Pats face potentially tough playoff opponent
Squad looking to jell following flurry of trades before deadline
The Regina Pats aren’t in a position to focus on where they will finish in the WHL standings.
It’s more about how they finish. After a poor first-half showing, the Pats’ fate is somewhat out of their hands regardless of how well the team performs over the last five weeks of its schedule.
What the Pats can control is putting themselves in position to hit their stride when the playoffs begin.
“We just want to keep getting better,” said head coach/GM John Paddock, whose club will play host to the 2018 Memorial Cup. “It sort of sounds like you’re walking the fence — everybody wants to get better — but that’s a fact when you add seven or eight players (at the trade deadline). We want to show we can play with the big boys coming up here. Our objective is to be playing our best hockey when it starts to count.”
The battle for regular-season supremacy is a two-horse race between the Moose Jaw Warriors (40-9-1-2) and Swift Current Broncos (37-13-3-1).
The Brandon Wheat Kings hung in there for a while before falling off sharply in the second half. They ’re 2-7-2-1 since two of the team’s elite players — defenceman Kale Clague and forward Tanner Kaspick — were traded at the deadline.
That created an opening for the Pats, who defeated Brandon 5-2 on Tuesday to win the season series (5-3-0) and move within two points of third place in the East Division.
Although the Wheat Kings still have two games in hand, Regina (28-22-5-0) is well positioned to overtake them in the standings.
“Our team has changed,” Paddock said in reference to his deadline upgrades. “Is (catching Brandon) an automatic? No. But, if we can keep getting better, then it’s going to happen.”
It’s open to debate whether that’s a good thing for the Pats, who currently hold the top wild-card playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. If they were to remain in that position, the Pats would cross over to the Central Division for the first two playoff rounds.
The Central is considered the WHL’s weakest division this season while the East is generally regarded as the strongest. By climbing to third place in the East, Regina would have to face either the Broncos or Warriors in the opening round instead of the Medicine Hat Tigers (26-21-7-0) or Lethbridge Hurricanes (25-216-0).
The latter would seem to present a path of least resistance.
However, Paddock is quick to reject the notion that Regina could manoeuvre toward a favourable matchup, dismissing it as “foolish” and “thoughtless chatter.”
“There’s a lot of hypotheticals,” he said of the standings. “One, be careful what you might wish for. Two, you can’t step on the ice as a player and you can’t go behind the bench as a coach without trying to win the game. It’s really just a joke (to suggest otherwise). You can’t go out and not play your best.”
In other words, the Pats have every intention of playing to win over the last 17 games of their schedule.
From there, the chips will fall where they may.
“We’re not going to catch those top two teams,” added Paddock. “I’ve known that since October. But we’re going to have to play one or both at some point (in the playoffs). You want to play good and we also know we’re going to play in May and nobody else does. It’s very important to be playing better and better as the season goes on.”