Status Of Top Tri-City Goalie An Unknown Chiefs Don’t Know Who They’ll Face, But Hope Boucher Back For Game 6
Will he or won’t he?
Not even the Tri-City Americans know for sure, or if they do, they aren’t talking about it.
He is Brian Boucher, the injured Tri-City goaltender, whose absence was felt Saturday night in Kennewick, where the Spokane Chiefs extended the Western Hockey League West Division semifinals with a 9-7 win over the Americans.
Boucher rested a sprained knee while the Chiefs bombarded his backups, David Trofimenkoff and Blaine Russell.
Spokane tightened the series at 3 games to 2. The winner of this best-of-seven set goes to Kamloops to open the finals in the West, probably on Saturday night.
Boucher’s status was listed as doubtful, but Tri-City coach Bob Loucks might figure that his starter on one good knee is the best he’s got going into tonight’s Game 6 at the Coliseum.
Tri-City general manager Dennis Beyak said he doesn’t know any more about the timing of Boucher’s return than he did a couple of days ago.
“It’s still day-to-day. The bottom line is, we need some saves,” Beyak said. “Spokane is a tough club to put away, but if we get some saves Saturday, I don’t know if the series goes back to Spokane.”
The Chiefs - Darren Sinclair and Kevin Sawyer in particular - have limited WHL scoring leader Daymond Langkow’s opportunities, but the Americans have come up with a potent second line.
“We needed Chad Cabana and Rob Butz to step up and they’ve done that for us,” Beyak said. “We’re happy with our second line.”
The Chiefs have even better scoring balance. Five Spokane players - Jeremy Stasiuk, John Cirjak, Joe Cardarelli, Greg Leeb and Dmitri Leonov - are among the league’s top 20 playoff scorers.
Coach Mike Babcock said the Chiefs would prefer to see Boucher in goal tonight, even though they’ve had far greater success against the other two.
“At this point, there’s no sense in treating anyone with too much respect,” Babcock said.
Babcock would also prefer to see his team settle back into a do-your-job approach that would preclude 9-7 playoff games.
“We haven’t played nearly as well since they made the change (in goal),” Babcock said. “I don’t know if that’s part of why we’re playing the way we are, but I’d rather see us get back to playing hockey.
“We’ve played hard and with emotion, but we got caught up in the flow of the game Saturday night instead of controlling it.”
Still, Babcock and the Chiefs are at the point where wins are the only result that keep you going.
“Going into Tri-City down 3-1 (in the series), nobody knew what would happen, if we’d lie down,” Babcock said. “We didn’t. We found a way. Now we have an opportunity to put more pressure on Tri-City.”
The Chiefs with a win would send the series back to Kennewick for Game 7 on Thursday.
“We’re in the Final Five,” Babcock said. “We’d like to be part of the Final Four and go from there.”
xxxx WHL PLAYOFFS Best-of-7 (Tri-City leads 3-2) Tonight: Tri-City at Spokane, 7 p.m. Thursday*: Spokane at Tri-City, 7 p.m. *-If necessary