WHL Championship: Spokane Chiefs hope to send series back to Medicine Hat in season finale at Spokane Arena

Nobody said it was going to be easy. Achieving something historic usually isn’t. But nobody expected it to be quite this difficult, either.

The Spokane Chiefs are on the brink of elimination following a resounding 5-2 loss to the Medicine Hat Tigers in Game 4 on Wednesday at the Spokane Arena. The Tigers have come into the Chiefs’ building and dominated the past two games – winning 6-0 and 5-2 – to take a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven Western Hockey League Championship Series.

“We’re down, but we’re not out yet,” Chiefs coach Brad Lauer said after the loss on Wednesday.

It’s not a scenario anyone would have envisioned after the Chiefs rallied for a 6-2 win in Game 2 in Medicine Hat to split the pair of games at the boisterous Co-op Place. For the Chiefs to send the series back to Canada, they’ll have to rally hard after the Tigers’ complete performances in Games 3 and 4.

“They played a textbook game,” Lauer said. “Once they got the lead, they’re very structured, very detailed – shutting us down and making us go 200 feet.”

It didn’t help that the Chiefs spent much of the second period killing penalties – first with a five-minute major and game misconduct assessed to defenseman Nathan Mayes on a heavy shoulder check against 6-foot-2, 189-pound winger Misha Volotovskii, then Rasmus Ekström, who had all of 33 penalty minutes in the regular season, was boxed for spraying the goalie to set up a 5-on-3.

“The 5-on-3 was a little bit, you know, I’m not sure,” Lauer said. “You know, at that stage of the game, to put a team down 5-on-3? But it is what it is. We needed to kill.”

The Tigers scored twice on the extended power play.

The Chiefs need to find a way to win three in row, something they did six times in the regular season and twice more in the playoffs. Remarkably, the Chiefs haven’t lost three in a row all season, something they’d desperately like to avoid in the last game of the season regardless at the Arena.

“We’ve always been a resilient team. Never doubted that,” defenseman Saige Weinstein said. “We’re just really focused on the next game. What we can do to put the pressure on them, get them back to Medicine Hat.”

“It’s not a position you want to be in, for sure,” Lauer said. “But at the end of the day, there’s a lot of teams you can look at that have come back from down 3-1. … We’ve done it before all year, we’ve won three games in a row. That’s what we’ve got to do now. That’s the situation we’re in. We’ve got a good group. We’ve got a character group. They believe in each other, they care about each other. Our focus has gotta be, ‘Win Friday night.’ ”

This is the last time this group of 20-year-olds – Ekström, Shea Van Olm and Brayden Crampton – will take the ice at the Arena. In all likelihood, it will also be the last time for captain Berkly Catton and Andrew Cristall, both of whom will most likely be playing professional hockey at a higher level next season. So an emotionally charged elimination scenario will be even more so with the season’s last game at the Arena.

“For some, our 20-year-olds, obviously, it’s their last home game,” Lauer said. “You know, that’s not a bad thing. If we win, we’ll (deal) with those emotions once we get through the series here. But you know, obviously, for our older players, their last home game, it is a special night for them. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that it’s Game 5, which is a must win for us.”

Three keys for Game 5

A better start: The Chiefs have allowed the first goal in 14 of their 19 playoff games, including all four in the championship series – with three coming in the first minute of the game.

Medicine Hat is the fourth team since the 2000 WHL playoffs to score the opening goal in the first four games of the WHL Championship.

“We gave up the first goal again, but I liked the energy that our guys brought,” Lauer said. “I thought we responded quite well, getting it back to tie it.”

The Chiefs have only held the lead once all series. That came after they scored four goals in a 4:46 span in Game 2.

Stay out of the box: And if they do go on the kill, locate Tigers defenseman Bryce Pickford. The draft-eligible Pickford scored twice on the power play on Wednesday and set a modern WHL record for goals in consecutive playoff games by a defenseman with seven.

“It’s not just this stretch. It’s been the whole year,” Medicine Hat coach Willie Dejardins said. “He’s got a great shot, sees the ice well. But seven in a row is a lot.”

Medicine Hat is 5 for 14 on the power play this series; Spokane is 2 for 13.

Top-line production: Coming into the series, Catton, Cristall and Van Olm had combined for 39 goals and 61 assists in 15 playoff games. In the championship series, they’ve combined for five goals and seven assists in four games, with just three even-strength goals. The Chiefs’ top line is a combined minus-21 in the series.

Cristall, whose 20 goals are within four of the WHL record for goals in a playoff season, and had come in scoring in eight straight, has been held without a goal.

Lauer praised the job Medicine Hat is doing to clog up the center of the ice, but he needs his best players to come up big on Friday.

“They have to work through this stuff,” Lauer said. “They’ve got to find a way to create offense.”