Chiefs Put Cap On Turbulent Week Spokane Gives As Good As It Takes With 9-3 Victory Over Tri-City

Hockey is a lot like the weather in Spokane. If you don’t like it, stick around a few hours and it’ll change.

Twenty-four hours after the Tri-City Americans crushed the Spokane Chiefs, the Chiefs took their revenge Saturday night in the Arena with a 9-3 victory over the Americans.

It wasn’t art. It wasn’t even terrific sport. It was a drawn-out, wrenching, penalty-marred 3 hours and 5 minutes, but it capped the most tumultuous week in Chiefs history.

Packed into seven days were the crash of the team bus, the distractions of Wednesday night’s all-star game here, the trade of the team’s 20-year-old goaltender, the arrival of three new players and Friday night’s 10-4 humbling loss in Kennewick.

“We’ve never had a week like that since I’ve been here,” said Tim Speltz, in his seventh season as Chiefs general manager.

After all that happened it was if the Chiefs were sworn to win, if only to put some positive spin on all they had to put behind them.

Nobody embodied the turnaround more than goaltender Aren Miller, who swept aside 22 of 25 shots one night after getting torched with five third-period goals the night before in Kennewick.

“I knew I was terrible last night - everyone knew,” Miller said. “But maybe it was good to get the bad game and the bad goals out of the way right away and move on.”

Miller in recent weeks had been in a backup role to Marc Magliarditi. But at the Western Hockey League trade deadline on Friday the Chiefs sent Magliarditi to the Red Deer Rebels, convinced that their future lies with Miller.

“I gave him (Miller) the player-of-the-game puck for us, because he did bounce back,” Chiefs coach Mike Babcock said. “I hated to see that last goal (Brent Ascroft’s second of the game for the Americans, with 1:04 to go) because at that point he was playing back in his net, not challenging, and he hadn’t done that all night.

“We just feel that to win this year and next we have to have Aren in net.”

Trent Whitfield lit the fire with two goals, his 13th and 14th points in his last six games.

Greg Leeb set up the first, stick-handling from the left circle while Whitfield broke to the net. Leeb’s pass found Whitfield alone with goaltender Brian Boucher. The shot went through the goaltender’s pads at 9:21 of the first period and it was 1-0.

Whitfield’s second goal - the Chiefs’ fourth and his 25th of the season - came on a blast from the right point with the Chiefs on the power play. But even though Whitfield was one of eight Chiefs with two or more points, even though John Cirjak had three assists to improve his team-leading point total to 58 and even though Joe Cardarelli notched a pair of goals and an assist, finesse was secondary to brutality.

Even Cardarelli and Cirjak got into heated scraps. The two usually even-tempered boys from Burnaby rarely drop the gloves, and never on the same night.

Feelings ran high as the Chiefs climbed back over the .500 mark at 24-23-2.

“Coming off a 10-4 loss we wanted to show them that that was the last time we were going to play like that,” Cirjak said. “So we came out hitting.”

Defenseman Kirk Dewaele made his Spokane debut a success, scoring his first goal as a Chief 1:34 after Whitfield had struck first. Picked up Friday in a deal with the Edmonton Ice, Dewaele and the other newcomer who started, forward Chad Reich, got high marks from Babcock.

“I thought Reich was great,” the coach said. “He did what we got him here to do. He won all his faceoffs, he was tough and a pain to play against. And Dewaele was a steadying influence, big and strong.”

The Chiefs are at home Wednesday with Portland.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COMING UP Wednesday: Spokane is host to Portland at the Coliseum, 7 p.m.