Rivalry reaches zenith: Chiefs, Ams place season on line

For the most part, the Spokane Chiefs will tell you that the past is behind them, and they wouldn’t be lying.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and every time – life goes on.

But that doesn’t mean the bitter defeat the Chiefs tasted when they lost their final Western Hockey League meeting of the regular season with the Tri-City Americans hasn’t carried over. And now that the heated U.S. Division rivals are set to square off for the Western Conference championship, the stakes are higher.

“That was obviously a heartbreaker for us,” said Chiefs captain Chris Bruton, referring to the 2-1 loss on March 15 that earned the Americans the Scotty Munro Trophy for the best overall record in the regular season and home ice throughout the playoffs. Tri-City finished with a league-high 108 points in the standings, and Spokane finished with 107 – both franchise records.

Because division winners earned the top two seeds in the first round of playoffs, the defending Memorial Cup and BC Division champion Vancouver Giants were the No. 2 seed in the conference, despite finishing with 106 points. The Chiefs knocked the Giants off in six games in a Western Conference semifinal series that wrapped up last Monday at the Arena.

“We’ve done what we had to do to get to this point,” Bruton said. “Now we want to do it again to get sweet redemption (against Tri-City). We are all really excited for this series to get going.”

The best-of-7 series, which begins tonight at Kennewick’s Toyota Center, pits the Chiefs and Ams against one another in the postseason for the fourth time and the first time in a conference championship setting. But the two know each other all too well.

The rivalry, 20 years old, has never been as exciting as it was this season. The teams were at the top of the division and conference – and for the most part the league – for almost the entire season.

In their first two meeting of the regular season, a home-and-home series in early October that began in Kennewick, the Americans won 4-3 in overtime and 2-1 the following night in a shootout.

The teams didn’t meet again until Nov. 24 at the Toyota Center. In Spokane’s 5-3 victory, Spokane’s top line flooded the score sheet. Bruton had a five-point night with two goals and three assists, Drayson Bowman added two goals and an assist and Mitch Wahl finished with four helpers.

The Americans won the next two meetings 4-1, once in Spokane and once at home, so it was encouraging when the Chiefs walked out of the Toyota Center on Jan. 5 with a 3-0 shutout.

But Spokane took two steps back, dropping a 3-2 shootout decision on Jan. 12 and suffering their worst loss of the season on Feb. 9. That’s when Colton Yellow Horn scored four goals and the Ams beat Spokane 7-2 at the Arena.

The Chiefs won the next three games before the 2-1 loss on March 15. The head-to-head score in terms of points was Tri-City 14, Spokane 13.

With the teams being so similar, the power play – which hasn’t been so hot for Spokane lately – is going to need to start clicking.

“Specialty teams are going to be huge,” said Bruton. “We have to keep them off the power play – they thrive off of it – and the power play will come for us.”

It will probably need to. Despite being the league’s top team when skating with an advantage during the regular season, the Chiefs are 6 of 47 on the power play through their first 10 playoff games.

“It’s going to come down to, for us, playing our game and sticking with the game plan,” Bruton said. “The way we played in the last series (with Vancouver), we stayed disciplined and showed maturity and the intensity of that series, to play a team as good as Vancouver, only helped us as a group.”

Ice chips

Tonight’s first game of the series and Game 3 on Monday will be televised on Comcast channel 78 beginning at 7 p.m. … Twelve players have scored the Chiefs’ 32 playoff goals in 10 games and 16 players have points.