I once had an NHL scout tell me that the one thing he didn’t miss about junior hockey was the silence after a loss. When a team wins a game on the road, the bus is a roaring cauldron of laughing, joking, teasing, yelling, and high spirits. When a team loses, it’s eerily quiet by comparison. And when a team loses a really frustrating or demoralizing game, the silence settles over everything from the post game meal to the bus ride home.
The Wheat Kings experienced just such a loss against the Vancouver Giants. They won the special teams battle (going 1-for-4 on the power play and 2-for-2 on the penalty kill). They outshot the Giants 32-20 overall, and 11-3 in the pivotal third period. Nicholas Johnson alone had eight shots on goal. Yet the team still lost. The silence all through the team dinner and postgame drive to Kelowna was deafening.
Contrast that with the reaction after the Wheat Kings 7-3 pounding of the Kelowna Rockets. It was like they let out all that frustration from the Vancouver game in a torrent of offensive vitriol, piling up 55 shots on goal in a game that, as lopsided as the score was, was still not as close as the score indicated. The bus ride to Kamloops was appropriately upbeat.
Ah, the ups and downs of junior hockey. There’s nothing quite like it in sports. Even shift to shift, the best teams can look very different. The least consistent teams can be downright unrecognizable.
- You can’t call the win over the Rockets a perfect game by any means, but a statistical breakdown makes the Wheat Kings look pretty darn good. They went 3-for-5 on the power play (3-for-3 until they put out some unconventional units for the final two cracks at the man advantage) and 2-for-2 on the penalty kill, the second game in a row they’ve limited power plays against and killed the few they gave up. Perhaps most eye-popping was the 55 shots on goal. That marks a new season high and the really impressive thing was they still had plenty of shots blocked and even passed up a few chances to snap pucks on goal.
- Probably no one was happier with the win over Kelowna than Nolan Flamand, who got a little emotional when asked to recall his time with the Rockets. Flamand has turned out to be one of the best interviews in the league, candid and thoughtful, but as much us media types appreciate it, that’s not really the selling point of his game right now. He’s smart as a whip, handy with the puck, and seems always to be in the right place. He now leads the team in scoring with 44 points in 40 games, matching his career-high in 27 fewer games. To think at the start of the season he was in a dogfight to even remain with the team as a 20-year-old. He played in such a way as to demand that third 20-year-old spot, and rather than rest easy once he had it, he’s kept on trucking. He puts up points in fits and spurts, and can be a bit streaky, but when he’s on (as he has been for quite some time now) he’s perhaps the best forward the Wheat Kings have.
- Nolan Flamand and Luke Shipley are having career-defining seasons with the team right now, almost best-case-scenario seasons, and I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before an NCAA division 1 program scoops them up (and yes, it is still a little strange to write that). Shipley outdid his career high with a three-point night against the Rockets, and is up to 12 goals on the season. Can he be the first Wheat Kings defenseman since Chad Nychuk to score 20 goals? Nychuk had 21 in 2021-22 and while Shipley is not technically “on pace” to catch him, that pace has changed dramatically thanks to his recent play. Shipley has three career two-goal games. They’ve all come in the last month and a half.
- I asked Marty Murray if, just as a coach could be frustrated when a team plays the right way and doesn’t win, a player might get more frustrated by a game where he plays well and doesn’t score than by a game where he doesn’t play especially well. Marty guessed fairly quickly I was not-so-subtly hinting at Nicholas Johnson, who had to be shaking his head after amassing eight shots against the Giants but not scoring. The next night, Carter Klippenstein did him one better, firing nine shots on goal and not getting rewarded for it with even a point. If the dam bursts for either of them, that would really round out the offense. You get the sense it’s about one good bounce away from turning into a tidal wave of goals for Johnson in particular. He ended up with an assist against the Rockets, but perhaps most vexing of all for him was that he was in the right place twice (in front of the net with his stick down) only to watch his teammates have their shots go in without touching him. The goals can’t be far away now.
- Of the two players who the Wheat Kings acquired in trade, I got the sense right away Merrek Arpin would have the easier adjustment. His style of play, simple yet effective, requires no translation whatsoever. I suspect you could put him on any team in the league and he’d fit right in quickly. We’re wishing him and his family all the best in dealing with a personal matter that saw him leave the team in Victoria. The other pickup in the deal, Jordan Gavin, was naturally going to take longer to fit in. An offensive player like that needs time to develop chemistry with new linemates, learn a new power play system, and find a combination of players that works with him. A two-assist game agains the Rockets (one of which came on the power play) is hopefully a sign he’s beginning to get comfortable in Black and Gold. You could hardly blame him for taking time to adjust; he’s barely played in Brandon since being traded to Brandon!
- If you had to pick a silver lining from the Wheat Kings’ losses on this trip, it would surely be the emergence of Nigel Boehm and Gio Pantelas on the back end. While neither play has amassed a lot of points on the road, each guy has had highly impressive moments both with and without the puck. Both guys possess the size, strength, and skating ability to close down the wall and stop the rush, and to break pucks out of their zone efficiently. It’s hard not to smile when you imagine what they’ll be doing in their veteran years. Gio is already about 200 pounds. As someone who’s a bit of a gym rat and has an enthusiastic interest in both bodybuilding and powerlifting, I recognize the signs of a young man with the ability to pack on a lot of muscle and move a lot of weight. Most of his weight right now is in his lower body, but you can see signs in his physique of the ability to add ten pounds of muscle to his upper body alone as he gets older. The trick is to add it without sacrificing speed. If he does so gradually, Gio could play at 215 pounds and never lose a step. And imagining him hitting the way he does now but 15 solid pounds heavier… yikes.
- Both special teams for the Wheat Kings have been steadily improving (they’ve cleanly won the special teams battle on both sides in four of the five games on this trip) but the rise of the penalty kill has been something to watch. Thinking of all the top-notch penalty killers in the league, all the NHL-calibre players like Brayden Yager and Tanner Howe who see a ton of PK time, it’s impressive that a determined collection of relative underdogs have steered the Wheat Kings to the best penalty kill in the league at 82.7 percent. Other teams might have more shorthanded pop, but no one is getting it done the way the core group of PK guys is for Brandon. They’ve allowed just one power play goal on the whole road trip, and the teams they’ve blanked include loaded Everett and Calgary squads. They say your best penalty killer has to be your goaltender, and Carson Bjarnason and Ethan Eskit have held up their end of the bargain, but in a lot of cases, the Wheat Kings are not giving up shots on the PK at all, or drawing penalties of their own to cut their opponents’ power play short. They’re not racking up shorthanded goals like they did last year but that hardly seems to matter.
The path forward for the Wheat Kings has been very clear for some time now. Scores involving Central Division teams are only mildly interesting at this point. The goal for the Wheat Kings remains to win the East Division. Keeping pace with the Prince Albert Raiders through this road trip (before a run of more familiar opponents begins) will be a massive step in that direction.
The Wheat Kings used a game in hand poorly when they lost to the Giants. They used another one wisely in their win over the Rockets. Another win over the Blazers would put them right back in the thick of the race for top spot in the division. A loss, while by no means catastrophic, would suddenly give the divisional race a much gloomier outlook until they could collect another win. The Raiders and Blades are done with their western road swing. Now it’s up to the Wheat Kings not to fall too far behind because of theirs.
