It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating: not a rollercoaster on earth swings around as wildly as the momentum in a junior hockey game.
What was going to be an excellent weekend for the Brandon Wheat Kings overall turned into rather a disappointing one in the span of a single period. After having beaten Regina 5-2 the night before, the Wheat Kings entered the third period up 3-0 on the Prince Albert Raiders. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.
The wheels fell off suddenly and dramatically in the third, and everything that could go wrong seemed to do so. Joby Baumuller, Caleb Hadland, and Carter Klippenstein all left with injuries, and the Raiders not only tied the game but took the extra point in overtime. Though Baumuller and Hadland returned for the next game, the Wheat Kings seemed to still be reeling from the loss to Prince Albert, and were shut out for the first time all season by the Lethbridge Hurricanes.
It was a sudden and dramatic reversal of fortune for a team that had entered the game against Prince Albert 5-0-1 in their last six and who seemed to finally be returning to full health. The good news is, the team dodged the worst of the injury woes (despite how it first appeared against the Raiders) and they could swing the momentum back in their favor with a home double-header against the Regina Pats this weekend.
It never hurts to go into a weekend motivated. It never hurts to get healthy right before you face a division rival either.
- It looks as if the Wheat Kings have dodged a major bullet health wise. Marcus Nguyen, the teams leading goal scorer and point getter, left the game in the third period against Lethbridge and appeared to be in all kinds of pain as he did. But the team released their injury list on the weekly report, and Nguyen wasn’t on it. Sure enough, he was skating at practice with the team today and looks like he could be an option this weekend. At this point, expect him to play at least one of the games against the Pats. That’s a huge sigh of relief following what looked like an ugly injury on Monday afternoon.
- Some more hugely positive news on the injury front: Nicholas Johnson looks just about ready to come back. The Wheat Kings have done admirably in his absence, but there were certainly games where they missed his heavy shot, powerful physical style, grinding game, and net-front presence. Last game against Lethbridge was perhaps the game in which they missed him most. Not only would another top caliber shooter have helped them break through against a determined and smothering Hurricanes’ defense, his ability to win battles on the wall would’ve been invaluable in a game where neither team could seem to make the plays they wanted through the middle of the ice. Johnson gives the Wheat Kings another offensive weapon and a player who can not only beat goaltenders cleanly with his shot (something a team can never have too much of) but who can also bull his way to the net using his sheer size. He looked ready to set the world on fire in the early season, and seems determined to pick up right where he left off. Wherever the team chooses to put him in the lineup when he comes back, he’ll make them better.
- After the loss to Lethbridge, Marty Murray said he didn’t feel many of the players on his team did their jobs, but there were two notable exceptions up front: Adam Belusko and Ben Binder Nord. That duo, alongside a rotating cast of forwards that filled in the third spot on their line, ended up on the ice against Lethbridge’s top unit several times and hemmed them in their own zone, doing an excellent job of keeping the Hurricanes’ big guns to the outside. Binder Nord continues to be the most willing scrapper on the Wheat Kings as well, and he’s handling himself well in those scraps. He doesn’t pick his spots, and he gets under the skin of his opponents (notably taking top defenseman Lukas Dragicevic off the ice for five minutes when he fought the Raiders’ top rearguard). Belusko, meanwhile, has been so impressive for me the last handful of games. It’s hard enough learning to play in a brand new city on a brand new continent while learning a new language and new play style, but throw in having to play a new position and it’s remarkable the kind of job he’s done. Whatever the Wheat Kings decide to do with him once they’re healthy, he deserves a ton of praise for what he’s accomplished in unfamiliar territory.
- Another Wheat King who did his job against the Hurricanes: Carson Bjarnason. 30 saves on 32 shots is going to be enough to give the Wheat Kings a chance to win most nights, and since they’ve been averaging over three goals per game this season you could reasonably assume (if you didn’t know better) that Bjarnason came away from a performance like that with a win. While he’s offered up a few more of the starts to Ethan Eskit this year (and Eskit has generally rewarded the team’s faith in him) Bjarnason remains the number one netminder in Brandon and, as of now (to reiterate my point of last week) should be the number one netminder for Canada at the World Juniors. With a .925 save percentage, Bjarnason leads the WHL by no small margin, and still sits a long way ahead of any of the other netminders popularly assumed to be competing with him for the Canadian crease.
- We’re a quarter of the way into the season now, and the standings watch is officially on. And atop the East Division are Swift Current and Saskatoon, just like… we all predicted? I’ll admit to some surprise that those teams have put together the kinds of seasons they have to this point, especially Swift Current who lost so much of last season’s top-end firepower and had such a dismal opening weekend but hasn’t let either of those things slow them down. Huge credit has to go Luke Mistelbacher and Brady Birnie, who have broken out in a massive way. I was among those surprised not to hear Mistelbacher’s name called on draft day last year, and as a Winnipegger I was pretty pleased to see the Jets invite him to their camp. Hopefully the Jets keep that relationship going because Mistelbacher, who brings the perfect offensive mixture of speed, size, and shot, looks like a late-blooming stud.
- Another thing that leaps out at me from my early standings watching is just how tight things are in the Eastern Conference again, even more so than last season. In 2023-24, the standings were absurdly tight in the middle of the conference; one bad weekend was the difference at times between third place and seventh or eighth. But the top of the conference was fairly locked in, with Saskatoon holding the number one spot pretty well from wire to wire. This year not only is the middle of the conference absurdly tight once again (four points, about one weekend’s worth of work, are all that separate third place from seventh once again) but the top of the conference isn’t by any means out of reach. Five points separate first from fifth, but the fifth place team (your Brandon Wheat Kings, incidentally) holds two games in hand. And both the East and Central Divisions have only two points separating the top team from their next closest competitor. Even more than last season, the Eastern Conference truly does feel like any opponent could beat any other on any given night. And isn’t that more fun? Super teams are amusing in their own way, but for day-to-day hockey this is the most entertaining for my money.
- Which brings us to another interesting point: who are the big buyers going to be, and which players are they going to be going all-in on? Right now, the two top teams in the East Division (Swift Current and Saskatoon) are fresh off seasons in which they pushed all their chips in, loading up with big name trade deadline acquisitions at the cost of a lot of draft picks and young players. Can they afford to load up again? And right now, who out east would even sell to them? There’s not a team in the conference that’s mathematically out of it yet, and while Moose Jaw is a popular choice among pundits to make seller’s moves, they’ve only recently gotten back to (relatively) full health themselves and couldn’t very well trade players for picks while they were struggling to ice a full lineup. A lot of teams who could teeter between buying and selling still don’t have the full picture yet. And yes, that full picture includes who will be hosting next season’s Memorial Cup. Once that’s decided, expect some big moves to start happening. If the start of the season has proved anything, it’s that whoever ends up hosting will need to make some moves to build up. None of the potential hosts have been perfect by any means (give credit where it’s due to Lethbridge on that front, who have been the best of the bunch so far).
I bring up the trade front because a number of Wheat Kings fans have wondered whether the Black and Gold might dip their toe into trade waters soon. It’s a fair question; the Wheat Kings are armed with more draft picks in the coming three drafts than any of the other Memorial Cup host hopefuls, and certainly more than Swift Current and Saskatoon. And with the rash of injuries they recently went through, the team could’ve been forgiven for picking up a forward. But they brought in Raiden Zacharias without paying any draft picks to do so, and he and the healthy forwards, plus some call-ups here and there, got them through the worst of the injury stretch without having to spend any of that built up draft capital. So that leaves Wheat Kings fans wondering? What are they going to spend all those extra picks on? Or are they going to spend them at all?
If you’re wondering where the blockbuster trades are, keep an eye out for the host announcement in early December. When that comes down, you’ll see dominoes begin to fall. In the meantime, the Wheat Kings battle it out in an Eastern Conference in which nobody seems to be truly out of it and in which the playoff picture is clear as mud for the time being.
