The last time the Sault Ste Marie Greyhounds made the conference finals was in 2018. Coincidentally, their opponent that year was the Kitchener Rangers; that conference final also marked the last time the Rangers reached the conference finals.
But while the Rangers are by far the better team on paper, this is a Greyhounds side that has clearly established themselves as a contender. Their series win against the defending champions, the London Knights, is proof of this; the hope here is that the Greyhounds can start another series strong and oust one of the regular season's top teams.
The Greyhounds were just one of a handful of teams to beat Kitchener multiple times. Is another set of wins on the cards?
Of the 15 teams that defeated the Rangers at least once during the regular season, only four would go on to do it multiple times. But of those four teams, two would beat Kitchener three times.
You want to know who those two teams were? The Greyhounds and the Owen Sound Attack, the latter of which was swept in dominant fashion by the Flint Firebirds in the first round.
That said, two of Sault Ste Marie's wins over Kitchener came in overtime, while the third came with a 4-0 scoreline.
The first game saw the Greyhounds rally from a 4-1 deficit to force the game into overtime, where Quinn McKenzie would score the game-winning goal with two-and-a-half minutes gone in the extra time period. The second game was the one with the 4-0 scoreline; goaltender Landon Miller would record the 18-save shutout while Chase Reid would score two of the Greyhounds' four goals. Sault Ste Marie's third win of the season series, a 3-2 win in overtime, saw Christopher Brown record a three-point night; he would record the game-winning goal as well as assists on the other two Greyhound goals.
The only loss that Sault Ste Marie suffered against the Rangers was a 3-0 shutout at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium. In that game, the Greyhounds were able to remain within a goal of the Rangers for more than half of the game before Tampa Bay Lightning prospect Sam O'Reilly and Jack Pridham gave Kitchener some breathing room on the scoresheet.
Final prediction: Greyhounds in seven
While I am backing the Greyhounds to advance, recent history doesn't exactly back my claim. Of the last four J. Ross Robertson Cup Finals, just one didn't feature at least one top-seeded team. In addition, of the eight conference winners to have contested an OHL postseason over that period of time, five would end up making it to the championship round. The lone exceptions were the Windsor Spitfires and Ottawa 67's, who won their respective conferences during the 2022-23 season, and the Brantford Bulldogs, who won the Eastern Conference last season.
But what the two aforementioned postseason tournaments have in common is that both occasions saw the team in question eliminated before the second round.
While that doesn't mean the Western Conference's top-seeded Rangers will be eliminated by the Greyhounds, it's also fair to assume that top seeds aren't totally immune, something that the first round of play might not have necessarily suggested.