Chiefs, Canes resume
The general rule is you don’t talk about a shutout while it is in progress. That’s just one superstition hockey players hold sacred.
That’s also why none of the Spokane Chiefs want to talk about Kitchener, Ontario, just yet. Though they have a 2-0 lead over the Lethbridge Hurricanes in the Western Hockey League championship series – which resumes tonight in Lethbridge, Alberta – the Chiefs aren’t punching their ticket to the Memorial Cup until they get two more wins, which could be part superstition, part good sense.
In the 2000 WHL playoffs, the Chiefs took a 2-0 lead over the Kootenay Ice in the league final only to lose the next four games to miss out on a trip to the Memorial Cup. If anything can be conclusive when it comes to playoff hockey, it’s that anything can – and often does – happen.
To name a couple of things that need to happen for Lethbridge to make the series interesting – which after two dominating performances from Spokane, it hasn’t been so far – is for the Canes to match the Chiefs’ speed and rebut Spokane’s forecheck.
“I think we do handle it at times,” Canes coach Michael Dyck said. “We’ve just got to sustain our momentum.
“There’s times when we try to look for, I wouldn’t say the easy way, but maybe that long stretch pass where we force things and that’s where they’re able to counter.
“We’ve just got to stick with our game plan and just have a little more patience.”
Time is running out for patience, though, and the Chiefs don’t plan on letting their foot off the gas.
“That’s our whole plan, going throughout the regular season and especially into the playoffs, we want to be a team that builds on speed,” said Chiefs forward David Rutherford.
The Chiefs (14-5 in the playoffs) have also been a team that doesn’t tend to cool on enemy ice.
They won a league-high 24 games on the road this season and have only lost twice away from home in the postseason – once at Tri-City in double overtime in the Western Conference championship series and once in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the West semifinals.
“Obviously, it’s going to be a different atmosphere because we aren’t the home team,” said Chiefs captain Chris Bruton.
“They’re going to be pumped and ready to go and they are going to have the crowd behind them, but we call ourselves the ‘road warriors’ for a reason. We love to play on the road. We don’t mind getting away from home and having that bit of adversity.”
Blackwater honored
Chiefs overage forward Judd Blackwater was named the WHL player of the week after scoring five goals and assisting on another to go with a plus-3 mark in four playoff games last week.
Blackwater netted two goals, including the game-winner in Game 7 of the Western Conference championship series, which the Chiefs won 4-3 over the Tri-City Americans.
Blackwater, a Lethbridge, Alberta native, is riding a five-game goal scoring streak in which he has netted seven goals.