When the Power Dodge Estevan Bruins played their final home game of the regular season on March 3, it was a great scene for fans of the hockey team.
Not only did they beat their Highway 39 rivals, the Weyburn Red Wings, in what was a pretty entertaining game, but the Bruins had their biggest crowd at Affinity Place in years.
The announced crowd was more than 2,200 people, and while it can be tough to gauge attendance at Affinity Place, due to people seated in private boxes and the lounge, there was no doubt that Affinity was close to capacity that night.
Attendance can also be deceiving for the final game, since many fans are using up their punch card tickets, and so they bring a few people with them. But that doesn鈥檛 account for such a large crowd.
Hopefully those people will be back when the Bruins take to the ice to face the Yorkton Terriers in Game 1 of their Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League quarter-final series on March 17.聽
The Bruins have an entertaining team this year that finished second in the league in goals. They鈥檙e fast, they move the puck well and they play as a team. They鈥檙e not a big team, but they are aggressive and they finished second in the league in penalty minutes.
Yorkton had a fantastic finish this season, winning seven of their last eight games to advance directly to the quarter-finals, and avoid playing in a first round 鈥渟urvivor series.鈥�
It should be an entertaining series, which will be great news for the fans.
Attendance hasn鈥檛 been great at Affinity Place this season. The team鈥檚 season ticket sales were down, and a lot of nights there were a lot of empty seats. Fans seemed to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the team at the start of this season, since expectations weren鈥檛 high with so many new players.
But even as the season progressed and people around the league realized the Bruins had a strong team, the crowds often remained sparse.
A multi-series playoff run with excellent crowd support would go a long ways to shoring up the team鈥檚 finances this season.
Hopefully the Bruins can slay a couple of dragons in this series as well. They haven鈥檛 won a best-of-seven playoff series since the 2005 quarter-finals. And they were knocked out of the playoffs five times in a nine-season span by the Terriers between 2005 and 2013.
Yorkton seemed to pose a mental hurdle for the Bruins for a lot of years. And while none of the players on the Bruins were in the SJHL the last time the two teams met in 2013, you can forgive Bruin fans for wanting to see their club finally dispatch the Terriers in a best-of-seven showdown.聽
