After a brief two-game road stand against the Kalamazoo Wings, the Iowa Heartlanders will return to Xtream Arena this week for three games. Iowa will take on the Wichita Thunder Wednesday night and the Fort Wayne Komets on Friday and Saturday.

The Heartlanders will ride into Wednesday’s game on the wings of a three-game win streak.

Iowa will play six of its next seven games at home, which could spur a late-season burst of momentum.

“I have been on teams before where, in this time of year, we change things around,” Iowa forward Kaid Oliver said. “We needed a start to change things, and I think last weekend was it for us.”

The Heartlanders still have a lot of work to do if they’re to make the playoffs in 2021-22. Iowa is currently in sixth place in the seven-team ECHL Central Division. The top four teams in each division make the ECHL’s Kelly Cup Playoffs, which are named after the ECHL’s first-ever commissioner Patrick Kelly.

Iowa has 47 points in the standings as of Tuesday. The Heartlanders are six points away from cracking the ECHL Central Division’s top four, which currently consists of the Toledo Walleye, Wheeling Nailers, Fort Wayne Komets, and Cincinnati Cyclones.

The Heartlanders have been cemented at the bottom of the ECHL Central Division standings for much of the year. But now, they’ve begun to dig themselves out of the hole.

“I think we are finally being rewarded,” Iowa head coach Gerry Fleming said. “I think we have been playing good hockey over the last month here. Now, we are finding ways to win. We have stuck with it and never really got discouraged.”

Iowa is just one point away from passing the Kalamazoo Wings in the ECHL Central Division standings and moving up to fifth place.

Offense has been fueling Iowa’s recent win streak. The Heartlanders have scored 4.7 goals in each of their last three contests, on average.

“We just have guys executing plays well,” Fleming said. “Our top line has been what we expected them to be when we recruited them early in the season. Hopefully we can keep it going.”

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The Heartlanders have also gained some defensive reinforcement of late, as goaltender Corbin Kaczperski recently rejoined the team. Kaczperski, who played collegiate hockey at Yale and Denver, spent a short time with the American Hockey League’s Syracuse Crush in between his stints with the Heartlanders this season. The Crush are the Tampa Bay Lightning’s AHL affiliate.

Kaczperski’s record as a Heartlander is 4-4-1. He posted a 93 save percentage and allowed just 2.27 goals per game.

[Kaczperski’s AHL experience] was good,” Fleming said. “When talking to him this morning, he said it was a great experience with great coaching.”

All three of Iowa’s games will begin at 7 p.m. this week.

“There are a lot of things that go into winning a hockey game, such as goalkeeping, defense, and winning on power plays,” Fleming said. “If we do those things right consistently, we give ourselves a chance to win every night.”