Two Weeks Until the Eugene Levy Cup playoffs!
Scottsdale has been the season-long lighthouse - steady, bright, and nearly impossible to ignore. Riding a 70% point cribbing clip, a league-best +82 differential, and an offense that hums at nearly 3.7 goals a night.
Reno,
Thornton, and
Inglewood form the league’s tightest chasing pack, each built a little differently: Reno’s special teams are borderline cruel (
85% PK),
Thornton leans on wave-after-wave shot pressure, and
Inglewood’s defense has quietly allowed the fewest goals in the WIHL.
Spokane and
Garden Grove sit in that dangerous middle lane, good enough to beat anyone on merit, inconsistent enough to drive their fans mad, while
Victoria and
Provo cling to the final rungs of the playoff ladder with scoring-by-committee groups and just-sturdy-enough defending. Below the fold, the story shifts:
Beaverton,
Billings,
Compton, and
Cheyenne keep hovering around .500 with good underlying numbers but none of the timely magic, and the bottom handful of clubs (
Eugene through
Walnut Creek) have spent the back half of the season fighting uphill through leaky goaltending, heavy shot-against totals, and special-teams holes they just haven’t patched.
With 14 days left and eight postseason tickets on the table, the picture is clear, but the ground is anything but steady… one good week, one heater of a line, one big road win, and the whole bracket could shift under everyone’s feet.
With a scant two weeks of regular season play remaining, what jumps off the page is Scottsdale’s avalanche of firepower:
Alvin Fabbri, Alyaksandr Tarlowski, Andrew Aulin, Dave Koufax,
and William Burrell are practically running their own traveling roadshow, all sitting north of 70 points and combining elite puck movement with enough special-teams damage to shift games before opponents even settle in.
Fabbri’s at 90 points with 10 game-winners,
Tarlowski is a walking chaos engine with 126 hits and 128 PIM to pair with 88 points, and
Aulin’s finishing touch (14.7% shooting) keeps that top unit humming like a well-tuned ’95 Civic on a warm desert night. Chasing them,
David Posejpal has been Roswell’s heartbeat with 43 goals, relentless pace, and a knack for scoring when the air gets tight, while
Steffen Richardson’s 56 assists have made him one of the league’s quietest lethal weapons.
Roman Sevcik continues to be Thornton’s metronome at both ends,
Max McMurdoch in Provo is piling up touches like he’s getting paid by the minute (24:27 ATOI!), and Boulder’s
Robert Monette and
Benedikt Richter keep punching above their weight with consistent, grown-man scoring shifts. Underneath the surface, a few trends shape the final stretch: the heavy hitters are heating up (
Brady, Crossthwaite, Ferguson all surging), the Bandits’ duo of
Weiher and
Lovenbury has become a headache nobody enjoys preparing for, and
Manuel Robles has turned Spokane’s late-season push into a genuine threat. With scoring up across the league, special teams sharpening, and almost every bubble team having at least one star riding a heater, the last 14 games promise to feel like playoff hockey dressed up in regular-season clothes.