January 12, 2017

FIRST PLACE ON THE LINE IN McCALL THIS WEEKEND

The top two teams in the Northwest Division of the WSHL will test each other this weekend in three games at the Manchester Ice and Events Center in McCall, as the Idaho Junior Steelheads return to home ice after the holiday break to host the Southern Oregon Spartans.

Friday and Saturday night games will begin at 7:00 PM, and Sunday’s game has a rare 4:55 PM start.

The Spartans have a record of 24 wins, 5 losses, and 2 overtime losses for 50 points in 31 games and a winning percentage of .806.

The Junior Steelheads bring a 23 win, 2 loss, and 3 overtime loss record to the weekend, good for 49 points but a higher winning percentage of .875.  Coach John Olver’s team has played 28 games, and therefore has three “games in hand” on the Spartans.

Idaho’s .875 percentage ties them with the Ogden Mustangs for second in the WSHL behind the .879 mark of the Long Beach Bombers.

This, even after going 1-2-1 at the Shootout in Las Vegas back in December.  The Spartans had a slightly better Shootout, losing to El Paso and Oklahoma City as Idaho did, beating Ontario as Idaho did, but getting an edge with a 3-2 shootout victory over Ogden as the Junior Steelheads lost a shootout to Long Beach. 

Southern Oregon has replaced the no-longer-in-business Missoula Maulers as the only serious challenger in the Northwest, and unless something utterly drastic happens to either the Junior Steelheads or Spartans, or both, the teams will finish 1-2 at the end of the regular season and earn first round byes in the playoffs.  The question to be answered is, can the Spartans knock Idaho off the perch they have occupied for so many seasons?  Missoula tried, but couldn’t.

Southern Oregon has been building up to this opportunity for a number of years.  The Spartans and the Seattle Totems, who come to McCall for three games weekend after this, joined the WSHL in the 2012-2013 season after being champions in the old NORPAC.  Southern Oregon had risen steadily to that accomplishment over a four year period.

The Spartans finished second in the Northwest in that 2012-2013 campaign and participated in the Thorne Cup tournament at Manchester Ice. They even stayed over in McCall in the short week between the division finals and league finals.

At that time, the team was going through head coaches faster than water through a Zamboni machine to make ice, and the distress continued through the following season.

Things for the franchise have really stabilized for the Southern Oregon franchise under Head Coach David Cole, now in his third season at the Spartan helm, and he has fashioned a challenger.

To fend off the Spartans threat, the Junior Steelheads will have to stop, or at best, contain the brother scoring duo of Chris and Cameron Seto, who hail from Surrey, British Columbia, and are now teammates in their second full seasons in the league.

Chris Seto, the younger brother now 19 years old, leads the WSHL in goals with 46, 15 more than Alex Johanson (Skokie, Ill.) of El Paso , in points with 78,  10 more than Peter Cicmanec (Prievidza, Slovakia)of Wichita, and in points per game with 2.52.

Chris has earned points in all but two of the 31 games he has played.  He has had five 3-goal games and one 4-goal game.

Last year Chris scored 101 points for the Spartans in 51 games, then added six points in four playoff contests.

Older brother Cameron Seto joined the Spartans this season after playing last season for the Fresno Monsters.

He is currently ninth in league scoring with 18 goals and 38 assists, for 56 points and a 1.81 points per game average, better than the 1.71 per game he scored for Fresno a year ago.

The 64 goals between them so far this year represent 46.72% of all Spartans goals.  Their 134 points are 38.5% of the team’s.   These are large percentages, reminiscent of the Missoula top scorers having a big portion of the Maulers’ scoring.

By comparison, the top two Junior Steelhead goal scorers, Matt Kindred (Garden City, Mich.) with 20 and Lance Herning (St. Charles, Ill.) with 19, represent only 20.74% of the team total.  Herning’s  41 points combined with Alex Piliya’s (Vitebsk, Belarus) 39, are 19.75% of Idaho’s total.

The Junior Steelheads feature a much more balanced offense for the Spartans to defend.  If Idaho can contain the Seto brothers, it will go a long way toward staying ahead of the Medford-based team.

As in any series, goaltending will be a key, and both teams feature excellent netminders.

Idaho’s Sergei Pysarenko (Odessa, Ukraine) has the league’s second best goals against average at 1.71 and third ranked save percentage of .936.

Tyler Matthews (West Chester, Ohio) starts the second half of the season with a 2.54 and .892.

For the Spartans, Mark Vlahovic (Ljubljana, Slovenia) returns to league action with a 2.37 and .930 after some impressive play for his country at the IIHF World Junior Championship.

He splits time with Austin Toussaint (Fargo, N.D.), who has fashioned a 2.65 and .910.

Other statistical comparisons between the two teams show them to be matched evenly coming into this weekend’s series.   Idaho is ranked sixth in the league on power plays.  Southern Oregon is one tenth of a point behind them in seventh.  Idaho’s penalty kill is fifth, Southern Oregon’s 10th.  Shooting percentages are essentially equal.

The three games this weekend will not be played in a statistics class, however.  The testing will be on the ice, and first place is up for grabs, more so than in recent years.  Every standings point is important in determining home-ice advantage for the playoffs.

These teams will face each other again for three games in Medford on the last weekend in February.  The six games between them are crucial.

Submitted by Dick Dorfman  -  Jr. Steelheads Play-by-Play