And so everyone’s favourite time of year in the hockey world begins.
For the teams fighting it out at the bottom of the playoff picture, some of whom often don’t clinch until the last possible moment, the playoffs represent a brief but still potent sigh of relief as one of the goals they’ve worked toward is achieved. None of them are happy just to be there, of course, and many of them have been in playoff mode for weeks already (Marc Habscheid of the Red Deer Rebels told me his squad’s playoffs had begun with 19 games remaining in the season) but getting in means they’ve arrived at the end of one push if only to begin another.
For other teams, teams who have known for weeks if not months that they would be in the postseason and had reason to believe they would be all along, this is the time of year they’ve been looking forward to since, in many cases, they were eliminated the previous spring.
Was this a successful season for the Brandon Wheat Kings? You can certainly see some obvious evidence that it was. Most obvious of all, this was the first 40-win season for Brandon since 2017-18 (though they would certainly have hit it in 2020-21 if not for COVID). They scored more goals than they’ve scored since 2017-18 as well, and won more road games than they have since the 2015-16 championship season. And they had two 40-goal-scorers, the first time they’ve had two (for that matter, the first time they’ve had one) since 2018-19. Several young players (and some older ones too) leapt forward, Wheat Kings are all over NHL Central Scouting’s list and clearly on NHL radars, the list of little wins within the season could go on and on.
But only the playoffs can really answer the question of a successful season, for this is the time of year in which success becomes objectively measured and absolute, and in which it is the only real driver. No one will remember outside of a team’s own fanbase (and many times not even there) how “close” a losing team was. Media types like me might remember how many posts they hit or how badly they outshot their opponent, but at the end of the day, you just have to win.
The simplicity of things makes playoff hockey all the more fun; standings watching is a thing of the past for the next two months and a win trumps and forgives all. And the players play like it. Playoff intensity is its own breed, and perhaps unique to hockey.
Never mind Christmas, if you work in hockey, this is the most wonderful time of the year.
- The first round of the playoffs will see the seventh postseason meeting since 2004-05 between the Wheat Kings and Hitmen in a matchup that is as close on paper as the two cities are geographically distant (just over 11 hours of travel separate the two). The Wheat Kings finished with 40 wins to the Hitmen’s 38 but Calgary had nine overtime or shootout losses to push themselves three points ahead of Brandon in the overall standings. The Wheat Kings finished with a goal differential of +28, the Hitmen +27. The two teams each won two games in the season series, with the road team winning all four times, and each team both scoring and surrendering the same number of goals (14). One expects 4-versus-5 matchups in the standings to be close, but this matchup is, on paper, air tight.
- If Calgary has any immediately clear advantage in an otherwise close series, it would come from their power play. Not only is it the second best power play in the league at 31.7 percent, it’s been especially efficient against the Wheat Kings. In fact, in the last meeting between the two teams, it was by far the biggest thorn in the Wheat Kings’ side. Brandon produced five even strength goals (and an empty netter) to the Hitmen’s one, but Calgary still hung around that game by virtue of their three power play goals. The Hitmen’s penalty kill is no slouch either (ranked sixth in the league) but sometimes the best way to keep a knife sharp is not to use it; the Hitmen are the least penalized team in the league. One thing veteran writer Perry Bergson of the Brandon Sun noticed is you don’t see the Hitmen getting up to much mischief after the whistle. They’re a disciplined group. Will the adrenaline and physicality of playoff hockey change that? Whether it does or not, the Wheat Kings are clearly best served by staying out of the box.
- So what advantages do the Wheat Kings have? Well, first of all, two 40-goal-scorers who often play on two different lines gives them a trump card on all but two teams (Medicine Hat and Kamloops) and having five twenty goal scorers isn’t a bad trump card to play either. Thanks to Luke Mistelbacher and Joby Baumuller, the Wheat Kings have the edge in high-end goal scoring in this series. When you can spend more than half the game with a top-eight goalscorer in the league on the ice, you’re going to be able to outscore a lot of opponents. Both Joby and Luke will get a lot of extra attention in this series as is the way in the playoffs, but if Calgary has a dedicated shutdown line or pair, they’re only going to be able to be lined up against one of them regularly. The quick-strike snipers’ ability was something the Wheat Kings were on the wrong end of their last two playoff series (oddly enough, Brayden Yager was a major factor in both those instances) but now the highest-end goalscorer’s touch is on their side.
- It’s actually the Wheat Kings’ third leading goal scorer, however, who’s proved the most dangerous in the season series. Jaxon Jacobson finished with four goals in four games against Calgary, the most of any skater in the season series, and saved his best work for the back half of the series with four points in Brandon on February 6 and three more in Calgary on March 11. Like Mistelbacher and Baumuller, expect Jaxon to get a lot of extra attention from the Hitmen, but he’s been dealing with that his entire career even back in his AAA days and it hasn’t slowed him down yet. And something people tend to forget with Jaxon: he’ll give as good as he gets. He throws some nasty reverse hits and has a pesky streak to him, and he has not only playoff experience with the Wheat Kings but TELUS Cup experience in AAA.
- One other advantage the Wheat Kings may have that we haven’t spoken about much since the start of the season but which to me comes even more to the forefront in playoffs is they have a physically imposing blueline. On any given night, depending on who starts and sits, the average height of that Wheat Kings’ back end is about 6-foot-3. And some of those guys (Nigel Boehm and Max Lavoie leap to mind) play like they’re 6-foot-8. Playoff hockey is usually a time for the heavy hitters on the blueline to shine, and its often a time where players unveil the full extent of their mean streak. We know what that can look like for Gio Pantelas, who not only has the skating and strength for explosive hits, but who got a crash course in playoff hockey last year, regularly playing against the best the Lethbridge Hurricanes could throw against the Wheat Kings and handling himself well.
- I confess I was openly rooting for chaos at the bottom of the WHL playoff picture. I have not yet seen a play-in game in my time covering the league (the most recent was in the 2018-19 season) but the thought of a winner-take all game, a game seven before the playoffs even begin, holds great dramatic appeal for me. At one point, it looked like we might have one in each conference (and a single point gained by Moose Jaw and two by Victoria would’ve given us exactly that). Alas we got neither of the hoped for play-in games but it was refreshing to see the WHL announce well ahead of time that they wouldn’t let tiebreakers come down to pure minutia for the final playoff spot. It leant an added air of excitement to the final push for the postseason.
- The wider hockey world has started to pick up on the difficult final third of the season endured by the Tri-City Americans (I’m seeing a lot of social media posts about it) and oddly enough, it may have been the Wheat Kings that served as one of the catalysts for their slide. At the time the Wheat Kings saw them, Tri-City was not only right in the thick of the playoff race but comfortably so; they held the second-best record of any team the Wheat Kings’ saw on that trip through the U.S. at the end of January. The Wheat Kings beat the Americans 7-1 on January 30 in what, given both the opponent and how far into the road trip they were, would surely rank among their most impressive victories of the season; this was the same Tri-City team that, under similar circumstances, had handed the Prince Albert Raiders their first regulation loss of the season. But after that loss to Brandon, Tri-City went 2-18-2 and missed the playoffs entirely. I don’t see the Americans nearly often enough to speculate on what exactly happened to steer them down the difficult road they walked from February on, and the Wheat Kings’ win prior to their descent in the standings may well have been pure coincidence. But it was a shock to the system to look at the standings a week ago and see what a difference a month and a half had made (for the opposite effect, see the Spokane Chiefs, who went 13-7-1 after beating the Wheat Kings on January 31 and went from ninth in the West to sixth as a result).
- One way or another, there will be plenty of Wheat Kings’ prospects represented at the TELUS Cup Qualifiers in Regina. Ethan Young and Logan Dosenberger of the Regina Pat Canadians are up 2-0 in their series against Carson Park and the Moose Jaw Warriors (with both wins coming in overtime) and Mason Chubey and the Winnipeg Bruins hold a 2-0 lead on Easten Turko and Urijah Moosetail of the Brandon AAA Wheat Kings in their league final. Incidentally, if one Wheat Kings’ prospect has really snuck under the radar while having an excellent season, it’s been Chubey. With 20 goals and 48 points in 38 regular season games, and 10 points in eight playoff games, the former 8th round pick is coming into his own in his first full season of U18 AAA. Add him to the list of guys from the 2009 birth year in tight competition among Wheat Kings’ prospects.
As I write this, the Wheat Kings are wrapping up a practice in Virden before starting the journey to Calgary for games one and two. It will be a two-three-two format for games this series which means, if there is a game five, Virden will play host to three playoff games this time around.
Last year, fans in Virden showed up in a big way for the Wheat Kings and, in a do-or-die game four, the Wheat Kings gave them plenty to cheer about. Hopefully they’ve got more games like that in them, because this is the time of year by which you really measure success.
