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A few old scores left to be settled in Saskatoon

Saskatoon Blades captain Derek Hulak rarely goes looking for trouble.

Saskatoon Blades captain Derek Hulak rarely goes looking for trouble.

He’s a two-time winner of the Blades’ most gentlemanly player award, and through 253 WHL regular-season games, he never collected a major penalty — not for high sticking, not for charging and certainly not for fighting.

That streak ended Feb. 17, though. Uncharacteristically, Hulak snapped. His Blades led the visiting Red Deer Rebels 7-1 through nearly 50 minutes at Credit Union Centre. What drove Hulak over the edge wasn’t the incessant chattering of Rebels forward Landon Ferraro. That, said Hulak, was nothing new.

But when Ferraro bowled over Blades centre Marek Viedensky after the whistle, Hulak lost his mind. And then his gloves.

“He just ran over Marek for no reason at all,” Hulak recalled Sunday. “It was a good two seconds after the whistle. Marek wasn’t even looking and then (Ferraro) just kind of says, ‘What are you gonna do?’

“I had enough and so I grabbed him.”

Video of the incident shows Hulak tossing at least 15 punches to Ferraro’s two. That bad blood lingers as the Blades and Rebels prepare to open their first-round playoff series Saturday at CUC.

“With the last game being the way it was, there is going to be a heated rivalry and we’re looking forward to it,” said Hulak.

Saskatoon and Red Deer have just one chapter in their post-season history. They met in the opening round of the 1993 playoffs when the Rebels were an expansion franchise. The Blades triumphed 3-1 in the best-of-five series but the first three games were decided by a single goal and the fourth featured an empty-netter.

This season, the Rebels return to playoffs after a two-year hiatus. They’re a team on the rise with dangerous weapons in 81-point man Willie Coetzee, 30-goal scorer Andrej Kudrna and 16-year-old Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who finished second in team scoring as a rookie.

One could also make a case for goaltender Darcy Kuemper as the team’s MVP. The Saskatoon product thrived as the Rebels’ workhorse with a 2.73 goals-against average and a .908 save percentage in 61 appearances.

“They’re a good team and they’re in the playoffs for a reason,” said Hulak, whose third-seeded squad welcomes the sixth-ranked Rebels. “As we learned last year, it doesn’t matter where you finish because it’s a whole new season.”

Saskatoon has 13 returning players from the team that won the East Division pennant only to be upset by the seventh-seeded Lethbridge Hurricanes in seven games. A year later, the Blades aren’t overlooking the Rebels despite finishing 16 points higher in the standings and winning the season series 3-1.

“We’ve had our success against them this year, and certainly in the last game, we had our way,” said Blades coach-GM Lorne Molleken, “but we expect a really tough series. They’re a team that plays extremely hard and they have good goaltending in Kuemper.”

The Blades counter with 19-year-old netminder Steven Stanford. Molleken anointed Stanford as his starter Sunday. The Calgarian platooned with Adam Morrison during the regular season.

“Little things don’t seem to bother him,” said Molleken, “and we’re going to be counting on him.”

cwolfe@sp.canwest.com