Stealth face feisty Minnesota Swarm in in playoff opener

Toss the streaks and overall records out. It’s playoff time.

The Washington Stealth open postseason play tonight, hosting the Minnesota Swarm in a National Lacrosse League West Division semifinal at Comcast Arena. The faceoff is set for 7:30 p.m. The two teams split a pair of games during the regular season.

Minnesota, which enters the playoffs as the No. 4 seed in the West, hasn’t won in more than a month, a losing streak that sits at six games. Three of those defeats were in overtime. But the Swarm (5-11) are one of few NLL squads that can match Washington’s size and strength across the board.

“They play a tough, nasty brand of lacrosse,” said Chris Hall, head coach of the 11-5 Stealth. “They’ve done well playing that way and they took the (Orlando) Titans, leaders of the East Division, to overtime last Saturday night (a 12-11 Swarm loss). They present problems like any team in this league does. We’ve got to focus on nothing but trying to beat the Minnesota Swarm ... 5-11 means nothing, 11-5 means nothing right now, it’s a matter of playing at the absolute top of your game.”

The regular-season series produced two heated affairs. Washington won the first contest 12-9 at home behind four goals from Jeff Zywicki and solid goaltending by Matt Roik, but the game also featured the ejection of two Washington players, defender Eric Martin and transition specialist Paul Rabil, for fighting.

The second matchup, eight days later in St. Paul, Minn., was even more physical.

The teams combined for 151 penalty minutes and saw a total of eight players ejected for fighting as Minnesota won 16-12, handing the Stealth their first loss of the season. The tensions reached a boiling point at the end of the first quarter when a fight between Stealth goaltender Tyler Richards and Minnesota’s Sean Pollock ignited a bench-clearing brawl that ended up in one-game suspensions for Stealth defenders Mike Grimes and Matt Beers.

So, one part of the Stealth’s game plan is obvious: don’t be goaded into fisticuffs with a lower-seeded opponent. Stealth forward Lewis Ratcliff said Washington players may need to “take a punch in the face or a slash and just turn away” if Minnesota tries to create trouble.

“They are going to try to muck it up with us,” Ratcliff said. “We need to be smart and disciplined and our power play needs to make them pay when they give us opportunities.”

Ideally, Hall said, the Stealth would like to stay out of the penalty box, but since that’s not likely to happen, the Washington players need to use their heads when the team is short-handed.

“Our man-down has played extremely well all year ...,” Hall said. “It’s good, it’s deep, we have good athletes there and we have some real intelligence on our man-down.”

Minnesota has lost a number of tight contests, but its current six-game skid isn’t as worrisome as one might think, Swarm head coach Mike Lines said.

“We’ve had some close games, we’ve given some (goals) away late in games, which is frustrating, but our last game (against Orlando) was probably as close to a 60-minute game as we’ve played in a couple months, which gives us some confidence going into the playoffs,” Lines said.

Hall knows all about the dangers of facing an underdog in the NLL playoffs. In 2004, Hall and forward Lewis Ratcliff helped lead the West’s No. 3 seed, Calgary, to its first NLL title.

“I’m highly cognizant of the fact, (and) now it’s true more than ever, that any one of those eight teams in the playoffs is more than capable of winning it all,” Hall said.

Washington, which owns the league’s top penalty killing unit, its top goal scorer in Ratcliff (46) and two players (Ratcliff and Rhys Duch) in the top-10 in the league in points, enters the playoffs on a high note after clinching the league’s overall No. 1 seed with a 14-9 victory over Rochester a week ago.

But the Stealth are wary of Minnesota.

The Swarm possess three of the league’s top-10 scorers in Callum Crawford (32 goals, 64 assists), Aaron Wilson (40 goals, 49 assists) and Ryan Benesch (28 goals, 55 assists) as well as one of the NLL’s better power-play units.

“They have some significant weapons to bring to the table,” Hall said.

Notes

Second-year forward Rhys Duch earned the NLL’s Overall Player of the Week award for his six-goal, three-assist performance in Washington’s regular-season ending 14-9 win over Rochester.

The sock-trick (six goals in a game) was the highest one-game total of Duch’s relatively short NLL career. The Victoria, B.C., native is second on the team with 86 points (33 goals, 53 assists).

Duch earned the 2009 NLL Rookie of the Year award after setting the league record for points by a rookie with 89 (35 goals, 54 assists).