Inglewood Always Up to No Good
Heading into February now, four months into the ’94/95 WIHL season, and the league has settled into something of a breathless rhythm. We have three heavyweights leading the pack.
Inglewood looks every bit the juggernaut, riding a balanced, precision-tooled attack (3.26 GF/GP), a nasty 22.5% power play, and one of the stiffest penalty kills in the league.
Scottsdale, meanwhile, is playing pinball hockey at full tilt boogie - nearly four goals per night, more than 40 shots a game, and a stupid offensive engine that leads the WIHL in goal differential by a country mile.
Garden Grove keeps gliding along with its smooth, stingy formula, the best goals-against rate in the league, and a possession game so steady it feels hypnotic.
Below them,
Thornton and
Spokane keep leaning on structure and special teams to stay in the chase, while
Provo and
Reno have muscled into the upper tier behind opportunistic scoring and underrated goaltending. The middle of the table is a brawl:
Bellingham,
Beaverton,
Billings,
Lethbridge, and
Victoria are all within a inch of each other, each with similar strengths...
faceoff prowess, shot suppression, cycles that grind you down, though none have been able to break free.
Boulder’s power play (26.4%) is still nuclear,
Eugene is throwing more rubber on net than anyone, and
Compton quietly leads the WIHL in faceoffs. At the other end,
Walnut Creek and
Boise are getting buried by defensive collapses, while
Roswell, despite boasting the better underlying numbers, can’t escape one-goal heartbreakers. As the season barrels toward the stretch run the WIHL feels unpredictable... even the best teams are just one hot month from being overtaken, and t
he bubble clubs are circling like sharks sensing blood in the water.
With the season feeling like it’s humming at full throttle with
Scottsdale playing the trombone in the orchestra’s loudest section, the
Geckos boast three of the league’s top four scorers, with
Alyaksandr Tarlowski (64 points),
Alvin Fabbri (63), and
Andrew Aulin (58) carving up defenses like a Thanksgiving Turkey.
Tarlowski has been a force of nature -
huge hits,
big minutes,
bigger moments - while
Fabbri’s playmaking and
Aulin’s finishing touch have turned Scottsdale’s top unit into must-see TV on a near-nightly basis. Thornton’s
Roman Sevcik and Provo’s iron-man
Max McMurdoch keep piling up assists, though
McMurdoch’s league-leading 24+ minutes a night come with a comically low 6.3% shooting clip. Over in Eugene,
Pierre-Luc Martel continues to snipe at a ridiculous 21% rate, and teammate
Andreas Griffin has become one of the most reliable dual-threat creators in the WIHL. Boulder’s
Robert Monette and
Benedikt Richter keep the Miners power play terrifying, Winnipeg’s
Fred Ferguson is quietly having his best year, and Roswell’s duo of
David Posejpal and
Steffen Richardson are racking up points even as the team tries to drag a negative goal differential uphill.
Heavy hitters like
Ferguson,
McMurdoch, and
Manuel Robles are leaving their marks while the takeaway artists (
Tarlowski, McMurdoch, Richardson) continue to shape games with pressure and speed. With six teams within a handful of points of each other and the schedule tightening, the WIHL’s stretch run is shaping up to be
a beautiful kind of chaos.
