Weekend Preview - Utah Grizzlies vs Stockton Thunder

The Grizzlies are on the road this weekend in Stockton, California, home to the ever-popular Asparagus Festival. Fortunately that isn't until April, so there should be no distractions for the team. Let's just hope they don't play Stockton in the playoffs.

The Grizz are coming off a recent successful home stand where they came up with 7 of 8 points. Their last game against Vegas was won in particularly commanding fashion, cutting down the current conference leaders 5-0. That's right - we said the Wranglers are the current conference leaders. We're not necessarily complaining about that, but the Grizzlies are 2nd, and only two points away, which makes this weekend pretty important. The Grizzlies have two games this weekend followed by 4 days off, then one game next week and another 4 days off. That's a lot of not playing hockey, so they need to make these games count to stay in the race. The Wranglers will play 6 games in the time Utah plays 3.

Stockton has been on a tear lately, winning 7 of their last 10 games, and moving up the conference ladder. They're 6 points behind the Grizzlies, with only Idaho in between. It should be easy enough to climb over those potatoheads, as long as it's not at the Grizzlies' expense. The Thunder are 20-8-6 when outshooting their opponent, so we think it will be important for the Grizzlies to 1) take plenty of shots on goal, and 2) keep Stockton's shot count down. Of course, that's nothing they shouldn't be doing anyway, so we'll just keep our coaching advice to ourselves. What do we know anyway?

With the way they played at home recently, we're hoping Utah can keep it up for their next three games. This will depend a lot on goaltender Andrew Engelage staying on top of his game and healthy. According to Coach Colley, Engelage is the team's backbone. He has consistently been able to bail the team out when they have breakdowns and keep them in the game. Not to mention that pretty slick 5-0 shutout on Wednesday night.

Now, you may or may not recall that Stockton and Utah don't really get along very well. In fact, the last time these two teams got together for a weekend, the infamous stick-tossing incident occurred. Not that it wasn't one of the highlights of the season, but starting that game off with a fight didn't seem to be the right choice for the Grizzlies, as everything kind of went ice jungle from there on out. We would say it would be wise for the team to stay out of as many distracting, momentum-killing altercations as possible while in Stockton. We don't want any Rick DiPietro situations. (Out 4-6 weeks from a punch in the face - ugh.)

Chance for 4 points this weekend. We're going for Grizzlies win and Wranglers lose. Stockton is in there somewhere. The fun starts at 8:30 pm.