Wolfsburg earn ticket for the quarterfinals

17 Mar 2013 | Dennis Mende

With a 5-3 away win this afternoon the outsiders from Wolfsburg turned around the pre-playoff series against Nürnberg and became the last DEL team to make it to the playoff quarterfinals. There they'll face regular season winners Adler Mannheim.

DEL pre-playoffs, day 3

Nürnberg Ice Tigers (7) - Grizzly Adams Wolfsburg (10) 3-5

In front of 4,412 spectators the favourites from Nürnberg went in front through Steven Reinprecht early at 06:06. With the start of the middle period though the nightmare started for them when Norm Milley became the man of the match for the Grizzly Adams. First he scored two goals himself to turn the result around before he assisted to the power play strike by Matthew Dzieduszycki at 37:09. During the third period the hosts were the clearly better team but Wolfsburg played incredibly effective to make it 4-1 through Tyler Haskins - again Norm Milley earned an assist. Although Yan Stastny cut the deficit to two at 52:55 the race to catch up came too late for the Bavarian hosts. With an empty netter Justin Mercier made everything clear at 57:36. James Pollock only was able to score the 3-5 with less than two minutes left on the clock for the first big surprise of the DEL playoffs.

Wolfsburg won the series 2-1

Playoff quarterfinals start on Wednesday with the following pairings:

Adler Mannheim (1) - Grizzly Adams Wolfsburg (10)
Kölner Haie (2) - Straubing Tigers (9)
Krefeld Pinguine (3) - ERC Ingolstadt (6)
Eisbären Berlin (4) - Hamburg Freezers (5)