After a stellar season, the Airdrie Techmation Thunder will challenge for the 2019 Heritage Junior Hockey League (HJHL) championship against the Coaldale Copperheads. The two sides will compete in a best-of-five series, kicking off March 22 at the Ron Ebbesen Arena, with puck drop set for 8 p.m. Coming toward the end of what has been a memorable year, Thunder head coach Derek Stamp said he expects a competitive final opponent for Airdrie’s junior B hockey club. “[The Copperheads] have a good all-around base of talent,” he said. “They work really hard and they play a structured game. “They’re going to be able to play any way the game dictates, so we want to make sure we’re taking care of the things we can take care of so we can play the game we want to play.” Based on this season’s performances, there is little separation between the two teams. The Thunder won the HJHL North Division during the 2018-19 regular season, with a league-dominating 35-3-0 record. The Copperheads, meanwhile, took the top spot in the more competitive South Division with a 29-7-2 record. The two teams also finished first and second offensively during the regular season – Airdrie netted 333 goals, while the Copperheads lit the lamp 199 times. If that’s not enough to make for a closely-fought final series, the two sides split their regular-season contests, with Airdrie winning 10-3 Sept. 22, 2018, and the Copperheads dishing out revenge in a 4-2 win, Nov. 16, 2018. The loss to Coaldale was Airdrie’s first defeat of 2018-19, after kicking off the year with 18 straight victories. “We expect they’re going to push us and we know they’re talented and very capable of creating a lot of offence,” Stamp said. “We’ll have to be ready to play them.” Airdrie qualified for the big dance after overcoming the Mountainview Colts in six games during the North Division final series. The Thunder clinched the series March 13 in Didsbury with a 4-3 come-from-behind victory in Game 6, with Rylan Plante-Crough and Tyler McCarry potting goals in the third period. Stamp said the Thunder showed its character to come away with the victory, after going down 3-2 after the opening two stanzas. “It was definitely a game with some early adversity,” he said. “As a coaching staff, we liked the way our players responded to that adversity. We came out in the third period, managed to get the comeback, and then held on in the late minutes, when Mountainview was really pushing.” While Airdrie overcame the Colts every time they met during the regular season, the Didsbury-based team did not go down without a fight during the North Division final, even taking a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series. Stamp said the early setbacks compelled the Thunder’s coaching staff to tinker with the line-up. One change that was particularly effective was putting forward Tyler Petrie on the same offensive line as his former Calgary Canucks teammate Jordan McConnell and Cooper Page. Petrie finished the series with four goals and six points. “We felt Mountainview was doing a really good job of stifling our offence,” Stamp said. “One of the ways we wanted to try and create some space for our offence…was to try and mix up the lines a little bit. “We had a different look and it worked really well. We had contributions from all four lines, and it definitely provided the offensive spark we were hoping it would.”
