The third time may be the charm for the St. Albert Raiders in the midget AAA playoffs against the Leduc Oil Kings.
The last two years Leduc eliminated the Raiders in the north semifinal in the fifth and deciding game. The 2011 series was especially heartbreaking, with Leduc prevailing 3-2 in double overtime to win the best-of-five affair.
“It’s almost fitting that it’s Leduc again this year,” said head coach Sandro Pisani. “But at the end of the day it’s really irrelevant for us. We want to play our best hockey and give ourselves an opportunity to move on and play for a league championship.”
In Sunday’s series opener in the north final the Raiders exploded for three unanswered goals in the last 10 minutes of regulation time to edge the hometown Oil Kings 3-2.
“It was probably not our best effort and we believe we have a lot more to offer,” Pisani said. “Earlier on we looked a little tentative. We were not as sharp as I thought we would’ve been coming out of the chute but in fairness we did get better as the game went on.”
Goals by Dan Huculak, Kyler Hehn and Kevin Miller rallied the Raiders to victory after Leduc broke open a scoreless stalemate to start the third period.
“We showed a lot of battle and a lot of resilience. It would’ve been easy to give up or to think we were out of the game but we stuck to the game plan and we continued to battle,” Pisani said. “It was good for our confidence getting that first one and after that it just seemed like we had a lot more jump.”
Wyatt Hoflin backstopped the Raiders to their fourth win in five playoff games.
“He was strong in net again,” Pisani said.
The best-of-five series resumes tonight at 7:45 p.m. at Akinsdale Arena.
“It should be a fun game,” Pisani said.
Game three is Friday at 7:30 p.m. in Leduc.
If needed, game four is Sunday at 2:15 p.m. at Akinsdale and game five goes Tuesday in Leduc at 7:30 p.m.
The series winner will play the Red Deer Rebels or the Calgary Flames in the best-of-five provincial final.
Leduc (24-7-3) finished five points ahead of the second-place Raiders (21-9-4) in the north standings and beat St. Albert twice by 1-0 scores.
In the last playoff round Leduc, the host team for the Telus Cup national championship in April, survived a five-game tussle with the sixth-place Fort Saskatchewan Rangers (12-16-6) and the Raiders needed four games to knock off the fifth-place South Side Athletic Club (13-17-4).
“We’re getting contributions throughout the line-up, which is really helping our cause going forward here,” Pisani said. “We’ve had some kids who stepped up and scored some big goals. Our goaltending has been very good and usually our penalty kill goes hand in hand with that and our penalty kill has been very exceptional obviously so far in the playoffs [with only two power-play goals against]. We’ve also scored some timely goals on the power play.”
