The last time the Blades swept a team in the playoffs was Round 1 in 2019 when they beat the Moose Jaw Warriors in four straight. The last time the Blades and Rebels played the Blades came back from a 3-0 deficit to win the series. Well the Blades finally swept someone, but the Rebels didn’t repeat what the Blades did last season. In fact the Rebels have never won a playoff series against the Saskatoon Blades.
Egor Sidorov scored his 8th goal of the playoffs to make it a 1-0 Blades game at 3:12 of the first period with the assists going to Brandon Lisowsky and Ben Saunderson.
Rowan Calvert scored shorthanded to give the Blades a 2-0 lead at 6:11 of the first period with the assist going to Misha Volotovskii.
Egor Sidorov scored a spin-o-rama goal for the Blades to make it a 3-0 game. Assists went to Grayden Siepmann and Charles Wright at 16:48 of the first period. I usually don’t like giving props to the visiting team but that was a nice goal. The Blades were hot dogging out their for a while when that was going on I was kind of hoping one of them got a flying elbow to the head.
Brandon Lisowsky made it a 4-0 game at 18:48 of the first period the assists on the goal to Egor Sidorov and Ben Saunderson.
Shots in the first period were 12-6 for the Blades
Egor Sidorov gets his second hat trick in as many nights when he scores to make it a 5-0 Blades game with the assists on the goal going to Tanner Moldendyk and Nicholas Andrusiak. Andrusiak now has the same amount of career points in 6 WHL playoff games as he did in the 45 games than he played with the Rebels. I mean albeit he is a defensive defenseman usually.
Fraser Minten made it a 6-0 game at 13:03 of the third period with the assist going to Egor Sidorov and Nicholas Andrusiak.
Shots on goal in the second were 13-9 for the Rebels
Former Regina Pat Alexander Suzdalev made it a 7-0 game on the Power Play at 4:52 of the second period with the assists on the goal going to Brandon Lisowsky and Loreburn, Saskatchewan native Morgan Tastad.
The refs also managed to squeeze Kai Uchacz in the penalty box for the final 2 minutes of his WHL career.
Steven Steranka looked pretty good in the shifts that he had and even had a scoring chance in the third.
Shots on goal in the third was 10-7 for the Blades. The Blades ended up outshooting the Rebels 31-26
Evan Gardner stopped all 26 shots that he faced for the win for the Blades. While Taylor Tabashniuk stopped 24 of the 31 shots that he faced against the Blades. Huge props to a bunch of the Blades players for taking the time in the handshake to let Tabashniuk know how awesome he played in a situation I am sure no one else would of wanted to do or could of done.
Three Stars of the game were 1) Egor Sidorov 2) Evan Gardner 3) Brandon Lisowsky
Attendance in Red Deer was 4415
Rebels next game is probably sometime in September. That is almost 6 months away. But in June the NHL Entry Draft takes place, The WHL draft takes place in May and the CHL import draft is coming up. Also it is expected that Ollie Josepshson will play for Team Canada at the U18’s in April and Samuel Drancak will also be playing for the Czech Republic. Wutzke would probably be the goaltender but we all know what happened there.
