It turns out, despite an early season schedule that was surprisingly scattered and heavy on home games, the Brandon Wheat Kings actually do pretty well with sudden bursts of games in a short span. Good thing, too. They’re about to get the most compressed part of their schedule yet.
The Wheat Kings played three games in four days from Wednesday to Saturday last week, all against East Division rivals, and won all three games. They outscored their opponents a combined 13-6 and surrendered only one goal in two of the three games, something that, prior to this stretch, they’d only done once all season when they blanked the Lethbridge Hurricanes back at the end of October. They did all of this without their leading scorer.
Yes, it was a good week.
The games against the Blades, Pats, and Warriors also marked the first three games of a 9-games-in-17-days stretch for the team, and it was important to stockpile some wins early in this difficult run. With a pair of home games this week, one each against Kelowna and Lethbridge, it’s important for the Wheat Kings to keep that streak going. Once they get into Alberta, the schedule is going to get even less forgiving and they’ll need to make sure they’re riding high going in and prepared to gut out some tough wins once they’re there.
Six games from now, the Wheat Kings will go into the Christmas break. The narrative surrounding the team going into that break is, as of now, fully in their control. Lately, that narrative has been an upward trend on almost every front.
- Probably the biggest upward trend for the Wheat Kings comes between the pipes. Jayden Kraus has put together back-to-back solid starts, and in both cases has probably been asked to do too much on the road. Stopping 21 of 22 shots he faced in the first period in Regina was an inspired bit of work and, as Marty Murray pointed out after the game, gave the team the chance they needed (and ultimately used) to get their high-octane offense rolling in the third. As for Filip Ruzicka, he was perhaps overshadowed by a sterling performance from Chase Wutzke in the win over Moose Jaw, but if your goaltender stops 24 of 25 shots on any given night then you are going to win the overwhelming majority of your games. Ruzicka is in the midst of a four-game run in which he’s stopped 122 of 128 shots he’s faced (a .953 save percentage, if you’re wondering) and he’s up to a .900 save percentage on the season. Improved defensive play has no doubt been a factor for the Wheat Kings in winning four of their last five, and that in tandem with improved goaltending has brought the Wheat Kings right back into the thick of the playoff race.
- I made a light-hearted crack on Twitter about Ruzicka being the runner up for goaltender of the week (no disrespect at all to Matthew Hutchison, whose first career shutout coming on the road to end a long losing streak for the Regina Pats was absolutely worthy of recognition and, as side note, was directly beneficial to the Wheat Kings as they nip at the Blades’ heels). I had a similar line about Chase Surkan being runner up for rookie of the week. Again, no disrespect at all to Boston Tait (who I can still remember ripping around on the ice with his billet brothers after Estevan Bruins practice back in the early days of my broadcasting career; am I getting old?). The Estevan native posted four points in four games and picked up his first WHL goal for good measure. But my goodness what a week by Chase Surkan, especially at the end. True, he picked up an assist on the insurance marker against Saskatoon on Wednesday night, but he saved his best for the weekend. He picked up a hat trick, including the game winner, in his hometown one night, then scored another game winner, this one literally last-minute, the next. One wonders if the league looked at Surkan’s performances and said something to the effect of, “Well, we can’t have the same guy winning every week!” because Surkan has already claimed that award more than once. Normally, if you get 20 goals out of a 16-year-old rookie, you’re thrilled. Heck, my second year in Prince Albert, Ryder Ritchie, then with the Raiders, won the Jim Piggott Memorial Trophy for rookie of the year with 20 goals. Surkan, who is up to 16 goals in just 20 games, might have that many goals by Christmas.
- On the subject of Ryder Ritchie, he’s one of a number of 2006-born WHLers who made the transition to the NCAA this offseason and one wonders how some of them are feeling about the results of that right now. Two years ago, when that group of WHL-trained 06s that included Ritchie, Berkly Catton, Roger McQueen, Ollie Josephson, and Cayden Lindstrom were tearing up the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, I looked at that group and saw them as potentially dominant in future for Canada at the World Juniors. Catton, of course, made the NHL early and it looks like injury will keep him out of the tournament. Ritchie and McQueen have started to settle in at the NCAA level, but neither of them are especially close to the point-per-game mark. They’re both having more success than Lindstrom, who has just three points in 11 games. Now I need to be very clear here because I’m not dumping on any of these players specifically or twisting any kind of knife, merely speculating. And I need to make it evident that players who transition to the NCAA go there because they’re trying to make a path to the NHL, not a path to the World Juniors. If these NCAA players end up having the kinds of careers their pedigree and draft position promise, nobody, not even media types like me, will really remember that they didn’t make the Canadian World Junior team in 2026. But I’m left to wonder: if Roger McQueen had returned to the Brandon Wheat Kings, a team that has scored goals almost at will all season long, and put up the kinds of numbers someone like Jaxon Jacobson has been putting up this season, is he on that Canadian World Junior roster? If Ritchie or Lindstrom returned to Medicine Hat, the second-highest scoring team in the league right now, and added their own contributions to that offense, would they, as former international stars for Canada, be in that conversation? What about Tomas Mrsic, who left Prince Albert for the NCAA after a 90-point season in 2024-25? If he had returned to a dominant Raiders squad this season, would he have played his way into contention? With a shorter roster list (more on that shortly) and long list of players making the NHL earlier than expected and getting a green light to return for the tournament, it’s almost impossible that all of these players would have been invited. And again, we’re not twisting knives here nor declaring mistakes at a moment long, long before each players’ development curve has finished its arc. But when that 06 group won gold medals at both the Hlinka Gretzky Cup and the World Under-18s, I had visions of them going globetrotting at the 2026 World Juniors, and it is a bit disappointing to know that will never happen now.
- More on the World Junior selection camp roster: last year, there was immediate controversy around some of the roster decisions and I take it as a good sign that there isn’t quite the same level of head-scratching going around this year, but in a country loaded to the brim with high-end hockey talent there are bound to be some “snubs” especially in a year with a smaller camp roster. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought Bryce Pickford was one and, Bryce, if you ever read this, just know that the fans in Medicine Hat have your back. As soon as I said Pickford should’ve made it, a host of Tigers’ fans found the tweet and were clearly in full agreement. So why should Pickford have gone? Well, he now has back-to-back 20 goal seasons as a defenseman, for a start. Yes, he has 20 goals already. Do some quick math and you’ll realize he’s on pace to be the first 40-goal scoring defenseman in the WHL since Paul Buczkowski in 1994-95 and might even have a shot at 50 goals. But there is much more to Pickford than goals. He’s a pain to play against, hits hard, and has two WHL championships under his belt. I’m hard pressed to name any defenseman on that roster he’d replace, but I’d like to have seen him at least get a look at camp. And if I can add one more, I’d add Kelowna Rockets captain Carson Wetsch. Wetsch was part of those 06 groups I mentioned earlier who had such success internationally, he’s over a point-per-game this season, had 30 goals last year, and is one of the hardest hitters in junior hockey. The Canadian World Junior teams I grew up with, the ones who rattled off five straight gold medals, always had guys like Wetsch, guys who could absolutely score but who also played that uniquely Canadian brand of hockey that so many international teams seemed so ill prepared for. Again, I struggle to think who he’d replace, but Wetsch is someone I’d have liked to see get a longer look.
- The first NCAA commitment of the season for the Wheat Kings goes to Max Lavoie, and he set his sights high. The 2006-born blueliner committed to Princeton over the weekend, a huge accomplishment for the young man to be able to continue his hockey career and education at an Ivy League School. It’s funny, I so often say that the truly nasty players on the ice have very different personalities off it and are often the nicest guys, but it’s often the case they’re among the most academically inclined too. Lavoie’s style, described to me more than once as “throwback” is heavy and ultra physical, but clearly it’s not mindless. And Princeton, oddly enough, has a history of exceptionally tough players graduating from their men’s hockey program including longtime NHL enforcers George Parros and Kevin Westgarth. Lavoie’s rise from the VIJHL to the MJHL to the WHL and now to the NCAA has been an incredible one in a short time. It couldn’t happen to a nicer kid.
- Last season, Carter Klippenstein had a game against Kelowna where he was absolutely dominant and had absolutely no luck on the scoresheet. He followed that up with a three-game goal scoring streak. Last game against Moose Jaw, and to a lesser extent the game before in Regina, reminded me of that Kelowna game for Klippenstein: all over the puck, all around the net, and often the most noticeable player on the ice, but not having the puck luck his play has earned. The beauty of Klippenstein’s game is he doesn’t need to burst the dam offensively in order to be great but it sure seems like that dam is getting awfully fragile under the pressure he’s put on it.
- They’re likely to be broken up once Jaxon Jacobson returns to the lineup and once some other healthy bodies return up front, but I was a really big fan of the line of Caleb Hadland, Brady Turko, and Jimmy Egan the last few games. Hadland’s style requires no translation whatsoever; he plays the kind of game that works anywhere in the lineup you want to put him. But Turko looks more confident with the puck every day and far more physical than last year (he’s sat a few guys down hard on the forecheck this season) and Egan, like Klippenstein, looks ready to burst a dam. He’s all over the puck right now and has steadily improved in the faceoff circle as well, going 7-for-12 against Moose Jaw and contributing to a dominant puck possession game by all four Wheat Kings’ lines.
- One final note on which to end one of the lengthier editions of this blog: there are 23 head coaches in the WHL. Only one guy has 100 goals and 100 wins with the same team. That guy is Marty Murray with the Brandon Wheat Kings, as he collected his 100th win with the team against Moose Jaw on Saturday night. A local product, a longtime hero for his hometown team, comes back home to coach them and collects his 100th win. It’s almost storybook. And the story is nowhere near finished. All I can say is, as both a player and a coach, the Wheat Kings have been lucky to have him. If you ask Marty himself, he’ll tell you he’s the lucky one. That’s how you know it’s been a good relationship.
There’s always a lot to talk about this time of year, and in that regard it’s great for scribes like myself. The Wheat Kings are going to give us endless material over the next week and a half, right up until the Christmas break. And once the break ends, they’re going to hit the ground running again. Part of the reason this time of year yields so much conversation is that the games just don’t stop coming. I didn’t even mention the annual teddy bear toss game coming up against Kelowna (the Memorial Cup hosts, no less) on Friday night.
There are almost more storylines than even a hockey nerd like me can keep up with. But it’s better to have too many than to have too few.
