Big trade this morning. Vancouver sends overage forward Tim Kraus and import defenceman Juraj Valach to Regina for a pair of 19 year olds, forward Mike Reich and defenceman Craig Schira. Adding Kraus and Valach means the Pats now have three imports again, but I assume they are getting around that problem by putting Kaspars Saulietis on the long-term injured list. When Saulietis is ready to play again and comes off that list (after Christmas probably?) they will have to make some more moves. Either that or they could just release Rudolf Cerveny since he hasn't been good enough to dress for either of their first two games.
The Giants now have room for both another overager and another import. Rumour has it that Mario Bliznak may be sent back to them from the NHL's Canucks, which would fill both slots. Nothing is official there though.
UPDATE: two more players assigned back to the WHL from the Minnesota Wild. Everett gets back Ondrej Fiala (another overage import, they seem to be in the news a bit today), while Saskatoon gets back Colton Gillies.
Fiala's return just further complicates the Everett overage situation, which now sits at six (Fiala, Campos, Crowley, Gendur, Reekie, and Sonne). One way or another, three of those guys are going to be with another team or in another league by two weeks from today. Same goes for the import situation there, as they now have three - Fiala, Karamnov, and Vartovnik. By October 11, one of them needs to be somewhere else. Seems obvious that trading Fiala is a good start to solving both problems, but it's always a challenge to find homes for these overage Euros.
UPDATE #2: another trade, this one a minor one which sees the Cougars pick up 19 year old goalie Tommy Tartaglione from the Oil Kings for a 6th round pick. The move gives the Cougars three goalies now, and on the surface this doesn't look like good news for rookie backup Joel Danyluk. Which is kind of too bad since Danlyuk stopped 27 of 28 shots in 27 minutes of relief work against the Chiefs last weekend, for a very respectable 2.20 GAA and .964 save%. Now, that's only one game but you'd hope he would get a few more games yet to prove whether he can continue that rate of play.
The Blades pared their roster by one player yesterday, assigning 16 year old defenceman Mitch Berg to midget.
Blades G.M. Lorne Molleken knows he traded the wrong Crowley.
This explains it: Jason Reese wanted to come back to the western conference and the trade to the Americans fulfills that.
The Bruins' Jadon Potter has a bit of Cliff Ronning in him? G.M. Darrell May thinks so.
Story on the Hitmen's grinder-turned-aspiring-sniper Carson McMillan. Also at the bottom of the article is the suggestion that the Keegan Dansereau situation could be resolved by the time the Hitmen play in Brandon tomorrow night. Perhaps the team bus is stopping and picking him up on the way there, that would certainly resolve things.
Political correctness gone too far: the OHL has suspended a player for five games for calling an opponent a "no-name Euro". The OHL apparently considers the word "Euro" to be derogatory to Europeans. Never mind that the freakin' currency many countries there use is called that, it's a bad word apparently. Ridiculous.....it's OK in the OHL's eyes to call him a #&$% @%&#$*@^$ ^&*@%er whose $%^@#! #&*($%@!* is a #^$&@* $^*&^!, but don't you dare call him a "Euro".
Don't get me wrong, there are truly derogatory and offensive words that should not be used and players should be held accountable for using them. "Euro" is not one of them, however.
Not too much news today, so I thought I would take a look at something that has been in the back of my head for a few weeks......the # of 16 year olds in the league this year. For some reason I thought there were a lot less of them this year than last, but looking at the numbers, it's pretty much the same. There are currently 50 1991-born players on WHL rosters:
Brandon: Scott Glennie, Brayden Schenn, Brody Melnychuk
Calgary: Chase Schaber, Matt MacKenzie
Chilliwack: Ryan Howse
Edmonton: none
Everett: Jeff Regier
Kamloops: Jimmy Bubnick, James Priestner
Kelowna: Jesse Paradis, Tyson Barrie, Collin Bowman, Kyle Verdino
Kootenay: Joe Antilla, Brayden McNabb, Nathan Lieuwen
Lethbridge: Carter Ashton, Cam Braes, Brennan Yadlowski
Medicine Hat: Linden Vey, Cody Carlson, Matthew Konan
Moose Jaw: Justin Maylan, Kevin Smith
Portland: Riley Boychuk, Brett Ponich
Prince Albert: Brandon Herrod, Ryan Button
Prince George: Ryan Kowalski, Art Bidlevskii
Red Deer: Landon Ferraro
Regina: Garrett Mitchell, Alex Pym
Saskatoon: Curtis Hamilton, Stefan Elliott
Seattle: Josh Lazowski, Brenden Silvester, Charles Wells, Steve Chaffin
Spokane: Jared Cowen
Swift Current: Cody Eakin, Brad Hoban, Joel Rogers
Tri-City: Jason Gardiner, Adam Hughesman, Mason Wilgosh, Lane Werbowski
Vancouver: James Henry, Evander Kane, Neil Manning
Last year there were 51 1990-borns who spent the full season in the WHL. Now, the 50 number for this year will likely shrink a bit more as most teams have a couple cuts to make yet and some of these 16 year olds will likely be amongst the casualties of those cuts. But even so, it's probably going to be pretty close to last year's numbers.
2 comments:
Here's what I wrote to the Guelph newspaper:
How can you allow bad words that deserve a 5 game suspension to be printed in your newspaper? You printed the "E" word 3 separate times... Per OHL guidelines please suspender your writer, a Mr. or Ms. M. Staff 15 days... There are other uses of the "E" word in today's paper but I think 1 suspension a day is sufficent to protect your Canadian readers. As an American reader, I find this very, very amusing, to put it mildly... Wonder what Don Cherry would have to say on the subject?
I am curious about the relationship of 16 year old's still on rosters to their draft position all of 2 years ago. From my count - only a casual one - at least a third of those selected in the first three rounds are gone while a relatively strong representation of those taken much later still exists. I realize that this can be over analyzed in terms of team needs and philosophies as opposed to talent or potential but it is always interesting. While scouting services are busy trumpeting their success rate at predicting the draft I wonder how their numbers stack up in terms of players who manage to take the step up...
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