It’s been a minute! Did anything happen while I was gone?
Owing to a tremendous amount of road games and a little bit of semi-deserved time off over Christmas, I haven’t put up a blog post in quite some time. And we have a lot to catch up on both in Wheat City and outside it as the stretch run kicks into high gear and the race to the playoffs hits the downhill portion of the track.
After the trade deadline, things happen all at once very quickly and very slowly. When you’re tracking the standings as diligently as every team will do this time of year, it can seem like not much changes from moment to moment. And then one weekend suddenly flips the whole conversation on its head.
The Wheat Kings will have to flip the recent conversation around the team on its head in a hurry, as they’ve lost three straight games and are about to get into an absolutely merciless portion of the schedule. Hey, wait a minute, didn’t they just have one of those?
Well, yes, they did, and they handled it like champs, going 11-1-o in a grueling month of December. When a team can put together a month like that against opponents from all over the conference, facing most of them in their own territory, then you can find the answers to a lot of problems just within that room. And because the team held fast on trade deadline day, they’ll have to.
Goodness, we have a lot to talk about.
- The trade deadline dominates the conversation in Brandon hockey circles, and has done for weeks, and much of the conversation among fans I’ve spoken to carries a note of disappointment that the team didn’t land a big fish. Selfishly, I admit I just about always root for the team to make a big splash; on the simplest level, a big trade is exciting. On a slightly deeper (but still selfish) level, it comes to this: I love calling games, and the longer the Wheat Kings play in the playoffs, the longer I get to call them. The more pickups they make at the trade deadline, the more likely it is that they go on a deep playoff run. And wins, no matter what broadcasters may espouse about “impartiality”, are always more fun to call. To be very, very clear, the Wheat Kings absolutely attempted to make moves to add to the roster. In our post-trade deadline chat yesterday, however, Marty Murray offered a reminder of the other side of that coin. If you mortgage too many assets for the moment, you’ll be left dealing with a sharp drop off in the future. The Wheat Kings have been very public about the fact that they don’t want to go through a “bottom out” phase the likes of which several teams have gone through both this year and last. They had conversations about adding pieces (Marty told me they talked to every other team in the league) but the prices were deemed too high. I’m torn on this, personally. The window the Wheat Kings appear to be opening will last longer than this year. In fact, many if not most of the players carrying the mail right now for the Wheat Kings have multiple years of eligibility left. I understand not wanting to give away a player who might yet be a critical part of a window that seems primed to remain open for years to come. The biggest nagging concern is the looming spectre of the NCAA. Of the players you hope to be part of the extended window, whose participation in it was once as close to guaranteed as anything can be in the hockey world, how many can be guaranteed to be back next year or the year after? Then again, as Marty pointed out, this can also make trading away excessive assets riskier; you might not have the players you need to recoup those assets down the line (there are absolutely examples around the league right now of teams facing precisely this dilemma, their inevitable rebuilds hampered by the departure of players who would have netted them the picks and prospects they needed to kickstart the next phase of their existence). In this, Marty pointed out, the old way of doing business in the WHL has changed dramatically. In that minefield of a new landscape, I can understand why the Wheat Kings chose to look for the answers within the room. The prices were too high, the risk too great, and goodness knows the team gave them reason to have faith in the group they have in December. It’s an argument in which I can understand both perspectives. Fans want the team to push all their chips in and send the team on the kind of run they haven’t experienced since 2016. The team wants to go on a run like that, of course, but also wants to keep this long-foreseen window to contend open as long as possible. I expect the debate in public forums will rage on. That’s about all I can offer by way of closing what is surely the longest bullet point I’ve ever typed in one of these blogs. Hey, it has been a while.
- I could fill several blogs with my thoughts on every major trade made this past week. The Prince Albert Raiders, lacking very little in their lineup but perhaps in need of more offensive depth, have added Brandon Gorzynski and now Braeden Cootes in what was surely the biggest move of the season so far by any team. I’ve been a Cootes fan for a while now, going back to his pinpoint shot off the rush that proved to be the Seattle Thunderbirds’ only goal in last season’s 4-1 loss to the Wheat Kings in Brandon. Now I guess I’ll be seeing that shot more often, not exactly a comforting thought. Cootes could technically return next season as well, as his entry level contract with the Canucks precludes him from going to the NCAA, but as he almost made the Canucks out of camp this season, that’s no sure thing. The price for Cootes was, as you’d expect, astronomical as he cost the Raiders no fewer than eight assets including two first round picks and a prospect currently playing for the United States National Team Development Program (who, if past experience is any indication, is more likely to go to an American team than a Canadian one; it was the Thunderbirds who originally brought Gracyn Sawchyn over from the NTDP, and that was prior to the NCAA’s change of heart). Seattle seems to be an entirely revamped team themselves. They traded Cootes, but retained Buffalo Sabres first-rounder Radim Mrtka and added Cameron Schmidt, Matthew Gard, and Noah Kosick via trade, to say nothing of Ethan Bibeau, who they also acquired in the Cootes swap. Both the Raiders and Thunderbirds came out of the deadline looking like they’d made big steps in the direction of their choosing.
- If they could be guaranteed to get all possible (or even all likely) years of eligibility out of the players they’ve brought in, I’d call the Vancouver Giants the long-term winners of this trade deadline. Following trades with the Oil Kings and Chiefs, the Giants now hold four of the top-12 selections in the 2023 WHL prospects draft, all of whom will be entering their prime next season. Mathis Preston and Ryan Lin making music together on a regular basis is the kind of setup that makes you go “boy, I sure am glad they’re in the Western Conference”. Joe Iginla getting to develop in a system where he’ll have some prime ice time is the kind of decision that could pay massive dividends for both the player and the team. Now the million dollar question: how many of those players remain in the WHL amid the constant lure of the NCAA? I suppose that’s the question looming over everything for the moment. More on that from a Wheat Kings’ perspective in a few moments.
- The Wheat Kings were not the only team to “stand pat” on deadline day, and a number of the teams that either stood pat or only made comparatively minor tweaks surprised me. By my reckoning, the Kelowna Rockets still had at least three first round picks to play with entering yesterday’s trade frenzy, including the grand jewel of their horde, the first round pick belonging to the Lethbridge Hurricanes that has (as of now at least) a chance to be first overall. That none of them moved is not necessarily a mistake, just a surprise. Given they are the only team in the country that knows for certain they’ll be playing in May, I expected Kelowna to empty the tanks somewhat. Then again, given what Marty Murray said about the price of defensemen, perhaps even the Memorial Cup hosts found the entry fee to those discussions to be too high. Reports out of Kamloops were they had no intention of moving Harrison Brunicke once they were sure he was coming back from Pittsburgh, so I can’t call that a shock (though I can tip my cap to Blazers GM Shaun Clouston for flipping Kayd Ruedig for a first and a fourth after acquiring him for a second and a conditional fifth in October). I also thought the Everett Silvertips might get in on the action; they certainly seemed to be making room to do so when they traded import defenseman Jakub Seidl to the Calgary Hitmen. To hear ‘Tips play by play announcer Casey Bryant tell it, Everett (like the Wheat Kings) swung on a lot of players and didn’t like any of the offers they were presented with. Perhaps they, too, saw some of the prices and politely declined.
- The final team I expected to see more moves from (even allowing for the massive move they did make) was the Spokane Chiefs. Once it became clear that Berkly Catton was not returning, and once they moved Mathis Preston, I expected to see slightly more of a sell-off for a team that has plenty of strong 2007-born players but, as of this moment, sits outside a playoff spot. The Chiefs have a couple of veteran defensemen who might’ve fetched a kings’ ransom if they’d wanted to move them, but sometimes organizations just don’t want to move those pieces for reasons of their own. Whatever the Chiefs’ reason, they dropped one of the biggest bombshells of the entire seasons in the Preston trade and then held the fort from there. Given that they acquired a near-point-per-game player in Tyus Sparks from Vancouver in the Preston trade (to go along with a first-round pick) I don’t think they can be said to have thrown in the towel on this season, and they are only two points out of the playoffs. Actually, they’re only three points back of the Memorial Cup hosting Kelowna Rockets as of this writing.
- We touched on the looming shadow the NCAA casts over so many decisions this time of year, and the Wheat Kings have some news on that front. Joby Baumuller, the teams’ leading goalscorer, has committed to Colorado College. Now I’ve seen different dates for the start of that commitment. To be honest, not all of what I do (certainly not this blog) can be called journalism but I do still have some journalistic habits including the habit of “going to the source” and in this case the source, Baumuller, has clarified to me that the commitment will begin in 2027-28, the season after next. The reason? As Joby expressed it, he wants to win here. Good thing for the Wheat Kings, because his presence makes that much, much more likely. With 27 goals so far this season, Joby is only one goal back of the league lead, and with his propensity for sudden surges of offense, that deficit could be erased in a heartbeat. Either way, he remains one of the deadliest shooters in the league, and if the Wheat Kings can count on that deadly shot for one more season, more’s the better for both them and the fans lucky enough to watch it.
- Every year when Canada doesn’t win a gold medal at the World Juniors (and even some years they do) there are loud cries from around the country and beyond about the potential underlying causes. Some of them go beyond the choices of personnel and coaches and shine a light on what they perceive to be deeper issues with the state of the sport in Canada. Two popular points of derision this time around: the skyrocketing cost of high level hockey, and the propensity for hockey players to play their sport year-round, often at the expense of all other athletic activity. These are two issues that, in my view and based on my conversations with people around the hockey world, are absolutely relevant to not only the fate of Canada’s international teams but the long-term health of hockey. The long-term costs of making the sport exorbitantly expensive, turning hockey into the domain solely of people with tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income, are obvious and varied. From a performance standpoint, you risk shutting out promising players from lower income families (or even reasonably financially stable ones), and turning away some of the best players the sport might ever see with a barrier to entry that’s completely beyond their control. As for playing hockey year-round, talk to coaches at higher levels and they’ll tell you that’s a major pet peeve of theirs. Players don’t develop as well over the long-term by burning themselves out on a sport 365 days a year. And if you talk to athletic therapists, strength coaches, and personal trainers, you’ll come up against an even more compelling reason for players to become two-sport athletes. Hockey players use very specific muscles when skating, muscles that are not often put under strain (at least not to the same direct degree) in other sports. Speaking as someone who has suffered overuse injuries in weightlifting, no muscle group, no matter how well trained, is designed to be pushed at its highest level every day of the year or even most days of the year; I’d love to do bench press every single day, but that would not only pass rapidly beyond the point of diminishing returns but result in muscle imbalances and injuries. This is what we’re starting to see as the effect of players training for hockey and, in many cases, nothing else all year. Certain muscles get overtrained and burn out, while other muscles and movements get neglected and far more prone to injury. So it was heartening to see some of the discussion after the World Juniors centre around two problems plaguing the sport at the minor hockey level. Now, let’s keep that same energy year round, not just when Canada finishes third at a major international tournament.
And this is what happens when I go too long without a blog, apparently: a great big wall of text. There are die-hards, I know, who read through every word of these no matter how verbose and I appreciate your dedicated eyes.
Speaking of rest, however, eyes need that too, so don’t forget to put the screen down and take a break today! I took up a lot of your screen time today if you’ve made it this far and I thank you for sticking with it.
