Sam Morris

Wranglers coach Glen Gulutzan talks to his team during a timeout in their ECHL championship series game against Cincinnati Cyclones Thursday at the Orleans Arena. After yielding the arena to other events for the weekend, the teams return to the ice tonight for Game 5.

By Ron Kantowski

Mon, Jun 2, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Well, they finally found somebody who could stop the Wranglers’ power play and slow down those pesky Cincinnati Cyclones.

The Charlie Daniels Band and a miniature schnauzer.

If you are wondering why the Wranglers played Games Three and Four of the ECHL finals on back-to-back nights and bypassed Saturday night to play on Monday, you can blame it on some band blowing Dixie double four time, or whatever Mark Knopfler was talking about in the “Sultans of Swing.”

I’ve heard of a Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out but a Tropicana Avenue Freeze-Out is something altogether different.

The devil left Georgia and went down to the Orleans Arena instead, icing the Wranglers, the building’s primary tenant, on Saturday night. The Charlie Daniels Band was the headliner at Volunteer Jam, a benefit concert that also featured fellow southern rockers 38 Special and Shooter Jennings, who, when last seen, was losing a big golf match to Happy Gilmore.

And playing on Sunday wasn’t an option, either, not with the Animal Foundation’s Best in Show dog show having dibs on the building.

So if you see the Wranglers defensemen skating sort of gingerly around the blue line tonight, there might be a perfectly good reason for it. Somebody said just to be on the safe side, they might attach a pooper scooper to the Zamboni for Game Five.

Wranglers president Billy Johnson had no idea the team’s charge toward the Kelly Cup was being temporarily preempted by a fiddler and a cocker spaniel.

“When we get to this point, they just give us what dates are available,” Johnson said.

It’s just the nature of the business that sports tenants sometimes have to work around their landlords’ schedule, and it’s not just the minor leagues where it happens. In the old days, the Chicago Blackhawks were forced to spend a couple of weeks on the road every hockey season when the Ice Capades or Ice Follies or whatever ice show had signed Peggy Fleming and some skating polar bears invaded Chicago Stadium. Just as the UNLV basketball does now when the rodeo rides into the Thomas & Mack Center every December.

Though I can never recall a Stanley Cup playoff game being interrupted by Kristi Yamaguchi or somebody throwing sequins onto the ice, that’s the NHL, hockey at its highest level. In that case, the landlord usually defers to the sports tenant.

At the Double-A level, wild-eyed Southern boys (I think that’s what 38 Special used to call themselves) and Airedale terriers get first ups — especially when not even Barry Melrose or the Amazing Kreskin could have predicted the Wranglers would still be playing hockey in June.

“Obviously, we would always prefer to play on Saturday,” Johnson said. “But those were events that were booked months ago.”

But Johnson said if a couple of guys sporting mullets and guitars wind up with their foot in his crease, the Wranglers can adjust.

“Hey, if Elvis, Jim Morrison and Mama Cass rose from the dead ... we’ll play on Tuesday,” he said.