The mantra of the 2017 Western Hockey League playoffs for the Victoria Royals is expressed on their post-season T-shirts, on which the words “unfinished business” are printed above an image of the WHL championship Ed Chynoweth Cup.
That, of course, refers to last year in which the WHL regular-season champions were derailed in their bid for the playoff title by just a few ticks of the clock in the second round.
But things are different now. The Royals go into this year’s playoffs not as the favourites and top seed, but as the underdog eighth and final seed in the Western Conference, and face the conference top-seed Silvertips (44-16-12) in a best-of-seven first-round series beginning in Everett tonight.
Royals head coach Dave Lowry admitted his team had a “lacklustre” regular season at 37-29-6.
“But we are not a fragile group,” he said.
“Every team is at zero again. We understand what it takes to play at this time of year, and will build on past experiences and disappointments.”
One thing is for sure in this series: The puck stops here.
Whoever gets more of that done in their crease will end up winning the Royals-Silvertips series.
The role of goaltenders is magnified in the playoffs because any crease miscue is so much more costly over four-to-seven games than it is over 72 in the regular season.
An added dimension the Victoria-Everett series is that it features two of the best goaltenders in the conference, if not the league, in Everett’s Carter Hart and Victoria’s Griffen Outhouse.
Hart is on another level altogether when it comes to junior hockey and is likely to repeat as Canadian Hockey League goaltender of the year.
The second-round draft pick of the Philadelphia Flyers backstopped Canada to the silver medal at the 2017 world junior championships and recorded a 1.99 goals-against average, .927 save percentage and nine shutouts in 54 games for the Silvertips. All three were WHL bests this regular season. This guy is a near puck-stopping machine with excellent mechanics and situational sense.
“He’s the best goalie in the CHL for a reason,” said Victoria sniper Matthew Phillips, who scored 50 goals this season.
Calgary Flames-prospect Phillips, named this week to the WHL Western Conference first all-star team, will be tasked with finding ways to get pucks past Hart, named conference first-team goaltender.
“We have to make life difficult for him,” Phillips said.
The way to do that is to play greasy hockey in the Silvertips’ crease area, the Royals believe.
“We have to get traffic and pucks in front of the net,” Victoria captain Ryan Gagnon said of the key to solving Hart.
However, the Silvertips surround Hart with such an unbending defensive structure that just breaking through to get an opportunity on him is problematic. Everett was the best defensive team in the WHL by far this season, allowing only 169 goals against. There was only one other team in the entire league that allowed less than 200 goals — the Kamloops Blazers with 198.
“Everett is so tight on defence, and they don’t take many penalties, so that if they get the lead, they don’t let you back in the game,” Victoria star sniper Tyler Soy said.
Gagnon added: “They [Silvertips] are meticulous in structure.”
That extends to the penalty kill, in which the Silvertips were also the best in the league.
Victoria creaseman Outhouse, meanwhile, just plain thrives on work. He played more games (63) and more minutes (3,558) than any other goaltender in the WHL this season. Outhouse is more of a reflex goalie than Hart and his saves are often of the spectacular variety. But many are off rebounds, the kind Hart rarely lets out.
Outhouse will have to be wary of Patrick Bajkov of Nanaimo, who led the Silvertips in both goals this season, with 29, and points, with 78.
Everett was 6-2-2 down the stretch, while the Royals go into the playoffs reeling and on a seven-game winless freefall, including dropping the final two games of the regular season 4-2 and 5-2 to the Silvertips.
But injured Victoria players Ryan Peckford, Regan Nagy and Ralph Jarratt appear ready to return tonight for Game 1, even though Royals’ top defenceman Chaz Reddekopp will remain on the shelf. The returns change the equation, but the question is how much, and enough to make a difference against the top team in the Western Conference?
“We had a depleted group,” Lowry said of his club’s late-season swoon. And, as Lowry said: Every team is again at zero.
Both clubs are studies in historical consistency. The Silvertips have never missed the playoffs in their 14-season history. The Royals have made the playoffs in each of their six seasons playing on the Island.
But the Silvertips have never won the WHL championship and the Royals have never been past the second round. So both teams have “unfinished business.”
This is the first post-season meeting between the Silvertips and Royals, including in the five years the latter franchise was based in Chilliwack and known as the Bruins.
ICE CHIPS: Victoria captured the last of two wildcard playoff berths in the Western Conference. The other went to the seventh-seed Portland Winterhawks (40-28-4), who will meet the second-seed and B.C. Division champion Prince George Cougars (45-21-6) in an opening-round series in which the 14-hour bus travel distance between the two cities seems truly daunting, if not downright exhausting, just to think about.
The other Western Conference opening-round series are intra-divisional match-ups in the WHL’s blended playoff formula. In the B.C. Division, the second-place Kelowna Rockets (45-22-5) meet the third-place Kamloops Blazers (42-24-6). In the U.S. Division, the Mathew Barzal-fuelled second-place Seattle Thunderbirds (46-20-6) play the third-place Tri City Americans (41-28-3).
