The Milwaukee Admirals are looking to the past as a template for what they hope can become a successful week.
With the Admirals facing elimination by Texas in Game 3 of the teams’ best-of-five Central Division Semifinal series tonight, they face the task of having to defeat the Stars in back-to-back games even to force a winner-take-all Game 5 that would be played Sunday.
It is a difficult order, but they have done it before. Milwaukee defeated the Stars on back-to-back nights at UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena on Jan. 19-20. Those victories came in the early portion of what eventually grew to become a 19-game winning streak for the Admirals, the second-longest such streak in AHL history.
Take Game 3, then Game 4, and then winning this series comes down to one game, Admirals defenseman Roland McKeown reasons. That said, the club also knows that doing so will require breaking down the task to a shift-by-shift approach.
“We’ve got to know that we can do that again,” McKeown told reporters yesterday. “Then Game 5 is a coin toss. You go out there and put your best foot forward, and that’s what we’re going to do.
“Let’s be that team that is hard to put out.”
The Coachella Valley Firebirds worked more than six months for the reward of having home-ice advantage through the Western Conference side of the Calder Cup Playoff bracket.
And it is quite the advantage for the Firebirds, who will take the Acrisure Arena ice tonight for their first home playoff game since Game 7 of last year’s Finals.
Coachella Valley ranked fifth in the AHL in attendance during the regular season, averaging 8,844 fans per game. The 10,087-seat building was sold out six times during the 2023 postseason, including all four home dates during the Calder Cup Finals.
There is an obvious parallel between the Firebirds’ current playoff series with Calgary and last year’s meeting, when the teams split the first two games in Alberta before Coachella Valley won two of three at home – both in overtime – to advance.
Firebirds head coach Dan Bylsma has worked on hockey’s biggest stages, including the Stanley Cup Final and the Olympics, and knows quite well what kind of mood that fans can set.
“It’s unbelievable,” Bylsma said of the Acrisure Arena environment. “Our fans and our building and the atmosphere, it feels like an NHL playoff game. There’s a different level to the playoffs in the National Hockey League in terms of the fans and energy in the building in how they back the team, how they motivate the team. We have that.
“Our fans are electric. Fortunately for us, we get it all year long, and it’s amplified in the playoffs. It almost feels like we’ve got 10,000 people on the ice playing for us.”
― with files from Patrick Williams
