The last game of the Winter Hockey season for my team, the Renegades, was last night. We played the Wet Bandits at Callingwood Arena. It was a late ice time, with the puck drop at 10:30. The game was tied 4-4 in regulation, so we sent to overtime. The two referees assigned to last nights game usually do a pretty decent job but last night they seemed to have it in for us. We got five minor penalties... none to me for a change... including one in overtime, while the Wet Bandits didn't get any. It wasn't a particularly rough game, it just seemed that every time there was a collision or minor incident, we ended up in the box. It was really satisfying when we got a 2 on 1 breakaway in overtime, short-handed, and scored the game winner...! The victory for us moved us from third place in the standings, to finish the regular season in second. The Wet Bandits, with the overtime loss moved out of last place and finished the season in seventh. We will now face them in the first round of the playoffs, which start on Thursday.
The league standings are kind of difficult to follow. Not every team plays the same number of games. It depends on how many you paid for at the beginning of the year. It costs over $11,000 for the team to play a 30 game schedule. Some teams opted to pay a little more or a little less for an adjusted schedule. Also, the league does divisional moves during the regular season, to keep the match ups balanced As a result of this, the standings are based on winning percentage against the teams in the same division... not points. We started the season in Division Nine and were winning most of our games. More than half way through we got moved up to Division Eight, where we finished the year. Some of our early games were against teams that also ended up in Division Eight and those counted towards our winning percentage, but the games played against Division Nine teams did not.
The playoffs start this Thursday, and run through until the third week of April. The first three playoff rounds are best of three. Then the winner of the ERHL Conference plays the winner of the CCRHL Conference in a best of five series for the Division Championship. There were quite a few inter conference games during the regular season, but mostly we played against teams within our conference. If we can put together a bit of a playoff run, odds are good for us to be playing a lot of hockey the next little while. Right after the winter championship round, Summer Hockey will get underway in early May...
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