Minnesota nearly paid the ultimate price for ending the Professional Women’s Hockey League season on a five-game losing streak, backing into the playoffs when Ottawa lost on Sunday night in the final game of the league schedule.

Now it has new life — and the challenge of facing regular-season champion Toronto in a best-of-five series that begins Wednesday in Toronto.

Rather than following the traditional format of 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 in the playoffs, the PWHL gave Toronto the choice of playing either third-place Boston or fourth-place Minnesota.

Minnesota coach Ken Klee said he expected to face Toronto, and doesn’t look at the choice as something that will provide any extra motivation for his team.

“For me it’s as easy as who has the toughest travel,” Klee said. “We’ve had the toughest travel the entire year. It’s no secret; I’m sure any team would agree with that. If I was them, I would say, ‘Who has the furthest to come and has the toughest travel to get here.”

Toronto general manager Gina Kingsbury said a lot of factors went into the decision.

“The process started a long time ago,” she said. “When we clinched first place we started those discussions on the hypotheticals in who that might be that we got to choose from.

“It was not an easy decision. There is no easy opponent in this league. We talked to our leadership group, we leaned on our athletes — how they feel against all these opponents. I
looked at how we matched up with these teams throughout the season. You always want to look at the more recency of the teams and how they’re doing in this time frame of the season. Are they healthy? Are they banged up? The travel came into play. You weigh everything.”

Toronto finished with 47 points, 12 more than Minnesota. The teams met four times during the regular season. Minnesota won the first meeting, 3-1, on January 10 at Xcel Energy Center before dropping the final three.

Toronto lost four of its first five games of the season before going on an 11-game winning streak that stretched from Jan. 26 to March 20.

“To go through an 11-game winning streak in the middle of the season after starting out so poorly was something we were really proud of,” Toronto captain Blayre Turnbull said. “From that, we were able to gain a lot of confidence.

“But as we gained confidence we felt like we still had so much to prove and so many areas we can get better in. Despite going on such a great winning streak, we approached every game as if we had more and more to prove, and I think that’s how we ended up in the position we are now.”

To that end, Toronto will not take any opponent lightly, especially a team in Minnesota that is eager to get back to its winning ways.

“They have two great goaltenders, who both have had great seasons,” Turnbull said. “They have some really good defensemen, and obviously, we know how offensive their biggest threats are.

“Kendall (Coyne Schofield) is extremely fast and she has been scoring a lot lately. Taylor Heise is such a natural goal scorer and offensive threat, too. They’ve got some star players who I’m sure will be really excited to face us, and they’ll bring their best games in the playoffs.”