Entering Saturday, the Alaska Aces (5-10-2) owned the third-worst winning percentage (.353) in the ECHL.
Their offense (2.53 goals per game) ranked 24th on the 28-team circuit. Their power play (13.0 percent) ranked 21st. Their shooting percentage (.079) ranked 25th. And they earlier endured a franchise-record, eight-game winless streak (0-7-1) that's the longest in the league this season.
Their most obvious shortcoming is a lack of offense. They average 32.06 shots per game (6th on the circuit) but don't get much out of those chances.
So what can they do to bolster the offense? Barring better scoring from the current crop of forwards, not a lot.
The Aces are unaffiliated, so they are unlikely to get help of any kind from an AHL team. Their dearth of scoring doesn't give them much in the way of trade bait either.
And that means about the only thing they can do to immediately upgrade is lure a forward or two from Europe. Guys usually start drifting back to North America from European leagues in Janurary, before the ECHL's deadline for transfers. Deadline usually is early February.
So that also means the Aces most likely have to get more out of the players they have. Easily said. But the Aces have played 17 games -- Game 18 marks the quarter-pole of the season -- and that's a decent enough sample size to believe scoring will continue to be difficult. At best, Alaska will have to do scoring by committee, but that most often doesn't work so well. Usually, it develops into lack of scoring by committee.