‘Perfect’ weekend would suit Cloutier

Back-to-back home defeats to Coventry Blaze and Braehead Clan last weekend severely dented Hull’s hopes of a first-ever top-six finish in the Elite League.

It gets no easier for Cloutier’s team, however, with the top three of Sheffield Steelers, Belfast Giants and Cardiff Devils all lined up to face them in the next four days.

That forms part of a punishing end-of-season schedule which will see the Stingrays play 12 games in 23 days, caused in large part by not starting their 2010-11 campaign until early October, a month after most of their rivals, following last summer’s off-ice travails.

Hull can secure their play-off spot with one more win and Cloutier will be looking for his team to begin their preparations for the play-offs by picking up a first success of the season in Sheffield on Saturday night (7.00).

Previous visits to South Yorkshire this season have proved fruitless, however, and Cloutier admits his team will have to play the “perfect” game in order to take anything back to the East Riding.

“The whole of Sheffield’s line-up can hurt you, they can score goals from any line – that’s why they are top of the league,” said Cloutier.

“We need to play the perfect game to get anything out of it. In fact we need to play the perfect weekend with Belfast coming to our place on Sunday.

“It is a tough few days for us but, between now and the play-offs we need to try and build some momentum and make sure we get into a rhythm by playing good hockey on a consistent basis.

“As far as I’m concerned we have been playing some good hockey in recent weeks, we’ve just not been getting the bounces and the results we deserve - I really believe that.”

Cloutier said his team needed to start converting more of the chances it was creating in front of goal if they wanted to enjoy a successful play-off campaign.

“It’s almost the opposite to how it was at the start of the season,” he added. “We were scoring plenty of goals but losing games because we were giving up too much in our end.

“Now we’re keeping things tight at the back, but not scoring enough goals to benefit from that.

“If we can get our scoring going, we might be able to steal some points over the next few days.”