Graham Mink continued his season-long conversation with Pennsylvania Puck managing editor Dave Sottile.

Dave: Prior to beating Wilkes-Barre/Scranton on Sunday, Hershey had lost six of its previous seven games. Why does a team tend to re-examine itself during losing skids rather than all the time?

Graham: When you’re successful as a team and when you’re winning games, you don’t give as honest an assessment as you should on whether you’re contributing or not. If you’re winning and you have a horrible game, it doesn’t make it look so bad.

You don’t bear down as much, you don’t make the corrections maybe you should and you don’t work as hard as you should. You’re rewarded for what wasn’t an optimal effort on a person-to-person basis. Over time, you start to lose momentum that way.

When you lose, you start to look at things a little more honestly and you self-assess differently. You’re harder on yourself. You need to re-establish good habits and get away from the bad ones, something that will make a team successful.

Dave: So what does it take to right a ship when it starts heading in the wrong direction during a season?

Graham: If each individual examines his own play and takes steps to improve that part of things, the sum of those efforts will get you out of that slump, but it takes time. It’s not as easy as it seems. It involves chemistry. It involves effort. It involves the style of play you’re playing.

Winning covers up a lot of your faults, so when you’re losing, your faults are exposed. Once you realize they’ve come to the forefront, you work at correcting them. You work at improving, and that makes the team better.

Dave: Didn’t the Bears begin to take stock in things during a four-game losing skid that began their recent troubles?

Graham: Things don’t always get better right away – even after you start addressing areas – because you’re playing against teams that want to win, as well. It takes 25 guys and a coaching staff to win.

Even when everything goes right and everybody plays the right way, you don’t always win. Sometimes the bounces don’t go your way. When you’re struggling and things aren’t going well, you try to bear down, work harder, make corrections and hope to get a break like we did on Sunday (rallying for a 4-3 shootout win). Hopefully we can continue to build something.

Dave: Can one victory really make that much of a difference in changing attitudes and approaches moving forward?

Graham: In my mind, I don’t feel like we’re out of anything yet. We need to have a good weekend coming up and a couple of good weekends before I’ll feel like this rough patch is behind us. We definitely have a long way to go as a team.

Hopefully from today’s practice, where the tone was very serious and hard-working, we’ll keep it going into the weekend.

Dave: Wilkes-Barre/Scranton had won nine consecutive games at Giant Center before Sunday’s Hershey victory. Did that put a little extra spring in your step as a team?

Graham: It was a little bit of a psychological relief, too, because we were rewarded. Wilkes-Barre is a good team. We were happy to beat them. The Penguins have had a lot of success in this building. It was a positive end to a bad weekend for us.

The two games we lost over the weekend, we played very, very well for long stretches in those games. But at crucial moments we faltered and that cost us four points. Even so, I think things are moving in the right direction.

I thought we played a lot better hockey this past weekend than we did before the all-star break. It’s just a matter of getting everybody pulling in the same direction and putting up a consistent effort. It’s just not good enough to play for a period or half a game and expect to win.

Dave: If you could pinpoint one area of concern (that) needs to be improved dramatically, what would it be?

Graham: We’ve relied a lot on our power play all season. We need to become a better five-on-five hockey team. I think we’re on the way to becoming that type of team. If we do, that will make us stronger.

The ultimate goal is to win the Calder Cup. Once we make the playoffs, I’ll be happy with wherever we start. It’s all about how we pull it together from that point.

It certainly sucks to lose at any point in the season, but it helps teach you things by exposing your weaknesses, so you can work on them and get better going forward.