Game 4 was a battle for awhile, but Hawks now in hockey heaven

Ondrej Stebetak stretches out to make one of his 36 saves, this one on Lukas Kaplan, but Everett got six shots by the Portland goalie to win 6-3 and complete a playoff series sweep (courtesy Winterhawks/Brian Hoven)

For a period and change Wednesday night, Portland was Hawkeytown again.

Through early second period in Game 4 of the Winterhawks’ first-round WHL playoff series with Everett, Portland led 2-0 and had the Silvertips off kilter.

Ultimately, though, class prevailed. Everett scored the next five goals en route to a 6-3 victory that completed the best-of-seven series sweep and ended the Hawks’ season.

The Silvertips, who finished the regular season with a WHL-best record of 55-7-2-1, are the No. 1-ranked team in the Canadian Hockey League. They are favored to win the Memorial Cup — emblematic of supremacy in North American junior hockey — in Kelowna, B.C., in late May.

Portland, meanwhile, ran its streak of consecutive postseason appearances to 15, but just barely. The Winterhawks (30-30-7-1) took until the final weekend of the regular season to clinch the eighth and last playoff berth in the Western Conference. That earned them a date with the queen of the prom.

“If we had finished in a different spot,” Portland president/GM Mike Johnston said, “it might have been a bit less challenging.”

Everett steamrolled the Hawks, outscoring them 25-5 in the four games. In Thursday’s finale, the Silvertips outshot the hosts 42-29, with six of Portland’s shots coming in the final two minutes after the outcome had been decided.

Portland beat Everett in their first three regular-season matchups, though one came in overtime, another in a shootout. From that point, the Silvertips won all seven meetings, including the four in the postseason.

The Hawks came out Wednesday playing as if they didn’t want the series — and the season — to end. Nathan Free — who scored Portland’s only two goals in the first three games — made it three in a row with a tally 5:42 into the game. The Hawks pushed the attack with seven shots on goal in the first seven minutes. When Nathan Brown converted a power-play goal 5:05 into the second period, the Hawks held a 2-0 lead and a 17-16 shots-on-goal advantage.

Nathan Free beats Everett goaltender Anders Miller for a first-period goal, his third of the playoffs, but the Silvertips prevailed 6-3 (courtesy Winterhawks/Brian Hoven)

But Jason Vaughn got Everett on the scoreboard with a goal little more than a minute later, and the Silvertips followed with two more scores to take a 3-2 edge into the third period. The visitors made it 4-2 just 1:12 into the final frame, and from that point the Hawks were in deep water without a life raft.

“We showed a lot emotion, a lot of care, a lot of pushback through the first half of the game,” said Kyle Gustafson, Portland’s second-year head coach. “Winning the first 10 minutes was key, and that rolled into the second 10 minutes. We were sharp with the puck. We put them on their heels.

“But credit to (the Silvertips). They are a really good team. There is a reason why they are the favorite to win it all.”

“We started really good,” Free said. “We did exactly what we wanted to do early. But they got some bounces and got a few more past us than we got past them in the end.”

If there were a silver lining to the series defeat, it was the production from Free, a first-year Winterhawk who had played the previous four seasons in the Tier II ranks. The 5-10, 165-pound 19-year-old, who scored 28 goals in the regular season, wound up with three of his team’s five scores in the postseason.

“It was a good series for me personally,” he acknowledged. “It was not what we were looking for (as a team), though. We wanted to go longer, play more games. But I can take a few positives out of it, for sure.”

“Nathan does great things on the power play,” Gustafson said. “He is a specialist. He has a deadly shot and he uses it. He is opportunistic. When he gets his stick on the puck, he usually makes good things happen. That is his game.”

The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.

After 36 playoff games the past two seasons — reaching the WHL finals in 2024 and the conference finals last season — the Hawks fielded a roster with 12 new faces this season.

“That is more (new players) than we have ever had,” says Johnston, who began with the organization as head coach in 2009. “It was a big transition.”

At the January trade deadline, Johnston — realizing playoff success was unlikely — sent away veterans Tyson Yaremko and Carter Sotheran in deals that returned mostly future draft picks. The result was a mediocre team that backed into the playoffs when the ninth team in the West, Victoria, lost its final three games.

For the first time in years, Portland didn’t have an assassin, a big-time scorer it could count on when the going got tough. Last season there were Kyle Chyzowski, Diego Buttazzoni and Josh Zakreski. The year before that, Gabe Klassen and James Stefan were 100-point scorers.

This season, the Hawks had but two 30-goal scorers — Alex Weiermair (37) and Ryan Miller (30) — and only four with as many as 20 (including Free and Jordan Duguay with 22).

Portland also accumulated the second-most penalty minutes in the league behind only Seattle, which was compounded by the third-weakest penalty-kill unit in the conference.

“I don’t think our team was undisciplined,” Johnston said, “but our penalty kill struggled throughout the year.”

Gustafson expressed pride in what his team accomplished this season.

“After we moved (Yaremko and Sotheran), we knew we were going to take a step backward and have to be more patient in developing young players,” he said. “I am proud of the leadership we got from Alex and Ryan. They were consistently good throughout the year. They cared. They are true Winterhawks. They put their team on their backs during the stretch run.

“We played three weeks of playoff hockey just to get into the playoffs. It was a battle every night. It took 68 games for us to get there, and by that time we were running on fumes a little bit. I am proud of the guys to hang in there. When things got tough late in the season, it would have been easy just to fold our tent. Achieving that goal was really important to all of us.”

Next season’s roster will be uncertain until the smoke clears around the end of the WHL playoffs. The only key player gone for sure is Weiermeier, who turns 21 in May and is a sixth-round draft pick of the Las Vegas Golden Knights. It is almost certain that two 18-year-old draft picks (Miller, fifth round, Pittsburgh, and defenseman Max Psenicka, second round, Utah) will be back, but that will be determined by their NHL clubs. Goaltender Ondrej Stebetak and forward Kyle McDonough are other 18s expected to be back.

“If they are all back, we will be a strong team,” Johnston said. “If we get three of the four, we will be strong as well.”

Portland had a host of 17-year-olds — forwards Duguay, Reed Brown, Jake Gustafson and Luke Wilfley and defensemen Will McLaughlin and Griffin Darby — who should make a bigger impact next season. And three 16s — forwards Alessandro Domenichelli and Finn Spehar and defenseman Luke Christopherson — all played 35 or more games this season, gaining experience that should pay off down the road.

Portland had only two overage players (Weiermair and defenseman Niko Tsakumis) and two import players (Stebetak and Psenicka) this season. Johnston said he intends to add another Euro — probably a forward — in 2026-27.

“We are going to have three and three next season,” Gustafson said. “We had the second-youngest roster in the league this season, but we got plenty of valuable experience for our younger guys during this playoff series against a contending team.”

Free could be one of the players to fill an overage spot next season.

“It is a possibility,” said Free, who is undrafted and said he is also considering moving on to college hockey. “I am not sure yet.”

Johnston and Gustafson hope that age and experience will help one or two of the forwards to develop as did Stefan from his 18- to 19-year-old seasons. In 2022-23, he scored 22 goals and 65 points. In 2023-24, his numbers rose to 50 and 101.

The 2026-27 Hawks will likely be in position to have better results than they had this season.

“We are in a really good spot heading into next year,” Johnston said. “We will have a better handle (on the 2026-27 roster) in a few weeks, but most of our 17- and 18-year-olds aren’t committed to going to college or going pro for another year or two. I don’t think there will be more than one or two players that we will have to deal with (losing).”

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