If my time in junior hockey has taught me anything about opening weekend, it is that opening weekend is chaos.
Wheat Kings fans, after the last two seasons in particular, need little persuasion on that point but on the off chance you require more evidence for the already-bulging folder of it, consider that the Wheat Kings held 4-1 and 5-2 leads on the Saskatoon Blades on opening night, surrendered only one goal at even strength, and still had to hang on by the skin of their teeth to win 5-4. And then consider that not only was this not the most chaotic game of opening weekend, it wasn’t even the most chaotic game involving the Saskatoon Blades, who fell 7-6 in overtime to Moose Jaw the following night.
Chaotic it may be, but opening weekend still counts in the standings. And where the standings are concerned, the Wheat Kings got what they needed out of opening night. They picked up two points in the standings, denied any points to a divisional opponent with whom they may expect to be competing all season, and sent their hometown fans (of which there were over 3600 in attendance that night) home happy.
The Wheat Kings have their own reasons to be happy, beyond the obvious two points. They will not, unlike last season, have to wait until October for their first win. They picked up a win over a division rival and made good use of one of just three games before their longest road trip of the campaign, and a number of their young players shone offensively. The night featured three WHL firsts and a home-ice first for Levi Ellingsen. As ever, I must add that calling a first goal or point is a huge highlight of my job, one of many little joys of this profession.
And yet, as Marty Murray expressed to myself and Perry Bergson after the game, the team knows better than to be satisfied. Nearly surrendering a three-goal lead and having to white-knuckle it through a game they led 5-2 won’t sit well, and Marty pointed out there were still summer habits to be worked out of the team’s game.
At the very least, the team gets to examine those summer habits and dissect the footage from that game from the position of being 1-0. And there are, at this moment, nine teams looking for their first win that would trade places with them on that one if they could.
So the work continues. But the lessons learned from that game won’t have to cost them in the standings so long as they learn them quickly.
- The Wheat Kings and Blades were both missing their presumed starting goaltenders in last Friday’s game (just one aspect of the chaos that so often consumes the first few games of the season) but the Wheat Kings got all they needed and all they could reasonably have asked for out of Ryley Budd in his Brandon debut. Facing down his old team for the first time, and under siege in the third period in particular, Budd stopped 42 shots en route to his first win as a Wheat King in his first game. A team that surrenders 46 shots on opening night is never going to be happy about that, but the Wheat Kings can at least be happy with the way their always-upbeat young netminder responded. With Filip Ruzicka still away with the Minnesota Wild (he’s backed up the last two games and looks set to back up tonight against Dallas as well), the Wheat Kings may have to lean on Budd for a little longer yet, but if opening night is any indication that’s not a bad thing at all.
- Ilari Kapanen told me after his first-star four-point performance last week that he’d never had four points in a game before. I cannot promise it will happen again, but I can promise that everything about Kapanen’s game shows he can have other multi-point outings in his future. He made a quick, tape-to-tape breakout pass to start the play on the Wheat Kings’ first goal, and showed terrific patience on both of his own goals. His first, in particular, was a thing of beauty as he outwaited a sprawling shot blocker, faking him out by selling the one-timer, and and sent his shot perfectly through a screen to make it 3-1. Any notes from the first game for the Wheat Kings, good or bad, must be tempered with the usual “it’s only one game” caveat but Kapanen made as strong an impression in that one game as a defenseman reasonably can. He also finished plus-four with those four points, so Kapanen wasn’t purely offensively focused either.
- Given another game, Kapanen might have played himself into player of the week honours from the WHL but there was another defenseman who impressed last Friday in Brandon and who had another game to build on that performance, and that was Brayden Klimpke of the Saskatoon Blades. In addition to his beautiful solo effort in the first period against the Wheat Kings, and his pair of power play assists, he picked up two goals against Moose Jaw the following night. Klimpke impressed me last season with his skating, and in the way he used it to defend the rush as he was one of the few defenders league wide that the Wheat Kings’ higher-end skilled players never seemed to have much luck against. It looks like he’ll be building on his already impressive 47 points of one year ago.
- Speaking of the higher-end skilled guys for Brandon, if there was one fly in the offensive ointment last Friday it was that the line of Brady Turko, Jaxon Jacobson, and Joby Baumuller only produced a single assist. To be honest, I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Jacobson, Turko, and Baumuller are going to score. A lot. Probably about as much as any trio in the WHL in fact. That they didn’t score on opening night doesn’t matter all that much in the long run. Two notes in that line of thinking: firstly, I liked the assist they did get as Turko won a puck-battle with 6-foot-6 Hunter Laing to get the puck back to Josh McGregor at the left point before he sent it over to Kapanen for the eventual goal. Secondly, that the Wheat Kings picked up five goals without any from the top trio is a pretty vivid illustration of the many points made about their depth this season.
- That depth is actually deeper than the Wheat Kings showed on September 18, as neither Hudson Landmark nor Jimmy Egan were able to go for that game. And with both guys now upgraded to “day-to-day” status, Marty Murray once again finds himself with an enviable problem. If you want to get those guys into the lineup, who on earth comes out? Egan was reliable beyond his years last season, and the Wheat Kings feel he has more offense to add on to his responsible two-way play, and Landmark showed plenty of responsibility and offensive pop in his preseason appearances. Then too, Ahmad Fayad didn’t get into the lineup on opening night despite a great preseason and he’ll need to play a certain number of games as a 16-year-old. Frankly, based on his preseason performance, he’s got all the tools to earn those games and doesn’t need to be brought into the lineup solely for rules compliance. So what to do? In this way, an early season road trip will be ideal for the Wheat Kings because a condensed schedule means you’re likely to see just about everybody come into the lineup if they’re able to. A back-to-back this weekend is going to be a good early snapshot of this.
- I grew up in a time when the best NHL teams all had what I mentally refer to as a “ruin your day line”, guys who could play physically and be in their opponent’s faces but also possessed the skating ability and skill to go up against the other team’s top lines and, as mentioned above, ruin their day. As a young Colorado Avalanche fan, I remember watching guys like Ville Nieminen and Dan Hinote playing the “ruin your day” role. For the dominant Red Wings and Devils teams of the early 2000s, it was guys like Kris Draper or John Madden. As I got older, the Anaheim Ducks put out what I consider to be the best example of that type of line in the last 30 years, the line of Sammy Pahlsson, Rob Niedermeyer, and Travis Moen. And while I fully expect the Wheat Kings to try different combinations in order to get the best possible mixtures out of all that depth, I see so much potential for the line of Levi Ellingsen, Cole Hunter, and Gunnar Gleasman to fill that role for the Wheat Kings. Any ruin your day line needs a speedy, gritty, responsible centre with a little touch around the net and such a one is Hunter. And of course, having some heavy hitters out there (and players who don’t mind, shall we say, keeping the other team honest when their agitating inevitably leads to scrums) is important for a line like that as well. Ellingsen represents something of a wildcard with this trio because he’s got the shot, speed, and vision to ultimately play much more offensive minutes as his career progresses. But young as he is, having him play against other team’s bottom sixes gives him a chance to build up to those minutes at a more natural pace.
Perhaps because it’s early in the season and excitement in general is still up it still feels like there was plenty to talk about here in spite of the Wheat Kings playing just the one game this past week. But I admit there was something odd about a Saturday on which no hockey was taking place for the Wheat Kings. I’m looking forward to having even more to talk about soon enough.
After all, a double-header of divisional opponents is on deck before the Wheat Kings head west, becoming the first team from the East Division to sample the teams from B.C. for a new campaign. And it’s still early enough that the chaos of opening night isn’t likely to have subsided much.
Bring that chaos on, says I.
