PEORIA — The 2025-26 Peoria Rivermen will be remembered for all the games they won, but also for the one game they didn’t in the SPHL Finals.
The Rivermen ran away with the league regular-season points title, set records for their goaltending and overall defense and won the first two games of the best-of-5 President’s Cup Finals series against Evansville.
But they failed to finish in the next two games on the road despite goaltending that gave them a 1.55 goals-against effort in postseason. And then the best single-season goaltending tandem in league history melted down in a decisive Game 5 in front of a big home crowd primed for a storybook finish.
No one had that on their bingo card.
Instead, they saw a Rivermen team become a footnote to back-to-back Evansville championships and, in the ninth best-of-5 championship series in SPHL history, become the first team to win the first two games and not win the Cup.
“We can beat anybody,” Rivermen head coach Jean-Guy Trudel said during the season. “And we can lose to anybody.”
In the SPHL President’s Cup Finals, the Rivermen did both.
“These veteran guys we had, they are why I really wanted us to win it all this year,” Trudel said. “I feel like this is maybe our last group of loyalty guys here. We’re going to lose some guys now. It will be a younger team, a rebuild.
“I think it’s going to be different going forward.”
Now it can be told
The Rivermen, like all teams in the playoffs, had a lot of hidden plot lines going on.
Veteran goaltender Nick Latinovich had a disc problem in his back. Key forward Braydon Barker was playing on a broken leg. Top winger Mike Gelatt had a shoulder that popped in and out of place shift to shift. SPHL goalscoring leader Mike McChesney had a knee injury that left him barely able to skate at times.
Team captain Alec Baer played the final two games with a broken nose after being hit in the face in Game 3.
The entire defense unit was flu-ridden and on IV fluids for the final three games of the series.
“Those are the things people didn’t know about this team,” Trudel said. “So yeah, we had one guy playing with a broken leg. Another with a knee so bad it was hanging together by a strap. Those five guys – our entire defense unit, Kylar Fenton, the Ryder brothers, Cory Dennis – were sick as dogs.
“Our goaltender (Latinovich) was getting the needle, getting shots in his back just so he could play, there were times when he had to stand up more and make saves because he couldn’t always bend down in the net. Gelatt’s shoulder hanging by a thread, McChesney’s knee just done.
“All those guys were pretty tough. And they never quit. Not one of them.”
In the aftermath of Game 5, Latinovich bravely took it all on his shoulders. It was unfair, because the reality was the team would not have reached the Finals without his MVP-caliber play through 11 postseason games.
“Some days it was tough to get out of bed in the morning, I was in so much pain,” he said. “I had some ups and downs, and it was tough mentally. The team did everything it could to treat my back, to get me out there to play.
“I wanted to give this everything I had, battle, because I don’t know if I’m going to play again. I feel like I let the guys down.”
A monumental journey
The Rivermen were in sixth place, hovering near .500 in mid-December when everything changed after Trudel removed the leadership letters from his players’ jerseys and made those roles be re-earned.
They responded with 12 straight wins to start January, the second-longest win streak in SPHL history and second only to their own record 14-gamer from the 2015-16 season. It stands as the third-longest win streak in the 44-year history of the Peoria franchise.
Peoria soared to a 15-point lead in first place, fueled by a 54-day stretch in which it never lost a game in regulation, putting together an 18-0-1 run.
They went on to win the William B. Coffey Trophy as regular-season points champions for the eighth time since joining the league in 2013-14.
From there, it was a sixth trip to the SPHL President’s Cup Finals in 10 years.
The Rivermen goaltending tandem finished one-two in the SPHL rankings, with Jack Bostedt named SPHL Goaltender of the Year with a 1.58 goals-against, .946 saves rate and five shutouts, and Latinovich at 1.98, .930 and four shutouts.
Peoria’s defense set a league record by allowing just 1.91 goals per game on the way to a 38-17-3 record. And in the playoffs, Latinovich was stunning with a 1.55 goals-against, .938 saves rate and three shutouts and a shutout sequence of 189 minutes, 35 seconds over parts of four games.
Bostedt, Baer and Dennis grabbed three of the six first team All-SPHL spots.
Putting the band back together
Late in the season, the Rivermen saw Gelatt and center Garrett Devine and winger Jordan Ernst all decide to come back down from their ECHL teams and make a title run in Peoria. JM Piotrowski joined them out of retirement.
At the center of a lot of that communication, and recruiting and imploring was Latinovich, the goaltender who led Peoria to its 2023-24 title. He talked to Ernst frequently and sold him on a return.
“It starts the moment you walk into this room, right up there on the wall, it says ‘Great people make great Rivermen’ and that’s really true,” Ernst said. “I really enjoy putting on that Rivermen jersey. So coming back down from the ECHL for a chance to win a championship here, with all these great teammates, it just felt like the right thing to do.”
One more push
The Rivermen playoff theme was “One More Push” emblazoned on their T-shirts, and reinforced by a stirring locker room speech delivering that theme by Bradley University athletics director Chris Reynolds on April 16.
They rode his inspired words to their sixth Finals performance in 10 years and seemed poised to sweep Evansville. Rivermen co-owner Bart Rogers rode around Evansville for 48 hours in a rented vehicle with cases of champagne on ice, poised for a celebration. It never happened. Instead, Evansville took the title, and literally that champagne, in Game 5.
“We were a great story. We just didn’t get the ending we wanted,” Trudel said. “We made it to the championship game, in our arena, in front of a huge home crowd, storybook was waiting to happen.”
The ending – a 6-4 loss on home ice by a team that allowed opponents less than two goals per game all season – isn’t any easier to accept in late May as it was when the season ended on May 9.
“You never get over those things, it hurts forever,” Trudel said. “Our analytics were great in the series. We had more grade-A scoring chances and the analytics had us as the winners after every one of those games. The only thing we didn’t expect was giving up six in Game 5.
“When you get to the Finals six times in 10 years, you’re going to lose some. But we just have to make sure we win the next one.”
Dave Eminian is the Journal Star senior writer and sports columnist, and covers Bradley men’s basketball, the Rivermen and Chiefs. He writes the Cleve In The Eve sports column for pjstar.com. He can be reached at deminian@pjstar.com. Follow him on X.com @icetimecleve.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Behind the scenes, untold injuries hampered Rivermen in SPHL Finals
Reporting by Dave Eminian, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
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