichael, Lapierre became a difference-maker, which was highlighted by his game-tying goal in Game 7 of the 2023 Calder Cup final.
Come last season, Lapierre picked up where he left off in the AHL and turned heads in Washington. He played 51 games with the Capitals, scoring eight goals and 22 points, adding another goal and assist while skating regular fourth-line minutes in Washington’s four post-season games. He then headed back to Hershey, where he led the AHL in playoff scoring and won the Jack A. Butterfield Trophy as post-season MVP. “Those are two great examples of the culture that we have down here,” Helmer said, “and how it helps guys make that next step and helps Washington have success.”
Though they’re prime examples, it’s foolish to suggest that McMichael and Lapierre exist at the terminus of the Hershey-to-Washington pipeline. If anything, they’re a sign of what’s to come, such as 2022 first-rounder Ivan Miroshnichenko.
A bit player with the Caps last year, Miroshnichenko first got his feet wet with the Bears and returned to the AHL to contribute seven goals and 12 points to last season’s championship run. Defenseman Vincent Iorio, Washington’s top choice in the 2021 draft, is likewise primed to be integral to the Bears’ pursuit of – and his personal opportunity for – a Calder Cup three-peat. And 2020 fourth-rounder Bogdan Trineyev is another who will look to build on the lessons learned during the 2024 title-winning season.
Their chance to prove they’re ready for the next step, as with any other Bear with designs on becoming a Capitals cub, is accepting the weight of expectation that comes amid a tradition of winning. “One thing that I like about Washington,” Helmer said, “is that they just don’t hand their young guys anything. They have to earn it.”
And as the next generation of Caps has shown, there’s no place better to do so than the Sweetest Place on Earth.
In this 2024-25 edition of our annual Prospects Unlimited issue, we count down the top 100 21-and-under players in the world (with features on Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini, Ivan Demidov, Rutger McGroarty and Zach Benson) and profile the Washingon Capitals development system. In addition, we have NHL team pages with features, grades and full rosters for each organization.
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