What: a best-of-7 Western Hockey League Championship Series between the Portland Winterhawks (60-17-4-1) and the Moose Jaw Warriors (56-25-0-3).

It’s the Winterhawks’ 13th trip to the league final; they’ve won three times. Moose Jaw is looking for their first WHL title in their 2nd final trip.

Without checking, the Winterhawks are surely the first team in league history to have all four series use the 2-3-2 format. They might even be the first ever, in any sport.

We saw last round the advantages and disadvantages of the 2-3-2. Portland could have swept the home games to win the series 4-1, but having not done so, they were in some trouble for Game 7 had a puck bounced differently in Game 6.

The game times for the possible Games 6 and 7 are subject to Canadian television coverage, and will probably depend on how the OHL and QMJHL playoffs, which will usually be the first game of a TV doubleheader with the WHL, will go. TV is also why all the games will start at 7pm PDT (the games in Moose Jaw will start at 8pm their time as Saskatchewan doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time.)

Travel fatigue shouldn’t be a factor, thankfully. Both teams will be flying for the championship series.

The Winterhawks winning the Western Conference championship over Prince George wasn’t a shock, but how it happened was a major shock. Winning with their top two scorers totaling 4 points, their star offensive defenseman having 0, one of their most important forwards not playing, and then their Game 6 lineup getting so short with injury that the goal song on Josh Davies’s winner was the MASH theme.

If he doesn’t get that goal...Game 7 might have been problematic.

With these injuries, Portland probably starts the series as the underdog. They might be anyway, if you subscribe to the theory that it’s the high NHL draft picks who shine late in the playoffs.

But they did find a way to win, and they’ll have home ice in this series. They also went over two months playing goalies off the scrap heap and went 18-9, so you can’t really count them out of anything.

The Moose Jaw Warriors just got through the best playoff series in WHL history, a 7-game win over Saskatoon where 6 of the 7 games went to overtime. Lynden Lakovic was the big hero with overtime goals in both Games 6 and 7.

It’s an open question how much those games took out of the Warriors, both mentally and physically; the total minutes of the overtimes almost add up to an extra game. They’ll also have to fight the idea that they just played the real championship series in beating the top-ranked Blades.

What they have going for them is obvious: three NHL 1st round draft picks, and a 2nd round NHL pick who only led the league in scoring. They’ll go as far as that group can take them.

It took them awhile to get going this season. They hung around just over .500 for a long time, but they turned it up in the second half of the year after their players got back from tournaments and they acquired Matthew Savoie. Since mid-December they’ve had 6 streaks of 5 wins or more, including a 6-0 run through the US Division (beating Portland 4-3 in a game that was more lopsided than the score would indicate). Because of that, the season stats, still pretty good, don’t do them justice.

Injuries: That’s the obvious one. Will they get anything out of Luca Cagnoni, Carter Sotheran, Jack O’Brien, and Josh Davies? Not only are they needed for their own contributions, but Portland’s biggest advantage in this series is depth, and three or four of them being out or not at top form negates that depth.

Moose Jaw’s top-end talent: Jagger Firkus, Matthew Savoie, Denton Mateychuk, and Brayden Yager, four of the top five players in the series, have racked up big playoff numbers after racking up big regular season numbers. Can Portland’s defense, possibly without two of their top defensemen, slow them down? They did do it to Riley Heidt and Zac Funk in the Prince George series, but this seems like another level above.

Portland’s top line: You can’t expect Gabe Klassen, James Stefan, and whoever plays with them to match the Warriors’ top men. But they have to be better than in the conference final, where they scored one goal at even strength the entire series. This could easily have cost them that series.

Nate Danielson: Can he have another series like the last, where he picked up the slack of the top line’s struggles? It’s hard to overstate how much he pulled the Winterhawks over the line last series.

Goaltending: Jan Špunar on paper has the advantage over Jackson Unger. He probably at least needs to keep the goalie battle even as he did against Prince George.

Depth: Portland looks to have a decent-sized advantage once you get past Moose Jaw’s top four. They have to make that count.

Special teams: Moose Jaw was the top-ranked power play in the league during the regular season. They’ve tailed off to merely average in the playoffs, but they’re still dangerous with that talent. Their penalty-kill percentage isn’t good but they make up for it by taking the fewest penalties in the league. Overall, they rely on their power play a lot more than Portland. If the Winterhawks can get some power plays they might be able to exploit them.

Starts: Again, the Winterhawks are the best-starting team in the league, probably one of the best of all time, winning the 1st period 52 times out of 82 when no other team did it more than half the time. Against Prince George, Portland started well in all four games they won, although they only led after the 1st in two of them. Moose Jaw was one of the best-starting teams outside of the Winterhawks.