Columnist Dean Juipe: ECHL playoffs are tough to predict

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 | 9:44 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

At a robust 31 teams, the ECHL is not only unwieldy but confounding.

It also keeps fans, players and teams from getting to know one another.

For instance, as good as the Las Vegas Wranglers looked Tuesday night at the Orleans Arena in defeating the Idaho Steelheads 4-2 in the first game of their best-of-five playoff series, who can say whether the local team is championship material or merely stocking stuffer?

The Wranglers are up 1-0 in the series and were 43-22-7 during the regular season, but the mysterious quality of the ECHL and its 16-team playoffs keeps all but the most rabid of Las Vegas' supporters tethered to some pillar of restraint.

Yes, the final standings indicate San Diego led the league with 108 points and Wheeling (106) and Atlantic City (100) also reached triple digits, but few have made the effort -- or lived to tell the tale -- when it comes to evaluating the widespread playoff contenders.

Peoria, Johnstown, Reading, Columbia, Roanoke and Pensacola provides a smattering of the teams still alive, as is something called Gwinnett.

Gwinnett (Ga.) has not only stumped many a contestant in a geography bee, I think it once caused a commotion in a restaurant when I complained to the waiter that there was a gwinnett in my souffle -- or was it the other way around?

At any rate, the very fact that Gwinnett is in the league, let alone playoffs, may prove that the ECHL could use a good pruning.

Even the best educated ECHL fan in Las Vegas is in the dark when it comes to recognizing a majority of the league's teams. The Wranglers not only didn't play most of the teams in the league's Eastern Conference, there were teams in the Western Conference as well that never made an appearance here or saw a Wrangler there.

Further scrambling matters is the fact that players may be coming down to ECHL playoff teams from American Hockey League teams that have finished their seasons. The Wranglers, for example, are said to be expecting a handful of players from Lowell (Mass.) of the AHL in the next week or two.

Will those players help or hinder the team and its chemistry?

I suspect Wranglers fans and players alike would rather opt for familiarity and dance with the ones who brung 'em, as opposed to getting acquainted with new partners this late in the season.

The Wranglers appear cohesive and played a fluid, respectable game in getting past Idaho in an opener that attracted 3,301 vocal patrons. The caliber of play was solid and the game moved smoothly along, with Las Vegas mainstays Greg Day and Marc Magliarditi at the forefront -- as they have been much of the season.

Day assisted on Chris Kenady's goal to break a scoreless tie in the second period and he scored with Kenady as a decoy on an almost identical 2-on-1 spurt near the end of that period to put Las Vegas back up, 2-1.

Magliarditi withstood the pressure Idaho was throwing at him in goal during a third period that saw the Wranglers go into something of a prevent defense before Cam Bristow secured the win with a breakaway goal at 18:20 to make it 4-2.

Spectators left the arena slapping hands and content, confident that Las Vegas will eventually eliminate the Steelheads and maybe give San Diego a tussle should each advance to the second round.

But beyond that, who knows? There are teams in this league we have never seen, representing cities we couldn't find on a map.

The Wranglers may be as deep and as talented as any of them.

They may have the goods to win the title.

Of course they might just as easily find a gwinnett in their souffle.