To the surprise of mill......err....nobody, the Edmonton Oilers made official today that #1 overall pick Ryan Nugent-Hopkins will NOT be returned to the Red Deer Rebels.
This is a blow to the Rebels, who with Nugent-Hopkins in their lineup may have been the team to beat in the WHL's Eastern Conference. Without him, they're probably just one of several teams with a chance there now. It's also obviously a blow to the Canadian World Junior team, where Nugent-Hopkins joins the list of elite talents who never suited up for Canada at that tournament.
And of course WHL fans in general get deprived of watching the best two years of this amazing player's junior career, so we all lose on that. But watching him with the Oilers so far, it's really hard to make an argument that he doesn't belong there - and that's one of the major purposes of the WHL, after all - to prepare kids for the NHL. He's ready to move on.
4 comments:
Hey Alan:
Any predictions this year or are you going to wait until Christmas time to see how the rosters are finialized and more trades being finished. LOL ....
this blog is getting dusty lol
Most WHL blogs are getting dusty. My local blogger in Portland, only blogs once a week and just reviews the games from the previous week.
Any other options out there?
Yup, dustier than the Hurricanes' win column, isn't it? :)
For some reason the last two Novembers have been busy times at work for me and I haven't really had much spare time to write on the blog.
Also, November is always kind of the slow period of the season - the early season excitement has abated, the overage situations are resolved and the early season tune-up trades made, etc. So there's really not a whole lot to write about anyway.
Come December we'll have the World Junior camps, then the WJCs themselves and the ramp-up to the trade deadline in January. So things will start hopping around then.
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