It was an unorthodox road that brought him there, but Brandon native Nolan Chastko wrapped up his WHL career in the fashion that every player dreams of doing: watching the clock tick down to his team winning a championship.
The 2005-born forward was a member of the Everett Silvertips as they won a championship in a five-game series victory over the Prince Albert Raiders. The last game of the series, in Prince Albert, the Silvertips pulled ahead in the third period and had plenty of time to anticipate the final moment when their victory would be official. When the moment came, it was everything they’d hoped for.
“All of us on the bench were kind of waiting for that clock to hit zero because we were up by four or five goals there and had kind of scored a bunch in the third, so we were getting pretty excited,” Chastko said. “At the end of the day, it isn’t over until the buzzer goes, so when that buzzer went it was a super special feeling, especially to experience it with all those guys. Everyone on the bench getting excited, going on the ice and throwing off your bucket and gloves, and throwing your stick, it was a really special moment.”
It was fitting that the Silvertips got to see the championship coming because at the start of the year, it seemed just about every WHL pundit had them as a favourite to, at the very least, emerge out of the Western Conference. As the season went on, they began to realize just how special of a group they had.
“At the start of the year, there wasn’t a lot of pressure but there were high expectations for our team to continue what we’d built off of the season before,” Chastko said. “We used those expectations as motivation. We wanted to be a really, really good team. At the start of the year, we had a bit of a rocky start, losing a couple games at the start of the year there but obviously at the start of a 68-game season those don’t end up being super, super important. We just kept building and building.”
Chastko’s own road to the WHL championship was perhaps not as predictable as that of his Everett squad. At 16 years old, he absolutely shredded the Manitoba U18 AAA ranks with the Brandon AAA Wheat Kings, posting 81 points in just 43 games. But with his hockey career taking him to the Virden Oil Capitals of the MJHL the following year, would a 16-year-old Chastko have believed he would one day be playing games on TSN and challenging for the Memorial Cup?
“I would’ve thought there was not a chance,” he said with a chuckle. “When I was playing in Virden at 17 and 18 there, I wasn’t really sure if I was ever going to get a shot at Major Junior. When I was 17 and 18 in Virden, my goal was just to make it to the Western League and there wasn’t anything else I wanted to accomplish after that, it was all a cherry on top after making it, so this season was unbelievably special and something I never would’ve expected.”
Another thing a younger Chastko might not have expected was just how far from home his WHL journey would eventually take him. Undrafted in the 2020 WHL Prospects Draft, Chastko played for his hometown AAA Wheat Kings, and then for the Oil Capitals, just up the Trans Canada Highway. When he moved up, however, he ended up playing his entire WHL career in Everett, more than 2000 kilometers from home.
“Virden is only 40 or 45 minutes down the road and I was never really away from home,” said Chastko. “That was a big change, for sure, being all the way over there and in a different country. It was difficult at the start, for sure, but I owe a lot to my billets for bringing me in and everyone on the team. The bond that we all had made it super easy to live away from home. It felt exactly like a second home.”
It was a good thing for Chastko to get used to adjustments on and off the ice. Moving up to the WHL from the MJHL, he cited the speed and hockey IQ of his competition as being the biggest change, and getting used to that change helped him with another big adjustment: moving from the WHL playoffs to the Memorial Cup.
“You get off an all-time high winning a WHL championship and then you go to a tournament where everyone is a champion themselves,” he said. “Everyone is even that way. There was definitely an adjustment when you go to that kind of tournament and you’ve been used to playing a best-of-seven series and all of a sudden it’s just one game. You get to the semis and the finals and it’s single elimination.”
The season didn’t end exactly the way Chastko or the Silvertips wanted, with a loss in the Memorial Cup final to the Kitchener Rangers. But a wild season that saw him put up career highs in every major category (and even play as a defenseman, despite being a natural forward) still ends with fond memories for him.
“When you look back at it, I’m definitely very fortunate to have been able to play in the very last game of the CHL season,” Chastko said. “It would’ve been unreal to win another championship with the group of guys that we have, but the one that we did get in the WHL was really, really special. It allows our group to be remembered forever in Silvertips history.”
Chastko added that he’ll be playing hockey next season, and taking finance courses, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
