Every WHL team wants players to compete when training camp begins so they’ll go into the season as ready as possible to jump in at a high pace. The Brandon Wheat Kings went a long way toward upping their internal competition at the CHL Import Draft.
The Wheat Kings selected 2008-born defenseman Samu Alalauri from Finland, 2006-born defenseman Adam Hlinsky from Czechia, and Czech 2008-born goaltender Filip Ruzicka in the draft. The selections will, the team hopes, fuel both competition and success now and in future.
“You go into the draft with a list of players and you build relationships with their agents, but you never know what’s going to happen unless you’re in the top end of the draft,” said Director of Hockey Operations Chris Moulton. “When you’re picking in the mid-40s, 90s, and 100s, you’ve got to watch the players fall and hope you get the right guy. We got three players that we had highly ranks, players we’d discussed, and we were happy when we walked away.”
According to Moulton, the first of these picks, Alalauri, is a pick for the future not only because he’s a 2008-born player but because he may not join the team this season (though Moulton did not close the door on this either). The team picked him this season to secure his rights for a more probable arrival in 2026-27.
“He’s definitely an NHL prospect in his age group, very highly regarded at home,” Moulton said. “We took, I wouldn’t say it’s a risky pick, we just made a pick for the future. If it lands this year, great, if not, we’ll welcome him next year… He has a high hockey IQ and a high set of skills. We would anticipate him coming in next year and being an impact guy early, but we think he has huge upside to be a professional type of defenseman.”
Hlinsky, meanwhile, is very much a pick for the present. The left-handed defenseman is a veteran of international hockey, including serving as captain of Czechia’s U18 team in 2024, and he may very well end up on their radar for the World Juniors this Christmas.
“We want him to make an immediate impact and we think he has the ability to step in right away,” said Moulton. “It’s not that we don’t think he will develop, but we’re not drafting him for the development. We think he’s an instant impact guy. He speaks very good English, has played internationally a lot, and always plays a leadership role on every single team he plays on. This was a guy we selected to come in and make an immediate impact.”
While he is Czech by birth, Hlinsky has spent the past two seasons playing in Sweden, mostly in the J20 circuit (roughly their equivalent to the WHL). Players are frequently drafted to the NHL from those ranks, and his experience there should help Hlinsky hit the ground running in Brandon.
“The Swedish and the Finnish junior leagues over there are probably the most comparable to the Canadian Hockey League,” said Moulton. “It’s just the way they play, there are similarities. I actually thought there was a benefit to him playing over there. I think he played at a higher calibre.”
In goal, size is often king in the modern professional game. Ruzicka has that in spades, standing 6-foot-7. He also put up exceptional numbers in the Czech U17 circuit last season, including a .943 save percentage and a 1.80 GAA.
“It’s no secret that at the NHL level, guys like big goaltenders,” Moulton said. “The one thing about Filip is you just can’t be big, you’ve got to be a good goaltender and show some athleticism and quickness. This kid is on the upward swing from what I saw. We have Ethan Eskit returning, Dylan McFadyen has played games for us, we have a goaltender we traded for named Hudson Perry who played some games for the Edmonton Oil Kings, we’ve got Urijah Moosetail. We’ve got guys who want to come in and push. We thought it was really important to have as much competition as possible. We need two good goaltenders to play and push each other this year, a 1A and 1B situation. We want to make sure that we can get the second guy behind Ethan who is the right guy to create competition.”
Key to that competition is the players arriving at camp this fall, and Moulton said the intention is for both Hlinsky and Ruzicka to be there. He also said creating competition at all positions is part of the reason the team didn’t select any forwards in this import draft.
“We’ve got an abundance of depth up front so it wasn’t an area we needed to fill unless we got a rockstar type of player,” Moulton said. “At the time, we needed some help this year for sure on the back end, and another area we wanted to create some competition within our group was in goal.”
With all that in mind, Moulton said the team expects to have four full teams at camp, and a much older group than they’ve had in years past. Late August and early September are going to see some faster paced and more intense hockey than fans might be used to at camp.
“I’ve been around the league for a while and sometimes teams have the depth and sometimes they don’t, and the ones that don’t have to try to acquire assets through trade,” Moulton said. “We’re not in that position right now. We have, I would say, five junior calibre forwards coming in that didn’t play in the league last year that are coming to compete. We had some real quality 2009-born players we drafted last year too, and you add it all together and it’s going to make our team better.”
Moulton added one final teaser for fans about what to expect come the fall: “I would say in all my years in Brandon, this will be by far the most competitive camp.”
