Tucson Roadrunners gearing up for final stretch of regular season, playoff push

Roadrunners coach Mike Van Ryn gave his team Tuesday off. It probably has as much to do with the games they’ve played lately as the ones they have yet to play.

Tucson has to conserve its energy with the playoffs just around the corner. The team will take it relatively easy leading up to this weekend’s series against Grand Rapids. The Roadrunners and Griffins play at 7:05 p.m. both Friday and Saturday at the Tucson Arena.

The Roadrunners are 38-19-5-1, making them one of the most consistent teams in the American Hockey League, but Van Ryn has expressed frustration with the team’s slow starts.

“We just have to figure out how to get our guys going a full 60 minutes on a consistent basis, and that’s the biggest thing for us going into the playoffs,” Van Ryn told tucsonroadrunners.com after the team clinched its playoff berth Saturday night.

Sixty-three games into a 68-game regular season, Tucson is figuring its way around the fatigue that inevitably hits any team, especially one as young as the Roadrunners.

So far, Van Ryn’s philosophy has been to keep the workload steady.

“A lot of teams tend to lay off this time of year and try to make things light,” he told the team site. “For us, we wanted to keep that working mentality to continue to push every day, and maybe that helped us down the stretch, I don’t know.”

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If the regular season ended today, the Roadrunners would head into the playoffs as the odds-on favorite to win the Western Conference and compete for the Calder Cup.

Tucson has the highest points percentage in the Western Conference with a .651 mark, while the Chicago Wolves of the Central Division are next with a .623 percentage.

Tucson and Chicago split their four-game, regular-season series.

To reach the Western Conference final, Tucson would have to win the first two rounds of the playoffs against Pacific Division opponents.

Tucson has a sizable division lead over second-place Ontario, which carries a .613 points percentage; San Diego (.597) is third and Texas (.579) is fourth. Stockton or sixth-place San Antonio could grab the fourth and final Pacific Division playoff spot.

The No. 1 seed will face the fourth-place team in the opening round, with the winner advancing to take on the winner of the second-place versus third-place matchup.

The first round of the Calder Cup playoffs consists of a best-of-five game series.