Americans Have Struggled Against Chilliwack

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By Keith Leventhal

Story Published: Mar 17, 2010 at 8:02 PM PST

The Tri-City Americans finished the regular season with the best record in the Western Conference.

As you would expect, they had quite a bit of success against most of the Western Conference teams.

But one team really gave them issues this year...the Chilliwack Bruins.

Unfortunately, that's who the Americans will be playing in the first round of the playoffs.

The Ams and Bruins played 4 times this year and Chilliwack won 3 of those games.

To make matters worse, the Americans only scored a total 11 goals against the Bruins...and 5 of those came in their one win.

But, head coach Jim Hiller thinks his team knows what the problem was in those losses.

Coach Hiller says,"We felt like their goaltender played pretty well against us and he was the first star in their 3 victories, so we're gonna have to get at him in a couple different ways, that'll be one thing that we want to do is maybe just place our shots a little bit better and understand some of, maybe, his strengths and weaknesses and more than that, we just have to play hard and just raise our level of compete, its playoff time, everybody's gonna do that, we have to make sure we do that as a whole."

The good news for the Ams is that, even with this year's struggles, they're still pretty good against the Bruins.

During the last 3 seasons, Tri-City was 12-1 against Chilliwack, including a stretch of 10 straight wins.

The Americans will try to get back to their winning ways on Friday night when they play game 1 of their series at the Toyota Center.