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What’s up: Yes, there are professional hockey playoffs in Colorado this season, and they have an Avalanche connection. The Loveland-based Eagles Saturday night got a goal from defenseman Matt Register at 1:05 of overtime to beat the Idaho Steelheads 2-1 at the Budweiser Events Center and even the first-round ECHL series at a game apiece. Register also had an assist on the Eagles’ other goal, by winger Alex Belzile. The Steelheads won Game 1 by a 4-2 score on Friday night.
Games 3, 4 and 5 are at Boise before Games 6 and 7, if necessary, are back at the Budweiser Events Center on April 25-26.
Background: . They had a fluctuating small cast of overflow players from the San Antonio Rampage of the American Hockey League to mix in with the roster core of those under ECHL deals with the Eagles.
With a 47-20-2 record, for 99 points, the Eagles finished second in the Mountain Division to the Allen Americans in the regular season. Their standouts are Matt Garbowsky, 26, the former Rochester Institute of Technology forward and Hobey Baker Award finalist who had 36 goals and 45 assists in the regular season, and Register, 27, who was named the league’s defenseman of the year for the second time in four seasons.
Avalanche organizational players on the Eagles’ playoff roster are goalie Kent Simpson, forwards Shawn St-Amant and Julien Nantel, and defensemen Mason Geertson and Sergei Boikov. Also, defenseman Justin Hamonic and Belzile are under AHL deals with San Antonio.
St-Amant, Nantel, Geertsen, Boikov and Belzile all were with the Rampage at the start of the week, but were reassigned to the Eagles — where all had stints this season — for the playoffs. The Rampage won’t make the postseason either and finished the regular season Saturday night against the Texas Stars. When the Avalanche sent Anton Lindholm, Rocco Grimaldi and Duncan Siemens back to San Antonio last weekend before its final game at St. Louis, that made the reassignments to the Eagles this week more possible.
Boikov, 21, was in the Rampage’s top pairing down the stretch of the regular season and Belzile, 25, while not considered an Avalanche organizational prospect, had 10 goals in 17 games in his time with the Eagles this season.
The Eagles also have three Coloradans — former University of Denver forward Luke Salazar (Thornton); defenseman and captain Sean Zimmerman (Denver); and former Princeton defenseman Michael Sdao (Niwot).
The Eagles’ coach, Aaron Schneekloth, and Avalanche coach Jared Bednar were teammates with the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays in 2001-02 before Bednar became an assistant coach for Schneekloth’s second and final season with the team.
Frei’s take: If you’re in Denver and need a hockey fix, the Events Center is roughly 50 miles north of the Pepsi Center and 50 miles south of Cheyenne, adjacent to Interstate 25.
The irony here is that the two trophies the Eagles have competed for — the Central Hockey League’s Ray Miron President’s Cup, which they won twice; and the ECHL’s Patrick J. Kelly Cup — are named after figures from the NHL Colorado Rockies’ past. Miron was the Rockies’ general manager for five seasons, Kelly their head coach for slightly more than one season.
