The Airdrie Xtreme knows it will open a playoff series next week.
The Bantam AAA team is now awaiting its opponent, the dates and whether or not it will have home-ice advantage.
With its 9-2 road win over the Medicine Hat Hockey Hounds, Feb. 4, and a 5-5 tie with the Bronks in Calgary on Feb. 5, Airdrie sits in second place in the Alberta Major Bantam Hockey League’s (AMBHL) Ram South Division with 30 points.
Medicine Hat sits in first with 35 points, while the Red Deer Rebels White has 26 and Lethbridge has 22. The regular season will conclude this weekend with the Xtreme facing two opponents on the road.
Airdrie will play the Red Deer Rebels White on Feb. 11 and the Calgary Northstars on Feb. 12, which is technically a home game but will be played at the Red Deer Arena.
“We’re playing for home-ice advantage and as a confidence builder against a team we’ll likely see next week again,” said Xtreme head coach Terry Keogh, adding the Rebels White can mathematically tie Airdrie, while Lethbridge can still reach third place, thus creating a myriad of scenarios.
The team knows it will open playoffs as early as Feb. 14 with the first round having to be complete by Feb. 19.
Keogh said the team’s big 9-2 win over Medicine Hat, who the Xtreme could potentially see in the second round, had several positive implications for Airdrie, despite having bus troubles and only arriving a half-hour before the game.
“It’s two-fold: it’s a confidence booster for us as there is a high likelihood we could play them in round two,” he said. “And the previous two games we played Medicine Hat, we had some really tough luck around the net – especially in the last game, where we completely dominated them in shots, but just couldn’t put the puck in the net. It was good to see. We certainly came out flying and never let up.”
Chad Harrison had three goals and two assists to lead the offence, while Ryan Barrow added two goals and three assists. Austin Cameron and Kris LeClair also each had two goals, with netminder Ryan Ternes making 20 saves for the win.
In the 5-5 tie against the Bisons, where Airdrie was down 4-1 after the first, Riley Smith had the hat trick with Jordan McConnell and Barrow each adding singles. Ternes made 34 saves in goal.
“We had couple bad bounces and they scored a couple of goals on us early,” Keogh said. “We started to get down on ourselves, but we regrouped and we’re able to battle back. I was very impressed with our play in the second and third periods of that game. It somewhat demonstrated how we’ve matured through the year.
“Earlier on in the year, I don’t know if we’d have been able to do that. It’s good sign going into playoffs that some bad things happened, but we were able to get back to playing our game.”
Keogh said he has been impressed with the balanced scoring recently and he believes the team is peaking at the right time.
“Although some players have stepped it up, if you look over the last three or four games, we’re getting points from all over,” he said. “It shows that we’re coming together and everybody has realized that if we work together like this, that hopefully we’re going to have some success.”
