Friday stuff

Couple notes on this Friday....

First, we have another European who can't cut the mustard here on this side of the pond. Swift Current made room for newly-acquired Matt Ius on their roster by sending rookie import Oliver Jokel home. The forward was pointless in 14 games for the Broncos.

By my count there are now only 30 Euros in the entire WHL this year. I don't know if that's an all-time low (since the introduction of the import draft obviously) but only 9 of the WHL's 22 teams currently have the full allowance of two imports, and one team (Brandon) does not have any at all. And based on their games-played and offensive numbers anyway, the contributions of 6 or 7 of the remaining 30 are pretty minimal.

When you consider these things, it gets harder and harder to dislike the proposed rule change that would limit teams to just one Euro per roster, doesn't it.....there's barely enough contributing Euros in the WHL right now to have one per team. I mean, the whole idea of having the imports here in the first place is that they help raise the calibre of play in the league which in turns makes the North American players better for having played at a higher level and against even better competition. But this only happens if the Europeans that are here are truly elite talents. The ones who are playing as 10th-12th forwards or 5th/6th defencemen are not helping to raise the level of play in this league; there are 17/18 year olds playing Canadian Jr A who can fill that role just as well. One import per team should be plenty now unless a lot more good quality European players suddenly decide they want to play Canadian major junior.

And in another note, Greg Harder says the Pats are closing in on a deal to finally move one of Linden Rowat, Jeff Bosch, or Damien Ketlo and put an end to their 3-goalie rotation they have used all season. It'll be interesting to see who the eventual suitor is....what team is going to take on a goalie from the Pats without moving a goalie back in return? There's some teams out there with some pretty stinky goaltending so far this season (check the league-wide save %'s, there's some pretty bad ones out there) but I don't know which team might be willing to take on a new guy and thus put one of the existing goalies out of the league.

Tri-City is another team still carrying three goalies, so you'd think they'll be doing something about that soon. Heck, Brett Martyniuk hasn't even played a minute of action so far this year despite dressing as the backup for 10 games or so. It's not fair to him or Drew Owsley, they need to pick one of those guys as Chet Pickard's backup and send the other one to Junior A....Pickard will be gone next season and they can use both Martyniuk and Owsley then.