Reliving last time Raiders swept Blades and beat Tigers with former player Aki Seitsonen

While the playoff run is following the path it took in 2005, the 2025-26 Prince Albert Raiders are quite different from the 2004-05 Raiders during the regular season. That year, the Raiders finished third in the East Division, and lost the season series with the Blades 6-4 including a loss in Saskatoon on the final night of the regular season.

So the Raiders were the underdogs in that series with Saskatoon, but they came away with a four game sweep. Game 2 was the only game that ended with a multiple goal lead as the Raiders shutout the Blades 3-0, but every other game in the series was decided by one goal including a 3-2 overtime win to close out the series.

“It’s quite a few years ago, but I always comes back to goaltending. We had a good goalie, Rejean Beauchemin, and obviously that game he would have stood on his head. Any time when we played Saskatoon, it doesn’t seem to matter how the regular season goes. It’s always a tight series, and I think we just won our groove in the playoffs and we just kind of took it to them.”

The next round in 2005 saw the Raiders move on to take on the top seed in the Eastern Conference Medicine Hat Tigers. The Raiders were rested while the Tigers had just come out of a seven-game series in round one, but the Tigers came out and took an early 2-0 series lead.

Once the series came back to the Art Hauser Centre, the Raiders took advantage of the hometown crowd and came out with a 7-2 win in Game 3. In that game, Seitsonen had his best game of the playoffs with two goals and an assist.

“When you go on a road, you go against a good team, and in hockey every round you play, it’s just kind of amps up a little bit more intensity and you play better teams. So going into Medicine Hat, maybe the base of the game got us a little bit, but then coming home we knew our fans were going to be behind us and we really found our game in Game 3, and were able to get a big victory to get back in the series for sure.”

From there, the Raiders had the momentum and won the next four games on the road to win the series in six games 4-2, closed out by a 3-0 shutout at the Hauser, but the most dramatic game was in Medicine Hat in Game 5.

During that game, former NHLer Kris Russell opened the scoring for the Tigers late in the first, then former NHLer and current assistant coach of the Edmonton Oil Kings Kyle Chipchurra tied it midway into the second for the Raiders, and that would be the last goal until Brent Ottmann’s only career playoff goal ended it 7:18 into double overtime.

“I can’t remember how he scored, but yeah, Brent Ottmann coming with a massive goal to just get us another win. You need those heroes in playoffs, and Brent got that big goal in that one.”

Part of the success in that pivotal Game 5 came from the travelling Raiders fans.

“Actually my father was there. So they took the fan bus to Medicine Hat, so I remember that vividly coming out of the bus and we had two fan buses already in Medicine Hat waiting for us. That was real cool.”

After the series with the Tigers, the Raiders would meet up with the Brandon Wheat Kings in the Eastern Conference Final, and a wild seven game series saw Caine Pearpoint score an overtime winner in Game 6 for the Raiders, but ultimately the Raiders would lose 5-1 in Game 7 to end the Cinderella run.

That year, Seitsonen lead the Raiders in scoring with 5G-9A-14P in 17 games during that playoff run. IT was the same year Seitsonen represented his home country of Finland at the World Juniors for the first time, and he earned a bronze medal with Finland in the 2006 tournament.

After spending nine years in the pros including stops in the AHL, ECHL, and European leagues, Seitsonen came back to Prince Albert and settled down with his wife. He runs his own construction company here, and he’s happy to call Hockey Town North home now.

“I think after my first season with the Raiders, if somebody would’ve asked me if I was going to be living in PA, I probably would’ve said no, but I got to live all over the place in the world, and somehow PA found us and it was easy to come back here. My wife found a job here as a school teacher, and then slowly we started our own company with the Seitsonen Construction and been building that for a little over a decade now.” He added, “we’ve got a place at Memorial Lake where we spend a lot of time in the summertime. No, it’s a nice place to live.”

Seitsonen has been chasing his boys around with their own hockey going on, so he hasn’t been able to get into the Art Hauser Centre for a playoff game yet. When he does, he’s hoping to bring some of the magic the crowd brought to his team in 2005 to help inspire his edition of the Raiders to defeat the Tigers.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com

by Nick Nielsen

Reliving last time Raiders swept Blades and beat Tigers with former player Aki Seitsonen

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