The Calgary Wranglers are in the playoff crunch, and their road to clinching a playoff berth continues with two games against Pacific Division opponents this weekend. It starts with the Edmonton Oilers’ AHL affiliate, the Bakersfield Condors. The Condors just fell to the Colorado Eagles on Wednesday in overtime and are as desperate for points as Calgary is. If not more.

Rory Kerins – Sam Morton – Martin Frk

Sam Honzek – Clark Bishop – William Stromgren

Lucas Ciona – Kyler Kupka – Ty Tullio

Parker Bell – Alex Gallant – Trevor Janicke

Ilya Solovyov – Jonathan Aspirot

Yan Kuznetsov – Hunter Brzustewicz

Artem Grushikov – Jeremie Poirier

Devin Cooley

Waltteri Ignatjew

Drake Caggiula – Noah Philp – Matthew Savoie

James Stefan – James Hambin – Seth Griffith

Daniel D’Amato – Alex Swetlikoff  – Cameron Wright

Ethan Keppen – Matvey Petrov – Connor Corcoran

Cam Dineen – Connor Carrick

Ronnie Attard – Alex Kannok-Leipert

Kyle Mayhew – Darren Brady

Collin Delia

Brett Brochu

Martin Frk – 57GP, 23G, 29A

Rory Kerins – 53GP, 27G, 23A

Dryden Hunt – 48GP, 15G, 33A (inactive on NHL call-up)

Seth Griffith – 58GP, 18G, 43A

Drake Caggiula – 55GP, 21G, 27A

Matthew Savoie – 55GP, 17G, 26A

It’s that time of the season when teams across the league start qualifying for the Calder Cup playoffs. Last year, the Wranglers were one of the first ones to but this year is going to cut it much closer to the wire. Each night of hockey comes with an associated magic number and a playoff race that’s going to be tight in the Pacific Division.

Worst case scenario, the Wranglers don’t make the playoffs. That would be statistically pretty hard to do, but not fully impossible just yet. If they do not have much success in the last remaining weeks of the regular season, they should still at least qualify in the seventh available spot in the division. Their magic number to qualify for playoffs going into this game is 14 with 10 games left to go.

In the Pacific, only the Colorado Eagles have qualified so far, and the Wranglers are on the edge of being mathematically unable to clinch the division. They will gear up to play like they have a best of three qualifying series in the first round of playoffs. Their opponents, the Condors, sit at a magic number of 24 and have 11 games remaining. No team in the Pacific is completely eliminated from qualifying yet so this is an important weekend of hockey.

It starts with a stop in Bakersfield, CA on Friday. They play just the one game against each other and puck drop is set for 8:00 p.m. MT. Streaming options are available for a fee on AHL.tv on Flo Hockey and multiple FlamesNation contributors will have updates on X (formerly Twitter).