NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
Hats litter the ice following Gavin McKenna's hat trick goal in the second period of a 7-3 win at Co-op Place over the Red Deer Rebels on March 15.
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
Playoff stipulations are pretty simple for the Medicine Hat Tigers, win and the 2025 Eastern conference banner hangs in Co-op Place.
The Tigers enter the final weekend of the regular season tied for first place in the conference and Central division with the Calgary Hitmen, sitting one win ahead of the Hitmen with both having played 66 games.
The Tigers host Lethbridge on Saturday, Calgary is in Red Deer taking on the Rebels the same night. Medicine Hat and Calgary will meet Sunday for Game 68 at the Saddledome in a contest that will more likely than not, decide the conference leader.
A Medicine Hat win Saturday and a Calgary loss the same night, Tigers clinch the conference for the first time since 2006-07, making Sunday meaningless due to tiebreaker rules.
A Medicine Hat loss Saturday and a Calgary win, Tigers need to win outright on the Sunday. If both teams lose or both win on the Saturday, the final game is the decider.
It puts the Tigers in a spot where they just have to win the games in front of them, a place Willie Desjardins would have taken if offered in September.
“We’ve had a lot of hard hockey through the year and there’s going to be eight really good teams in the playoffs,” Desjardins said. “In our division, Lethbridge and Calgary both loaded up, which is good, Edmonton has a really strong team, so it’s going to be a challenge but we like where we’re at.”
The Tigers enter the final weekend with an eight-game winning streak, carrying a 22-2-1-1 record since the Jan. 9 trade deadline. Desjardins says the team has come together well from the start of the season and even more so since the deadline. But the two-time WHL champion bench boss cautions getting too excited about the win streaks the Tigers have had.
“You can have all these runs you want, you get to playoffs and it’s just a totally different animal,” Desjardins said. “We have two games left, we have to play hard because both games are against really good teams. You won’t beat those teams every time, they’re just too good of teams. So we have to play hard and we’ll see what happens.”
They’ll play in front of a sold-out crowd Saturday night, with all seats sold and Co-op Place offering overflow tickets available. It will be the first time they’ve had a sold-out crowd since Connor Bedard and the Regina Pats visited on March 13, 2023.
That crowd of 6,405 saw Gavin McKenna score his first WHL goal and the Tigers blank the Pats 7-0. As for the sell-out game slated for Saturday, there’s no visiting star or extensive 50/50 lottery that has driven up the sales, much to the pride of the orange and black.
“It’s really exciting,” defenceman Josh Van Mulligen said. “Getting a lot of the passionate fans out to games that they’re really excited for and they believe in what we could do. So we’re really looking forward to playing in front of them.”
“I really appreciate it, hopefully we can give the fans the game they deserve,” Desjardins said.
They will be donning the retro ‘flying Tiger’ jerseys on Saturday as well before they are auctioned off online for the Tigers’ education fund.
This weekend will also see the return of defenceman Jonas Woo who has been out of the lineup with an upper-body injury suffered in a fight on Feb. 15. The 18-year-old Winnipeg product went through rehabbing his first major injury of his young career, picking up a couple antidotes over the month.
“Just learning myself, how I recover and what’s best for me, it’s a lot of little things,” Woo said.
He’ll slot alongside Bryce Pickford who returned last weekend after recovering from an upper-body injury, one that also held him out for around a month.
Woo played in high-intensity games while a member of the Winnipeg Ice, part of the Ice’s roster that made the run to the league final in 2022-23. He says Winnipeg and Medicine Hat aren’t comparable with how the league has changed, he’s looking forward to seeing how this group will step up in the postseason, starting this weekend.
“We have a lot of skill and a lot of hard work on this team, so I’m sure we’re going to go deep and we’re going to do the best we can to bring that thing home,” Woo said.
