Bees' season rests on game at Corpus Christi

McALLEN — All the Killer Bees need to do to reach the playoffs is beat the Corpus Christi IceRays Tuesday night. Then, beat the Wichita Thunder on Friday while hoping the IceRays lose at Allen. Finally on Saturday, the Bees (25-26-10) must once again beat the IceRays, which would then clinch a playoff spot.

Sounds hard, right? And it will only be made harder by the Bees’ injury situation, which will likely keep Jesse Bennefield, Jesse Perrin and Tom Sawatske out of Tuesday's game at Corpus Christi (28-25-8) and force them to play with 14 skaters.  To make things more difficult, the team has also been hit by a flu bug over the last week.

None of that, however, is being used an excuse. The reasons the Bees trail the IceRays by four points (64-60) with three games remaining and hold exactly no tiebreakers go well beyond the injuries of the last week. Except for the last seven games, urgency has been an on-again, off-again proposition. Leads haven’t always been safe, and consistency mostly hasn’t happened.

Regardless, because of the two games left with Corpus Christi, the Bees still have a chance to make up for a disappointing season, though they don’t enter at full strength.

“Is it the perfect scenario? Probably not,” Bees coach Chris Brooks said. “But when you’re playing cards and you’re dealt a bad hand, what are you going to do? You have to try to make the most of it.”

Unfortunately for the Bees, making the most of it against their rivals hasn’t exactly been a strength for much of the season.

In 12 games against the IceRays, the Bees are just 4-7-1, including going winless in the last five matchups. In 14 against Laredo they went 3-7-4 and never won at home. Last weekend, when two wins could have propelled them past Corpus Christi for the fifth and final playoff spot, they went winless, earning only one point. And that one point they earned was in a 3-2 shootout loss to the Bucks after squandering a 2-0 lead.

Now, to make the playoffs, the Bees need to reverse the season series with the IceRays while finding a way to turn the urgency and desperation into wins. That’s something they weren’t able to do Saturday in a 5-3 loss, though the effort and commitment was there.

“Nothing changes. We have to go out thinking, like in March Madness, that underdogs win all the time,” goalie Andy Franck said. “We’ve just got to go in there, take it game-by-game and hopefully we can come out ahead this time.”

If they don’t, the season’s over.

“There’s no bouncing back if you lose tomorrow,” captain Stacey Bauman said. “We’re thinking about winning. We’re thinking about a win tomorrow night against them is what we’re aiming for and then we’ll worry about the weekend after that. We’ll worry about the future later.

“We’re going to control what we can control right now and go from there,” Bauman added. “No talk about bouncing back, that’s for sure.”

ICING: A regulation loss Tuesday would assure the Bees a non-winning record and keep them from finishing above .500 in consecutive seasons for the first time in team history.

Brian Sandalow covers the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees for Valley Freedom Newspapers. You can reach him at (956) 683-4436.