NORFOLK —The Norfolk Admirals promoted Jeff Carr to head coach early last season, and he has helped orchestrate an impressive turnaround in less than two years.
The Admirals open their first playoff appearance in a decade Wednesday night in Quebec against the Trois-Rivières Lions in the first round of the Kelly Cup Playoffs.
Norfolk finished the regular season second in the ECHL’s Eastern Conference North Division to the Adirondack Thunder with a 41-21-6-1 record (89 points) — the club’s highest win total since reaching 55 in the 2011-12 season. The Admirals clinched their first winning season since rejoining the ECHL in 2015.
Carr, who took over as head coach eight games into last season, was previously brought in as an assistant coach at the start of the 2022 season after a successful five-year stint in the SPHL with the Knoxville Ice Bears. He won 152 games and was named Coach of the Year following a 42-10-2-2 campaign in the 2021-22 season.
Carr, who went 20-39-4 during his first season with an Admirals team that finished last in the division, said Norfolk ownership gave him “carte blanche” to help rebuild the team.
“It’s been a special two years,” said Carr, who was extremely complimentary of staff members and mentors that he’d come in contact with throughout his career. “It was a makeshift year last year — we didn’t have continuity. We had a really big grind, but that’s where all the fun is. You’re at the bottom and you feel there’s no way out. We really wanted to flip the culture.”
Carr has used the same blueprint in the development of all his teams, demanding output from every player on the ice through hard-nosed play and grinding effort. And that is displayed with the spread of scoring on this team: 14 players, including four defensemen, each appeared in more than 30 games and registered 20 or more points. And he wants that trend to continue during the best-of-seven playoff series.
“We’ve just had maximum effort on recruiting good people,” Carr said. “Players that want to jump over the boards for each other. That was the recipe that we put in.”
Stepan Timofeyev led the Admirals in the regular season with 53 points on 20 goals and 33 assists, followed by Danny Katic with 24 goals and 26 assists.
Andrew McLean was the top scoring defenseman with eight goals and 25 assists. Yaniv Perets was the top goalie with 18 wins in 24 appearances, recording a 2.99 goals-against average with an 89% save percentage.
Brandon Osmundson, a Chesapeake native, has 29 points (nine goals, 20 assists) in his first season with the Admirals.
“We step into this year, and we feel like we’re getting a lot of breaks through all our work on and off the ice,” Carr said. “It’s a slow methodical grind, players focus on getting back to doing their craft. And when you do your job, that’s usually when points stack up.”
The ECHL playoff format has the Admirals playing on the road for the first three games of the series, with Games 2 and 3 at the Colisée Vidéotron on Friday and Saturday. Game 4 is scheduled at Scope on Wednesday, April 24, with additional home games if necessary. All games are available via the streaming service on FloHockey.tv and can be heard on the Admirals Radio Network via the Mixlr app.
The winner of the seven-game series advances to the North Division finals and will face the winner of the Adirondack-Maine series.
The Admirals won 7 of 8 games against Trois-Rivières (31-30-5-3, 70 points) during the regular season, including all three in Quebec.
“Going into the playoffs, everyone is going to have to be a leader,” Carr said. “They’re going to have to step their game up, stay humble and continue to get better. We’re a tough team because we don’t have one top line, you never know who’s going to put up a goal or an assist or who’s going to get a hit or get into a fight. We’re a sum of all our parts.
“We move forward and take it a day at a time.”
First-round series
No. 2 Norfolk vs. No. 3 Trois-Rivières
Game 1: 7 p.m. Wednesday at Trois-Rivières
Game 2: 7 p.m. Friday at Trois-Rivières
Game 3: 7 p.m. Saturday at Trois-Rivières
Game 4: 7:05 p.m., April 24, at Scope
Game 5: 7:05 p.m., April 27, at Scope*
Game 6: 7:05 p.m., April 28, at Scope*
Game 7: 7:05 p.m., May 1, at Scope*
*If necessary
