Sitting 7th in the AHL’s North Division with an underwhelming record of 6-7-2-1 somewhat clouds this notion. But, make no mistake, these Marlies are indeed #ActuallyGood.
It’s easy to place this current iteration alongside the Marlies’ Calder Cup-winning counterparts from the season prior and quickly deem the former a failure. On the surface, it’s not entirely close, either.
They were special.
Emboldened by an ability to outright dominate practically all facets of the sport, those who observed the 2017-18 Marlies merely assumed that they were the end product of a lab experiment – a team meticulously constructed by hockey’s most gifted scientists for the purpose of achieving AHL perfection.