The Saskatoon Wild ended their first round in a short but dominating fashion, sweeping the Brampton Blades in 4 games. The Blades are a team that is transitioning to youth and were sellers at the deadline so it wasn't really a surprise that the Wild won yet a sweep is not always so common. Saskatoon outscored Brampton 17 - 8 and scored no fewer than 4 goals in any game showing a remarkable consistency.
The biggest victim in this murder was Cooper Supernaw, the Wild poured 190 shots his way and averaged 47.5 shots per game. Brampton only managed to throw 61 pucks on Ilya Kopralkov which worked out to be 15.25 a game, not much work for him to do. Physically the Blades managed the edge but that likely has more to do with Saskatoon always holding the puck. Brampton pounded the body 101 times or 25.25 times a game whereas Saskatoon had only 63 or 15.75 a game, the ice packs were flowing! The special teams battle also paints a clear victor in this series. Lets start with powerplay percentage, the Wild scored 3 times on 16 attempts for a 18.75% while the Blades somewhat surprising scored 0 times on 12 power plays. Saskatoon's depth up front was too great for the penalty kill of Brampton.
While this match up heavily favoured the Wild the next round will not be so kind to Saskatoon, Ottawa is a powerhouse with possibly more depth than any other team in the VHLM. It starts in net with their fast and loud goal tender AK47 who is one of if not the best goalie in the entire VHLM. He is not only capable of stealing games, he is capable of stealing an entire series if he gets hot enough and it looks like he might be going supernova these playoffs. Ottawa's defence is stacked and could end up being the difference as both teams have great net minders and their forwards are good. The Lynx feature Cian Mercer, Benjamin Tumack, Robert E. Lee and Shayne Gow as a powerful top 4 that can skate, hit and move the puck without any difficulty.
Who will advance? I guess we will have to tune in to find out for sure but right now the deck looks stacked against the Saskatoon Wild. Can a team that faced very little resistance in round 1 find that killer spirit that you need to close out a difficult series? Will they meet adversity head on and rise to the challenge? Or will they fold like a cheap wallet?
My hope is that the Wild pull out the victory but either way I know it will end up being a great series and whoever emerges from this war has a great shot at winning the Founder's Cup. Let's go Wild!!!
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