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Marlies 2015-16 season a record-setting building block
- Updated: June 1, 2016
A day after their record-setting season came to an end, the Toronto Marlies were still dealing with the sting and the swell of championship dreams cut short. But as their American League Eastern Conference Final loss to the Hershey Bears fades behind them, they’ll almost certainly look back on the 2015-16 season as one to cherish and build upon.
“The players felt good about the season that they had, and they feel good about where they’re at in their careers, but there’s a lot of disappointment about what happened in this series and falling short of the ultimate goal,” Marlies head coach Sheldon Keefe said Monday, one day after his team had its season end after falling 3-2 to the Bears in Game 5. “It’s going to take some time to really digest, everything that happened, not just in that series, but even the series that we won. We’ve got the summer to really digest things.”
There are a slew of positives to digest: the franchise finished the regular-season with a team-record 54 wins, claimed top spot in the entire AHL for the first time in the organization’s history, and earned a berth in the conference final for the second time in the past five years. Just as importantly, Keefe and the player development team assembled by Marlies GM Kyle Dubas produced an astonishing number of youngsters – 15, to be exact – who at one point or another were recalled to play at least one game for the Maple Leafs. Whether it was the growth of highly-touted forwards William Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen or the ascent of relative revelations such as wingers Nikita Soshnikov and Brendan Leipsic and blueliner Rinat Valiev, Toronto’s future is as bright as any team’s.
“Reflecting back on the year, it was an awfully successful year for the team with the regular season that we had, and to win two playoff rounds, and a lot of guys had great individual years,” said veteran defenceman and team captain Andrew Campbell. “There was a ton of improvement from everybody, and that’s what you look for at this level, is improving and trying to get to that next level. For the most part, we accomplished that as a group, despite the disappointing ending.”
“Definitely the most talented group that I’ve been a part of,” added veteran centre Sam Carrick. “I just think we had a great group of young kids who had a lot of drive. It was just fun to be a part of.”
The Marlies had the AHL’s most potent offence in the regular-season, scoring a franchise-record 292 goals – 17 more than the league’s next-best squad in that department – and proved themselves capable of erasing just about any in-game deficit via their impressive firepower. That was a credit to the virtually unheard-of roster depth Dubas was able to assemble, and also a tribute to the tremendous job Keefe did in his first year as a professional head coach.
“I thought he was unbelievable this year,” Sam Carrick said of Keefe, who earned the job of AHL North Division All-Star coach for the work he did this season. “He really established what he wanted from us right from the start, and he rewarded guys for giving back to him. It was one of those seasons where it felt like it flew by, and that’s a credit to our coaching staff for making every day coming into the rink fun.”
The Marlies players’ respect for Keefe was …
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