Opening night notes

Few things tonight....first a flurry of trades right before the puck dropped:

Moose Jaw sends 18 year old forward Mike Forsyth to Chilliwack for a conditional draft pick.

Medicine Hat sends 17 year old forward Trent Ouellette to Regina for a conditional 13th round pick in the 2013 bantam draft. A 13th round pick in a draft 3 years from now is about as close to "nothing" as you can get, since teams rarely draft into the 13th round in the first place. On the plus side, at least he wasn't traded for a bus.

And the biggest deal sees Moose Jaw send overage forward Thomas Frazee to their hated rivals just up the road in Regina. This is a complicated deal that involves two draft picks on each side, but the main asset coming back to the Warriors is Regina's 2012 2nd round pick. It's surprising that Moose Jaw would deal within the division like that - and with their biggest rival to boot - but I guess you gotta take the best deal when you're trying to move overagers in a crowded market.

For the Warriors, this gets them down to four overagers and with one of them, Brendan Rowinski, on the injured list for a fair while yet, they can go with the three healthy ones until Rowinski is ready to play. Thomas Heemskerk is the #1 goalie and Spencer Edwards was just named their captain, so the 3rd spot is probably between Rowinski and Dylan Hood. Likely Hood is safe until Rowinski is ready to play, then they'll have to move one of the two.

Now....to the most pressing matter of the night: the WHL website.

To everyone's great surprise, I'm sure, the &*%^#$!@ site did not work properly for the start of the season.

• at the start of the evening the right-side scoreboard was an unusable mess of out-of-place links and icons. They fixed it by the 2nd period of the early games, but this is something that never would have happened in the first place if oh, I don't know, THEY HAD TESTED THIS FEATURE EVEN ONCE, EVER.

• so, we play "guess which 'Game Summary' link to click" and when you guessed right, it took you to a lovely blank page. Again this was fixed within a couple hours but again, this is something that never would have happened in the first place if oh, I don't know, THEY HAD TESTED THIS FEATURE EVEN ONCE, EVER.

• on that lovely otherwise-blank page there were two links, one saying "View Scorer's Sheet" and one saying "Text Box Score". The Text Box Score worked great if you like old newspaper style boxscores. The View Scorers Sheet though, that gave us (and still does at this moment actually) a fatal error in a call to the member function getValue() on line 137 of actions.class.php. Perhaps they'd like us fans to debug it for them, I'm sure we have some smart people out there who'd have fixed it by the end of the first period. Again, this is something that never would have happened in the first place if oh, I don't know, THEY HAD TESTED THIS FEATURE EVEN ONCE, EVER.

The league rolled out a crappy, bug-riddled product two weeks ago and have proceeded to debug it on the fly since then. Yes, they have mostly fixed the problems; but the point is, why did this ever happen in the first place? The WHL isn't some mom and pop operation. They're selling a product and they have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of "customers" for whom this website is a key means of consuming the WHL's product. In that light, the lack of care and attention put into this site is mind-blowing.

They knew there were problems two weeks ago when they launched. Fans complained then, but it really wasn't that big a deal to most since the season hadn't started. But the league and its developers didn't take advantage of that "grace period" to get everything right - once the games started counting, they STILL didn't have everything working, and they've had a couple more weeks now to make sure it did. The league should expect more than this from their developers and the fans should damn sure expect more than this indifferent treatment from the league.