Finally, the playoffs

We ended the regular season with two big wins on Saturday and Sunday. Beating our increasingly bitter
rival Rockford 7-1, in a physical game.

Sunday we closed up the season, clinching our conference, and home ice advantage through the conference finals, by beating Peoria. After the game was over on Sunday, our entire team went out for dinner at Harry Caray's to celebrate a great season and look forward to a long playoff season.

It was a fun night, especially after we had played well the last weekend of the season, you always want to end on a good note before heading into playoffs, and I think our team had been waiting for the playoffs to start for a while now.

Our general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff announced that we were going to be playing Milwaukee during the middle of the dinner. It was a little strange since we had no idea who we would be playing, all the other teams had been so close to one another in the standings. Also, we had played Milwaukee last year and so it had that rematch feel to it. A lot of the coaching staff talked about what we had to do in order to go a long way in playoffs, about preparing ourselves, raising our game to another level, and giving everything we have to obtain a championship.

Monday was a day off to rest before the playoff push, and i definitely took advantage, sleeping in late, and meeting up with our physical therapist Jim to get my leg worked on from my nagging injury.

Tuesday was definitely a work day, going over all of our systems, making sure we have all our coverages and routes down for the upcoming Milwaukee series, even going over each of their players strengths and weaknesses.

A lot of preparation by the coaching staff and management goes into a playoff series. They look at all the footage from the games we played against them and analyze what things will work against the Admirals, and try to figure out what Milwaukee will try to do against our team.

Everyone looks forward to playoffs, it is so different than the rest of the season. Playing the same team back to back seven times is tough to do. It can really get personal going up against the same guys night in and night out. I think the most important thing about going into playoffs is knowing that anything can happen, and that no matter what, there are seven games to play, so you have to come to each as if the one before never happened, win or lose.