Practice had ended, yet most of the Milwaukee Admirals remained on the ice in the bowels of the Kern Center on the campus at the Milwaukee School of Engineering Thursday morning, firing pucks at the empty nets and boards. It took a while for players to finally begin filtering off, and it was a slow crawl, one at a time.

Such reluctance to hang up the skates every day hasn’t been lost on Admirals coach Dean Evason, who helped guide the Admirals in the American Hockey League playoffs with an incredible 15-4-1 finish to the season.

"It’s been a grind here," Evason said. "We’ve grinded it out every single night trying to get the wins. Having said that, our group has stayed extremely fresh and excited. You watch practice and it’s not like oh my gosh, we have to play another hockey game. We’re excited to play another hockey game. That’s great. We’ve played playoff hockey now for the better part of at least two months. We’ve played tight, pressure games. We’ve been up, lost leads, came back, so we feel, hopefully, the learning process we’ve grasped here as of late and we should be in a position where we can play that type of hockey."

The yearly challenge for a coaching staff in the AHL is roster fluctuation, but this year was perhaps stranger than most with the lockout in the National Hockey League almost assuring frequent turnovers across the league. The Admirals, for instance, made 97 transactions.

Fourteen of those include players who have spent time in Milwaukee and with the Admirals’ parent club, the Nashville Predators.

It’s been a unique balancing act, one that Evason feels he and his coaching staff has done a good job managing.

"We think we’ve done, hopefully, the right things early in the season to develop players and your team," Evason said. "At the start of the year everyone asked us, asked me in particular, what’s more important, developing or winning? We said right from the start there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do both. If you do look back on the season we have developed people.

"We feel we’ve developed players here and got to a point where won enough to get in the playoffs. We’ve kind of done both so now we’re in a position to compete for a Calder Cup and you never know what happens once you get in."

All of that change speaks to the collective effort down the stretch for the Admirals, who clinched the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference on the last day of the regular season. And while they play the top-seeded Texas Stars (43-22-5-6) in the first round, the Admirals (41-28-4-3) finished just eight points behind them.

The incredible final 20 game push to the postseason has been a total team effort for Milwaukee, as no Admirals player ranks in the top 20 in the AHL in scoring. Many individuals have played well over the course of the season to get the team to the playoffs, but so many have shuffled in and out of the lineup that it’s nearly impossible to just pick one to focus all the attention on.

"They’ve bought in. It’s a credit to your leadership group," Evason said. "Coaches can only say so much, talk to them so much about how to play the game, how hard we play the game. It’s that inner leadership group and peer pressure within the group that they push each other."

If there is one player to hang a hat on though, it would be goaltender Magnus Hellberg.

He is fourth in the AHL in goals against (2.14) and has provided a solid backing for the team following a rough start to the year.

"He feels real good about himself," Evason said. "From game one to his last game the development was tremendous. There’s no question the group feels real good playing in front of him and real confident that if we have a breakdown he has the ability to bail us out."

"’Maggy’s’ been fantastic," Ford added. "Our confidence has grown with him. And the biggest thing this time of year is you’ve got to start from the back end out and if our goalie is our number one player and our defense can kind of follow suit with that and our forwards have been putting in timely goals."

The Admirals begin the playoffs tonight at the BMO Harris Bradley Center and hope to take advantage of starting this five game series with Texas with back-to-back games in Milwaukee. The Admirals finished the regular season 21-12-3-2 at home.

"We’ve played pretty solidly at home and we’re excited," Ford said. "We have a great fan base here. This first round we’re hoping we have great support and we’re in our home bed and are preparing accordingly all week. Not having to travel is great and we’re looking to get off to a fast start. We’re excited for the run."

As Ford finished talking, more players finally drifted off the ice and began prepping for their walk back to the BMOHBC. He admitted it can be difficult to sustain a high energy level over the regular season, but the Admirals received a necessary re-fueling once their playoff spot was clinched – and they don’t see it running out any time soon.

"Every day could be our last so we had to go on kind of a run to make it into the playoffs and now that we’re here it’s just business as usual," he said. "We’re coming to the rink excited. We’ve got a good, youthful group mixed in with some veteran guys. They keep us young and they look to us for some guidance once in awhile. It’s been a good fit. We have a lot of good pieces in place and we’re going to be excited for the playoffs Friday."