Blazers, Giants renew rivalry in another playoff series starting Friday night

Caedan Bankier added, “It’s exciting. You play them a lot throughout the year. They know a lot about us, we know a lot about them, so that makes the rivalry even more special. They’re pretty close — only three hours down the road — so it’ll be exciting. We’re going to have a lot of fans hopefully come down there. Theirs are going to come up here.”

The Blazers, the Western Conference’s second seed, dominated the seventh-ranked Giants during the regular season, going 6-1-1 including four straight wins. However, outside of a 6-0 blowout at home — the last game played between the teams in Kamloops a couple weeks ago — the games have been tight.

“They have a good goalie [Jesper Vikman]. We can’t expect to win games by huge margins. It might be one, two-goal games,” said captain Logan Stankoven. “It’s going to be close, so we’re going to have to stick with it, stick to our game plan, then hopefully as the games go on we can find ways to put pucks in the net. We can’t get impatient and start making risky plays. That can lead to turnovers.”

The Giants know they need to start quick to even have a chance against a Blazers team that finished 29 points ahead of them in the standings.

“Kamloops is a very good first-period team and we’re aware of that,” said Giants assistant coach Adam Maglio. “We have to play our style of hockey. Our guys need to be at their best every shift and it’s going to take a collective effort for sure. We need everyone going in this series. We have very good goaltending in Jesper, but certainly that start and they have a good crowd and it’s going to be loud.”

Vikman is the key for the Vancouver Giants if there’s going to be any upset this year.

“The hope is he’s not seeing 50 or 60 [shots] for sure. I think we have a game plan in place to insulate that, but certainly his game is trending in the right direction,” noted Maglio.

The Blazers have made a habit of firing 40, 50 and sometimes 60 shots at their opponents every night.

The team is hoping this is the first of a few playoff series leading to the Memorial Cup.

“We’re not looking ahead to the Memorial Cup right now. Obviously the city’s probably excited about it, but we’re not focused on that at all. We’re focused on round one,” said Seminoff. “We’ve got a goal first to win the league. We’re not thinking about that right now. We’re going at it game-by-game, series-by-series.”

by Chad Klassen

Blazers, Giants renew rivalry in another playoff series starting Friday night

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