SchoolYourPool.com Fantasy Hockey

By GREGG DRINNAN
(gdrinnan.blogspot.com)

Around the WHL, and then some . . .
There may be a move afoot to cut back on the number of WHL exhibition games that are played on the second weekend of the preseason. One WHL general manager has told me that it would be a good idea not to play on that particular weekend, which is after players start to leave their WHL teams to join NHL rookie camps.
The Kamloops Blazers met the Rockets in Kelowna on Sept. 5, which was the first Saturday after players began leaving the WHL for NHL camps. Kamloops head coach Barry Smith said both teams had agreed to dress 18 players, two under the maximum.
The Rockets added two former WHLers – D Kevin Kraus and F Jonathan Milhouse – in order to fill out their roster. Kraus and Milhouse both were in the camp of the BCHL’s Vernon Vipers.
The Rockets, by the way, beat the Blazers, 3-2, and the best player on the ice may have been Kelowna F Shane McColgan, a 16-year-old Californian who was the 13th overall pick in the WHL’s 2008 bantam draft.
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Looking for information on someone who is with the Medicine Hat Tigers?
Want to know which players have been released by the Tigers?
Sorry. The Tigers aren’t talking.
The Medicine Hat News reported Sept. 5 that the Tigers, long one of the WHL’s most-secretive organizations, have decided not to release the names of players who are cut or reassigned, unless they are veterans.
According to The News: “The Tigers cut 26 players early in the week but requested that their names not be publicized.”
Willie Desjardins, the Tigers’ general manager and head coach, told The News: “I’m not going to announce any cuts publicly. I just feel like why do I want everybody in the city to know some poor kid got cut. It’s a tough thing. If it’s a veteran player then it’s different. These other guys, (fans) don’t know about them anyhow.”
Desjardins will double up this season as head coach of Canada’s national junior team.
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WHL teams have signed at least 32 prospects to education contracts since Aug. 1, with most of those signings coming since training camps opened late in August.
Two teams – the Lethbridge Hurricanes and Chilliwack Bruins – each announced the signings of six players all at once, while the Swift Current Broncos did the same with four players.
Although figures aren’t available, observers will tell you that this represents a veritable flood of signings relative to Augusts past.
So what’s going on?
Well, as one general manager put it, “The relationship with junior A and you just can’t risk it.”
Translation: The relationship between the junior A leagues in the west (the B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba junior leagues) continues to deteriorate. And WHL teams would rather risk signing a player and having him not pan out than not signing him and having end up with a junior A team.
One GM told me that the second he signs a player, he considers it an investment that will cost his organization a minimum of $10,000.
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The Subway Super Series – it used to be the ADT Canada-Russia Challenge – will again stop in two QMJHL, OHL and WHL cities.
Whoops! Not quite.
While the tour will stop in Drummondville and Shawinigan, both homes of QMJHL franchises, and Barrie and Windsor, two OHL centers, it will appear in only one WHL city. The WHL all-stars will play the touring Russian side in Kelowna on Nov. 26.
The other western stop will be in Victoria on Nov. 25. Victoria hasn’t been home to a WHL franchise since the Cougars moved to Prince George after the 1993-94 season.
"We have great respect for Victoria as a hockey market and there has been strong interest expressed in that market regarding the WHL," WHL commissioner Ron Robison told Cleve Dheensaw of the Victoria Times Colonist. "Victoria was a priority when looking at centres outside the WHL that should host a game. Winnipeg and Victoria are the two centres in which, if we can bring our product to in this format, we will look to make it happen. Those are the two influential markets in the west (where there aren’t WHL franchises). Both cities have historically been supportive of junior hockey."
Vancouver-based RG Properties operates the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria and Prospera Place in Kelowna.
Robison, however, told Dheensaw that fans shouldn’t read anything into the Victoria date, choosing to call it a “one-off.”
Still, you have to wonder if holding this game in Victoria, along with Robison’s mentioning of Winnipeg, doesn’t signal the start of some kind of Cold War. There are WHL owners who are most upset that the NHL’s Calgary Flames, who own the WHL’s Calgary Hitmen, moved their AHL affiliate into Abbotsford, B.C., just a few slapshots from the Chilliwack Bruins and into the same general area as the Vancouver Giants.
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The biggest surprise of the WHL’s exhibition season has to be the Chilliwack Bruins, who opened with four straight victories. The Bruins, who went 19-46-2-5 and didn’t qualify for the playoffs last season, now are being guided by Marc Habscheid, their new general manager and head coach. Of course, Habscheid knows that no one remembers a team’s exhibition season record in March, but you can bet he is pleased just the same. . . . Former Chilliwack GM Darrell May, who lost his job in January, has signed on as a western scout with the Chicago Blackhawks. . . . Roy Stasiuk, fired as the Lethbridge Hurricanes’ GM in May, has joined the Toronto Maple Leafs’ scouting staff. . . . The Kamloops Blazers have acquired D Bronson Maschmeyer, 18, from the Vancouver Giants for a 2010 third-round bantam draft pick. Kamloops GM Craig Bonner admitted to being disgruntled with the puck-moving ability of the defencemen with the Blazers, so he placed a call to his brother, Scott, who is the Giants’ GM. Craig, then the Giants’ assistant GM/assistant coach, spearheaded the recruiting and signing of Maschmeyer by Vancouver. . . . F Jay Fehr, 20, of the Brandon Wheat Kings had to forget about joining the rookie team of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild at the prospects’ tournament in Traverse City, Mich. Fehr suffered a lacerated leg in an offseason boating accident and has yet to receive medical clearance to return to action. . . . The Everett Silvertips picked up F Travis Dunstall, 20, on waivers from the Medicine Hat Tigers. Dunstall, taken 16th overall by the Kamloops Blazers in the 2004 bantam draft, had been told by the Tigers not to report to camp. When they were unable to trade him, they placed him on waivers. Dunstall had 49 points and 103 penalty minutes in 61 games with the Tigers last season. . . . With Dunstall, Everett has five 20-year-olds, two over the maximum. The others are F Zack Dailey, F Shane Harper, F Alex Poulter and D Colin Scherger, with the latter two also being waiver pickups.

(Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of the Kamloops Daily News. He has been covering the WHL for more than 30 years.)

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