Sydney Ice Dogs

Canberra Brave are the team that advanced.

The Ice Dogs defeated the Perth Thunder 7-4.

On Friday, on the Saturday games, the Newcastle North Stars just pipped the Ice Dogs 10-1 on the Saturday.

And then in the second game on the Saturday night, The Canberra Brave got up over the Melbourne Mustangs in a game that felt like the final 4-3 win there.

Felt very much like 2023 vibes in that one.

They had a very, very strong regular season and sort of took that form into finals and overall certainly very deserving winners, that's for sure.

Yeah, massive congratulations to Newcastle, I thought.

The way they played in the semi-final against the Ice Dogs, it was just a ruthless beating that they handed out there.

Let's start with Diggy's highlight.

Highlight from my weekend was the Ice Dogs giving me a team sign.

Vertez Jersey.

Wow.

I know they lost, but that opening goal was amazing.

His reaction was so good.

He just had such a great Second half of the season when he joined the Ice Dogs, the North Bears.

Yeah, he stood out.

Started with the Canberra Brave, CBR Brave, and the Sydney Bears.

The Brave with a 4-3 win over the Bears and the Sydney Ice Dogs with a 7-4 win over the Perth Thunder.

I have to be honest, I was surprised with both of these results.

Yeah, well, look, the Bears, we thought were just...

Yesterday's semifinals, Newcastle North Stars.

I looked at this scoreline and I was just dumbfounded.

10-1 over the Sydney Ice Dogs.

What happened here?

Good on you, Jim.

Terry Wallace there, AFL Hall of Famer, Hawthorne legend, Dogs and Tigers coach, of course.

More Sports Day after the break.

Yes, we've got off our message line.

It's up and back.

Of course, we've got the game in flow a lot more.

And if you can at least limit his damage or limit the amount of times he gets the ball, you're asking somebody else to do it for the Dogs.

And they're clearly not as good as Bailey Dale.

They've both got riddled with injuries.

Dogs have had a point set back.

I feel like it's just made them hungry.

Totally.

Strangely enough for the Sydney teams, they've only ever met each other once in finals history.

And considering they've both been around for a very long time, obviously the Bears are one of the founding teams.

And then the Ice Dogs came in, I think it was 2002.

Yeah.

They're starting that sort of thing.

We've also had these off-ice development facilities start to become... not mainstream but start to become a thing so we had one in Queensland in next level that was the first one that's closed down now but we have one in Sydney and we've got one in Melbourne and another one opening up in Melbourne shortly where it's you can go in there's synthetic ice you can practice stick handling you've got shooter tutors you've got the VR stuff there's one in Sydney called Viking Performance Development Lab and that's run by the coach of the Sydney Ice Dogs and And the teams go in there and they do all this off-ice stuff without the ice.

And Nathan Walker trains there when he comes back to Sydney.

And it's really state-of-the-art stuff.