Wednesday stuff

News for today....

A little more is known now about the tragic death of former Silvertip Jordan Mistelbacher. Seattle TV is reporting that Mistelbacher was found outside in the snow in his hometown of Winnipeg. Temperatures in Winnipeg the last few days have been in the -40 to -50 Celsius range with the windchill (-40 C = -40 F, for American readers) so even short exposure to that kind of cold can have serious consequences. More details will come available in the next few days, I'm sure.

Couple notable games tonight.....first, the CHL Top Prospects game goes tonight in Oshawa, Ontario. 14 WHLers are in the game, seven players on each of Team Cherry and Team Orr. The game is on Rogers Sportsnet in Canada; game time is 5pm Mountain / 4pm Pacific but the game is being tape-delayed to 7pm local time on both Sportsnet West and Sportsnet Pacific. So if you want to watch the game live, you have to be able to find the Sportsnet Ontario feed on your cable or satellite.

The other noteworthy game is the WHL debut of Mikael Backlund, who will take to the ice in Kelowna as the Rockets host the Tri-City Americans. Can he live up to the hype? I would think he should be able to pot 40 points or so in the Rockets' last 30 games of the season.

Speaking of hype, the anticipation is growing for one of the biggest games of the WHL season so far, which takes place Friday night in Calgary. It's the first meeting of the season between the Hitmen and the Giants, the league's two runaway leaders in the standings and many people's current favourites to meet in the league final. I hear the Hitmen have sold 12,000 tickets to Friday's game already so it should be a very good crowd. The game will also be televised on Shaw. The two teams will meet again in Vancouver near the end of the regular season in March.

Speaking of the Giants, Gregg Drinnan reports that Giants' star and current WHL scoring leader Casey Pierro-Zabotel got married over the Christmas break. Certainly not every day an active WHLer gets hitched, although I know of cases where it has happened before. In any case, married life clearly agrees with Pierro-Zabotel, since he has 19 points in 8 games since the Christmas break ended. He pretty much singlehandedly beat the Tigers last night in Medicine Hat, scoring four goals in the Giants' 6-2 win.

Oh, and in the rule change department, the OHL has passed a new rule which will give players a one-game suspension if they remove their helmets prior to fighting. This is obviously a knee-jerk reaction to the death of Ontario senior AAA player Don Sanderson a few weeks back. Sanderson died after hitting his bare head on the ice during a fight.....Sanderson's death is tragic but how many tens of thousands of hockey fights at all levels are there every year in which nobody dies? I'm not a believer that one isolated incident is cause for a rule change. Plus, Sanderson did not remove his helmet prior to his fight; it came off during the fight. That's still going to happen, since often one of the early objectives in a fight is to get your opponent's helmet off. Or maybe the OHL will start suspending people for doing that too. And then maybe when they're done that, they can start having the refs carry big soft boxing gloves which they can hand out to players who square off.