Griffins beat Wild, clinch franchise-best season with 50th win faster than ever

Grand Rapids did more than beat Iowa. By the time the Griffins left Casey’s Center with a 5-2 victory on April 15, they had reached 50 wins in the fewest games in franchise history, pushed their total to 105 points and locked up the best regular season the organization has ever put together.

That kind of finish says plenty about where the Griffins stand now, both as a Calder Cup threat and as one of the strongest development proofs in the Detroit pipeline. Grand Rapids entered the night at 49-15-4-1 and left with a .750 points percentage, surpassing the old franchise standard of .719 from 2005-06. Their 26th road win tied the club mark set in 2002-03, while their road points percentage of .788 had already established a new benchmark before puck drop.

The game itself was over quickly. Amadeus Lombardi opened the scoring 86 seconds in, Tyler Angle made it 2-0 at 14:02, Ondrej Becher followed 27 seconds later, and Wojciech Stachowiak scored on the power play with 2:28 left in the first period to put Grand Rapids ahead 4-0 before Iowa could settle in. Oskar Olausson got the Wild on the board at 9:46 of the second, and David Spacek cut it to 4-2 late in the period off a feed from Caedan Bankier, but the Griffins controlled the third and Alex Kannok Leipert sealed it with an empty-net goal eight seconds from the finish.

Michal Postava turned aside 24 shots for his 16th win, improving to 16-6-0. Lombardi finished with a goal and an assist, Angle picked up his 20th assist, and Becher supplied the game-winner for his ninth goal of the season. For a team that has built its reputation this year on depth rather than one-line dependence, those are the kinds of contributions that travel into the postseason.

The milestone also fit the bigger arc of Grand Rapids’ season. The Griffins had already clinched a playoff berth on Feb. 27, the first team in the AHL to do so, then wrapped up the Central Division title on March 26 and the Western Conference regular-season title on April 3. Kienan Draper and Dylan James made their AHL debuts in the win, another sign that the roster keeps producing new layers even while the standings keep tightening around it.

This was also a fitting continuation of the Griffins’ long edge over Iowa. Grand Rapids had won 17 of the previous 23 meetings with the Wild, and nine of the last 12 had been one-goal games. This one was not, and that made the message even clearer: the Griffins are not just winning. They are winning like a team built to matter in May.