Flyers one win away from MJHL crown

Playoff excitement has reached a fever pitch in Winkler.

The hometown Flyers, who haven’t won a Manitoba Junior Hockey League championship since 1998, can claim the Turnbull Trophy on Friday night with a victory on home ice over the defending-champion Steinbach Pistons.

Winkler leads the best-of-seven series 3-0 after beating the Pistons 4-3 in overtime Tuesday in Niverville. Game time is 7 p.m.

Flyers general manager and head coach Justin Falk said Friday’s anticipated sellout crowd of 1,300 at Centennial Arena — all advance tickets have been sold with a limited number of walk-up ducats available prior to the game — has more to do with a general enthusiasm for the team than the prospect of ending a 25-year championship drought.

“The town and community has been great to us, especially the last handful of years exiting COVID here,” said Falk by phone Thursday. “Our attendance, our corporate support — if you follow along on different social-media platforms — our arena and game-day experience is quite something. It’s a great experience, and all that has carried throughout the regular season and the playoffs.”

Pistons GM and head coach Paul Dyck said the Flyers are playing an inspired brand of hockey.

“There’s a tremendous amount of excitement in their community, which there should be,” said Dyck. “It’s been over two decades since they’ve won a title and we were the team that beat them in the first round (of the playoffs) last year. It was a great matchup and a tremendous series, and that was probably a lot of motivation for them.

“They have a lot of returning players that were a part of that, and our team had a tremendous amount of turnover. So, we have guys in our room that experienced that, but we were on the other side of it. So, there’s no doubt that for their staff and the returning players, I think they brought a little bit of a chip on their shoulders into this series.”

The Flyers, who last appeared in the league final in the spring of 2002, have been doing it with defence and timely offensive productions.

Goaltender Malachi Klassen has allowed only five goals in the series, while lowering his playoff goals-against average to 1.96 and raising his save percentage to .925 in 14 starts.

Limiting the Pistons — the league’s most productive offence during the regular season with 4.21 goals per game — to five goals in three games has been crucial.

“We’re wanting to tighten up on a few details defensively going into the next game,” said Falk, who is in his third season in charge of the Flyers. “There’s been a few areas we haven’t been overly happy about but that’s just the standard here. We want to play a 200-foot game and everyone’s required to defend and defend within our structure.”

Offensive woes aren’t a recent development for the Pistons, who have had their home games moved to the Niverville Recreation Centre for the final round of the playoffs. Previously, the club had been playing out of La Broquerie’s HyLife Centre with construction ongoing at Steinbach’s new Southeast Event Centre.

“We just haven’t really found a rhythm offensively here the last three weeks or so,” said Dyck. “When guys are accustomed to scoring in the regular season at a certain rate — the reality is that it just tightens up come playoff time and you have to find different ways of putting pucks in the net. That’s something that’s hard for a young player to to adapt to.”

Steinbach’s top-rated defence has also taken a hit in the post-season.

“Our second periods have really cost us,” said Dyck. “They’ve scored six of their nine goals in the second period, for some reason. It’s a small margin, right? If you look at the games, they’ve all been very tight and sometimes things don’t go the way you hoped they would.”

A Winkler victory Friday would send the Flyers to the Centennial Cup national junior A championship in Oakville, Ont., May 9-19. Should the Pistons prevail, Game 5 would be played Sunday at 7 p.m. in Niverville.

“We’re staying focused, we’re staying ready to handle adversity and we’re wanting to be resilient,” said Falk. “Maybe it’s just three years into coaching, but we don’t focus on too much in the past and don’t get too far ahead of ourselves either.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca