It took nearly beyond the Pacific Junior Hockey League regular season for the Richmond Sockeyes to finally learn they would be facing the Grandview Steelers in the opening round of the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year.
The Tom Shaw Conference rivals open their best-of-seven quarter-final series at the Burnaby Winter Club tonight and the teams are at Minoru Arena for game two Thursday (7 p.m.).
The Sockeyes (22-13-3-5) have been in “wait-and-see” mode for the last two weeks — locked into third place — while Grandview (28-9-2-5) and the Delta Ice Hawks (31-12-0-1) battled it out for top spot.
A pair of winter storms over the last 10 days wiped out a number of games and spilled the regular season over into Monday.
The Ice Hawks finally clinched first place with a make-up game win in Mission on Sunday night, while the Sockeyes didn’t even play their final road game against Aldergrove which was also postponed but had no impact on the final standings.
Little separated the top three teams in the conference for much of the 44-game campaign. A Steelers’ overtime win was the only difference in six regular season meetings (3-2-1) with Richmond.
Sockeyes head coach Judd Lambert has used the stretch run to get his team into playoff mode.
“We were trying to find some cohesion and something to build on over these last three of four games,” said Lambert. “We’ve been locked into third and it was up to Grandview and Delta to figure out who we were going to play.
“Delta is probably a little bit better up front and Grandview is a bit better defensively. “There are not any surprises which there never are at this time of year.”
The Steelers took out the Sockeyes in six games last season and in seven back in 2015.
Game three of the series goes Sunday in Burnaby (4 p.m.) and the teams are back at it Monday (7:30 p.m.) in Richmond for game four.
