Faltering Gulls Fall Out of Playoff Contention

SAN DIEGO —  The Gulls ambled out of their dressing room and onto the San Diego Sports Arena ice to warm up for Saturday night’s game against Salt Lake thinking they still had a chance to make the International Hockey League playoffs.

Management wanted to keep it that way.

When word came in just before faceoff of the Gulls’ 4-2 loss to Golden Eagles that San Diego was eliminated, mum was the word. Milwaukee clinched the eighth and final playoff spot with a 4-1 victory earlier Saturday at Kalamazoo, Mich.

“Why spoil a good thing?” Gull General Manager Don Waddell said with the Gulls leading Salt Lake, 2-0, after the first period. “We’re winning.”

The other seven playoff spots have been sewn up for two weeks, and the Gulls (30-44-8, 68 points), who have slipped from second to fifth place in the IHL West in the past four months, found themselves struggling for a spot in postseason play.

It wasn’t exactly a race to the finish line for the Gulls, one of two expansion teams this season. Going into Saturday’s game, their record was 7-23 (including four overtime losses) since Feb. 1.

That fact that the Gulls are newcomers to the league and one of only three IHL teams without an NHL affiliation seemed of no consequence to Waddell. The Gulls did a nosedive, pure and simple. They spent the first two months of the season in second place. But by late January the Gulls had slipped out of the division race. The focus turned to reaching the playoffs. On Jan. 20, they were nine points ahead of Milwaukee (35-43-3, 73 points) in the standings.

“I’ll be honest; I expected us to be in the playoffs,” Waddell said. “I’ve been in the league for a few years, and I thought we’d put togther a team that was playoff-caliber. We just stopped scoring goals. We couldn’t win at home (the Gulls were 2-8) in the month of February.

“It’s been a long year. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs and we still had a chance to make the playoffs. That’s the frustrating part. We had it. We had the lead. We shouldn’t be in this position.”

The Gulls, apparently oblivious of of their plight, took a 2-0 lead in the first period and led, 2-1, after two. Mike Sullivan opened the scoring at the 16:21 mark as he led a three-on-two break, took a pass from Robbie Nichols, and flipped a short short point blank past Eagle goalie Steve Guenette.

Then Steve Richmond beat the buzzer ending the period when he stuffed a shot from the right side after Derek Mayer hit him with a sharp pass from the left boards.