A Giant mistake to write off Chiefs

If the modern athlete lives to prove his doubters wrong, then the Spokane Chiefs have us right where they want us.

Forty-eight hours ago they were down, disrespected and left for dead.

Now they’re dead even.

It’s a good thing there’s a scoreboard to tell us, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been sure what to make of Spokane’s 1-0 victory over the Vancouver Giants in Game 4 of their second-round Western Hockey League playoff series Wednesday night at the Spokane Arena.

The team that got off 41 shots? Not the winners.

The team that had a 4-on-3 advantage for 69 seconds, then a 5-on-3 for 34 more and finally a 5-on-4 for 17 nerve-wracking ticks? Not the winners.

The team that scuffled through with five defensemen? OK, yeah, that was the winners.

And you could have sworn the Chiefs spent the entire second and third periods on the penalty kill, even though the sides were mostly at even strength – at least until a wild and thrilling final 5 minutes, after the referees had finally discovered evildoing in the building.

But maybe that’s just the nature of a 1-0 lead in playoff hockey. Doom looms behind every lazy check or errant pass.

“And that showed,” said Spokane forward Drayson Bowman. “Things get real tight and you can’t afford to make a mistake, otherwise the game’s tied and going into overtime and the momentum completely changes.

“It was during that time I think that our experience helped us a lot – knowing where to put the puck and make the safe plays out there.”

Except that no play seems all that safe when the opponent is Vancouver, the best in the West this season – and the franchise that’s piled up more points over the last five regular seasons than any team in the WHL.

Spokane, on the other hand, entered these playoffs little more than an afterthought, not only outdistanced easily for the U.S. Division title by hated Tri-City but no better than fourth in the conference after playing just .500 hockey for the last month of the season.

Then, after getting past Seattle in the first round of the playoffs, the Chiefs found themselves thoroughly outplayed in the first two games of this series in Vancouver, managing just two goals on only 38 shots.

Of course, the Chiefs did have a little something to fall back on:

The memory of winning 20 playoff games a year ago en route to the Memorial Cup championship.

That’s not cachet they can just redeem for another Cup, but it is experience that comes in handy in white-knuckle moments like the one they faced Wednesday.

“We just felt it was a matter of time until we broke through,” Bowman insisted. “There’s a lot of experience in our room and nobody thought the series was over.”

In fact, they seemed to like it even more when all hell broke loose those last 5 minutes.

“It’s a nervous time, for sure,” said defenseman Trevor Glass, a particularly impressive force on that penalty kill, “but it’s more exciting than anything. A lot of our players thrive on situations like that. It’s the playoffs and it doesn’t get any better than that – and when you kill one of those off, you get a little energy from it and feel like you can do anything.”

Until then, it was a strange and uneventful game. The hits didn’t seem as hard as in Spokane’s 5-2 victory on Tuesday, for two periods the only penalties were a couple of shame-shames on Vancouver for too many men on the ice during line changes – and, of course, there was the business of the Chiefs only getting off 18 shots.

But then, only one has to go in if your goalie is as on his game as was Dustin Tokarski, who barely betrayed a pulse when things seemed to be caving in.

“Nah, it was fun,” he said. “The crowd – I never heard that many people get that loud in my life.”

Or that few. The announced crowd was 4,838, though it looked like less – though it was a slight improvement from Tuesday night. The midweek dates in this series certainly aren’t helping, but it’s just as easy to conclude that there’s a considerable segment out there that had given up on the Chiefs after the debacles up north.

“Oh, for sure,” Tokarski agreed. “I’m sure most people thought we were dead. We came back here down 0-2 and you probably wouldn’t think they would come in here and lose two. But the only opinion that mattered was ours.”

Bowman agreed.

“I can see where it was easy to write us off,” he said. “They’re a great team and had so many points during the regular season – and they’ve been a tough team for years now. But nobody thought we were out of it, just because they had held serve at home. We were confident we could get the job done here.”

Now the tricky part – getting it done in Vancouver, where the Chiefs have to win at least one game.

“But any time you win even one game in a series,” said coach Hardy Sauter, “the momentum’s in your favor.”

Strangely enough, the Chiefs just won two. Dead men skating, indeed.