What word the Brandon Wheat Kings would use to describe the 2025-26 season would vary depending on which Wheat King you asked, but one thing is constant: whether at the start of the season or the start of the playoffs, none of them expected to be reflecting on the end of the season this soon.
After a four-game series loss at the hands of the Calgary Hitmen, however, that’s just where the Wheat Kings find themselves. The team that started so poorly, went on an unbelievable run to overcome that start, overcame an almost unreasonable amount of late-season adversity, and ultimately fell short in the first round, has now dispersed, and the team’s staff is left to take the lessons from this season into the next.
“We felt we had a chance to get through the first round at the very least and we ended up getting swept in four,” said Wheat Kings head coach and GM Marty Murray. “When you look at getting swept in four, it seems like a beating, but it was four one-goal games. The two overtimes ones in Calgary really stung. There were some illnesses, kind of whatever could go wrong went wrong, but the playoffs were disappointing. We scored by committee, goal scoring wasn’t an issue all year, but this was one of those times in a four-stretch when it went cold.”
Scoring goals wasn’t a problem for the Wheat Kings right out of the gate, but they started off on a losing streak nonetheless. The team surrendered 15 goals in two games on opening weekend, and that spun its way into an 0-4-1 start, the worst for the franchise in 20 years.
“Our confidence was kind of low coming out of that opening weekend and all of a sudden we’re faced with Prince Albert, Edmonton, and Saskatoon,” Murray said. “You can see how it could spiral a little bit. I really thought we could have done some damage in the first six weeks of the season, but it was a battle to keep our heads above water and get back to .500 through those first 15 games.”
But by the end of December, that season opening cold streak felt like a thing of the very distant past. The Wheat Kings put together their finest December of the internet era, rattling off 11 wins in 12 games, falling only on the second half of a back-to-back with travel against the Medicine Hat Tigers and beating teams from two conferences and three divisions in their best month of the campaign.
“That’s a difficult time of the year, coming up on Christmas,” said Murray. “There are lots of distractions and everyone is excited to get home, so credit to the guys for grinding it out and having a really strong December. For me, that was the point of the season that allowed us to get up out of the lower half of the conference and fight for that third through sixth spot. We made some nice strides and we had contributions from everybody.”
December was the team’s best month statistically, but it may not have been their most impressive. With injuries frequently limiting them to 11 forwards (and at least one of those was usually an affiliate player) the Wheat Kings still picked up seven wins in ten games in the month of February.
“It seems like the last couple of years, as soon as the January 10 trade deadline strikes the injury bug hits us, and that was the case again this year,” said Murray. “It’s a long, grueling season in the Western Hockey League and at some point you’re going to get hit with the injury bug. You hope that it comes in small doses where it’s not affecting six or seven guys, but that’s what we dealt with. Some guys really rose to the occasion and elevated their game. In the middle of that, we faced a run of really tough opponents and we finished well over .500 in that grouping of games.”
That string of injuries hit the Wheat Kings at their most critical positions, dog-piling on a series of roster concerns dating back to the summer. At the end of July, the Wheat Kings boasted centre depth of Roger McQueen, Carter Klippenstein, Jaxon Jacobson, and Matteo Michels. By the start of the season, Jacobson and Klippenstein still made for a formidable one-two punch up the middle, but by the end of January, only Jacobson remained active.
“Carter was a guy that wanted to play centre, so it was a good opportunity for him, and then Nick (Johnson) was thrown right into the fire,” Murray said. “Your centre ice has to be so good in order to have a chance to win. Our guys found a way to get through it for the most part and kind of put a band-aid on a position that, on paper, we got hit pretty hard.”
And all that adds up to a very mixed bag of a 2025-26 season. On the one hand, numerous players took gigantic leaps forward, and most of those players are eligible to return next season. Youngsters on the Wheat Kings emerged as top-tier scorers, reliable defensemen, and stalwart goaltenders, often by being put in high-pressure situations far earlier than the team had planned.
“You’re not happy unless you have success in the playoffs but I think we did take some steps,” Murray said. “Jaxon Jacobson, a young 17-year-old gets handed the reins as a first-line centre, which at any age is not easy in this league, and to have him come up with 85 points, to see guys like Joby (Baumuller) take huge steps and hit 40 goals, another thing that’s not easy to do in this league, some guys were as advertised like Luke Mistelbacher. It’s fun to see guys come along like (Prabh) Bhathal, (Gio) Pantelas, (Nigel) Boehm, (Filip) Ruzicka, where you don’t know how things are going to play out but those guys rose to the occasion.”
On the other hand, there’s no erasing the disappointment of a four-game first-round exit, even one in which, for the second year in a row, the Wheat Kings were losing close games. In the first round the previous two seasons, the Wheat Kings went up against opponents in Moose Jaw and Lethbridge who had added multiple NHL prospects via trade and properly loaded up. This time, the Wheat Kings went in against a less loaded opponent, and one that finished just three points ahead of them (with fewer wins) in the standings. Yet the result was still an early exit.
“Calgary is a really good team and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but to not get out of the first round, you’re disappointed with it,” said Murray. “As a staff, as an organization, it’s one of those things where it stings to think about still. Hopefully everybody is a little hungrier coming into next season.”
And what exactly will the team look like next season? That question has never been harder to answer than it is right now. By coincidence, this interview fell on the day the NCAA’s transfer portal opened and more than 200 young athletes applied to switch schools. What that and other NCAA departures will do to the landscape remains to be seen, though Murray noted there were no surprises at the exit meetings and every player moving on was one who they had known was going to do so.
“It’s a great time to be a player, first and foremost, you have the opportunity to play in the NCAA and it’s a great opportunity for players,” he said. “But I think too, a lot of guys have to look at themselves in the mirror and ask if now is the time. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. We’ve seen guys that left our league and have had some success, and we’ve seen a number of guys who left and now are in the portal today. Those are some really tough questions that guys have to present to themselves, and we have to be confident in what we can offer them to improve their development.”
The result of all this NCAA-related roster shuffling is a league that looks to be trending younger. That won’t bother the Wheat Kings too badly, however; their 2008 birth year of players has always been one they’ve felt confident in, and five players from their 2023 draft were on the roster this past season, complimenting U.S. Priority Selection Jimmy Egan and Import Draft pick Ruzicka in net.
“It’s knocking on the door, those guys are entering their 18-year-old year,” said Murray. “That’s an age group that is probably our strongest. It used to be the 2006 age group, and for a variety of reasons that never came to fruition, and now the 2008 group with Jacobson, Pantelas, Boehm, (Cameron) Allard, you can throw Ruzicka in now, Egan, Boyce, we’re hoping to get the Finnish defenseman we drafted (Samu Alalauri), that’s a really strong age group and it’ll give us a really good start.”
Now Murray enters the paradoxically named offseason, a season that isn’t really “off” at all for any GM. It won’t offer a lot of rest for many of the players either. Jacobson and Pantelas have already been named to Canada’s camp for the World Under-18s, there’s an excellent chance more Wheat Kings will be named to camps for the Hlinka Gretzky Cup and World Under-17s, and several Wheat Kings have been consistently named on NHL Central Scouting’s lists (the next of which is due out this week) and have a high chance of hearing their names called at the NHL draft in June.
“We feel like we have as many good young prospects as anybody in the league, and we’ll see throughout the summer how they stack up. It gives them an edge where they can start the year at a high level, but it’s also important to get a little rest and take some time off, recharge the batteries and be ready to go again at the end of August.”
