Luckies right on the verge of confirming Lightning Cup win with best performance in last three seasons

With a 7-4 home ice win over the Smithers Steelheads on Saturday, the Houston Luckies clinched at least a share of first place in the Central Interior Hockey League regular season, with only two games left to play. Both games remaining will be on the road on Jan. 29-29 against the only team that can catch up to Luckies’30 points, the Terrace River Kings. Still, it’s never quite over, they say until the fat lady sings… It may be all academic and arithmetic. The Luckies are still odds-on to take the Lightning Cup for the regular season with only a single loss and four ties in the season. Their big wins against 100 Mile House earlier this month, gave Luckies a seemingly insurmountable goals-for, goals-against record. The Kings, on the other hand, will need all six points from its last three games to reach the 30-point mark, including a win from Saturday’s (Jan. 21) highly-anticipated encounter with traditional rivals, the Kitimat Ice Demons, on the big ice surface at Tamitik. The Kings have yet to win a game in Tamitik. With a tie and a loss, however, against the Luckies earlier in the season, the Kings can still write their own ticket by winning all the way. A Demons win would end Terrace’s chance of tying for first place. However, although they are currently only a point ahead of the Demons, with 24 points, a loss would drop the River Kings into third place, with their last two games against Houston, which has only lost once this season. But these games will be on Terrace ice. Houston’s only loss was to the Smithers Steelheads, who still have four games left on their schedule, both against eastern region teams, a pair at home against the cellar-dwellers, Williams Lake Stampeders this weekend, and then two on the road against the Mackenzie moose, who could be waiting to play spoilers for the Steelheads. The Ice Demons, with a win Saturday in their final game of the season, will have done all they can to consolidate a playoff against Smithers, instead of Houston. Any single point gained by Terrace will likely drop the Demons into fourth place and ensure a second or third place finish depending on how the Steelheads do in the last two weekends of the regular season. Over the past weekend, the Luckies fought off a determined Steelheads team and now feel comfortable that any single point will confirm a clear league championship. Luckies led all the way. The Luckies led 2-1 at the end of the first, 4-2 at the end of the second and finished off the Steelies with three more goals in the third. In Kitimat the under-manned Mackenzie Moose, with only 12 skaters on the bus, did their best but ran into an essentially health Kitimat Ice Demons team looking for points, and went down 14-1 on Saturday and 11-0 on Sunday. See Demons website, click on www.kitimaticedemons.com for details. The Moose have two more games at home with the Steelheads and may want to go out with a bang. In 100 Mile House the Williams Lake Stampeders succumbed to the Bears on Saturday, by a score of 6-5, but came back in the second half of the double-header to record its first road win of the season, 5-3 over the Bears. It was the final game of the season for the last-place Stampeders, who recorded 4W-16L-0T for the year. The best news was that Stamps took three of their last four games… to deliver some hope for next season.