Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

Junior is like any other level of hockey. Good goaltending gives a decent club a chance to beat anybody. Something less can undo a powerhouse.

I'm dating myself here but I recall a Toronto Marlies team in 1972 that was as good or better than the franchise's other powerhouses of that era, including a couple that won Memorial Cups. The '72 Marlies were loaded with first-rounders and ran away with the regular-season championship. A mere infant, my world came undone when the Peterborough Petes knocked them off in the playoffs and I put it down to the cruelty of the fates. Years later I had a chance to ask a member of that team, Bob Gainey (this was Bob Gainey before he became that Bob Gainey), exactly how they pulled it off. "Goaltending," he said expansively.

The lesson here is that a good junior team should try to upgrade its goaltending and a great junior team should try even harder.

So it is that no one should be surprised that the Windsor Spitfires, the top-ranked team in the CHL for most of the season, made a trade with the Erie Otters http://new.windsorspitfires.com/viewcontent.php?id=2844 to acquire the rights to goaltender Brandon Maxwell, a heralded prospect (as much as a draft-eligible teenager can be heralded). Maxwell's bio appears on Page 11 of the USA Hockey guide to its under-18 team. That his bio appears in the USA Hockey guide goes directly to the root of the story.

Last summer Maxwell signed on with the U.S. Development Team in Ann Arbor and was looking to head to Boston College next year. At some point, evidently, he had a change of heart. Story goes, he hoped to play as an under-ager for the U.S. team at the world under-20s in Ottawa next month and then would be ready to cast his lot with a team in the OHL.

I don't quite get his focus on the world junior team. He played and played pretty well for the U.S. team that was runner-up to Ontario at last winter's under-17s and for the U.S. under-18s last spring. But it's a big step up to the under-20s - I wrote last week about the class of '91s who will be relied upon on the Canadian team, but none of them is a goaltender. That's a far different proposition. It would be hard to see Maxwell as anything more than a back-up on a U.S. team at the world juniors. Thomas McCollum of Guelph and Sanborn, N.Y., is by most scouts' estimations the best goalie in the O these days and the reason the Storm have been able to make noise in what many figured to be a rebuilding year. And Brandon Maxwell should know this better than most because his father, Brad Maxwell, is an assistant coach in Guelph.

Oh well. This would be a great deal for Windsor but for a couple of things.

No. 1: Master Maxwell can't just skate away from the Ann Arbor program. He needs USA Hockey to grant him a release. Brad Maxwell signed more than this memento (now available at a very reasonable price). He signed his son onto the USA Hockey's program and USA Hockey looks at this not just as a commitment but as an investment. USA Hockey has staked a lot of money in the development of Maxwell. Maybe - and it's a big maybe - USA Hockey could be bought out, but I have my doubts. No amount of money could buy the program out of the fix it would be in without Maxwell. The outfit has but one other goaltender on its under-18 roster - they know how hard it would be to try to recruit a kid into the program in mid-season. No great sell-job could disguise the fact that the kid coming aboard was never even USA Hockey's second choice.

No. 2: Pity poor Andrew Engelage, the Spitfires goaltender on their run this season, the kid who is leading the league in wins to this point. Going out to trade for an elite netminder is hardly a vote of confidence for him. And if Maxwell doesn't come, he might feel like a red-headed stepchild.

An encouraging word for young Engelage is needed. I suspect that the workload will be fairly balanced if Maxwell arrives this season - the other lesson about goaltending at this level is that you not only need good goaltending but goaltending depth. (See Steve Mason last season.)

The Windsor Star's Bob Duff astutely points outs out that this deal's real payoff is a couple of seasons down the line when the franchise is bidding for the Memorial Cup. It's a good point. I'll try to make another. If Maxwell gets out of Ann Arbor anytime soon he can kiss goodbye any chance of playing for the U.S. team at the world juniors. Ever. USA Hockey has never come across a grudge it couldn't hold and it has a deep-seated hatred for all things to do with Canadian junior hockey. The organization would find it especially galling that Maxwell would land just the other side of the tunnel. Even if he plays out the season with the U.S. development program I suspect the boys in Ann Arbor will try to make a statement with Maxwell - they don't want him to be just the first one to jump ship and they don't want anyone else being distracted by the prospect.

I Told You So Dept.

Item One: There wasn't a lot of love for the Brampton Battalion when I wrote about them back in October. They were ninth in the Eastern Conference at the time and a few who came on the board or sounded off elsewhere dismissed Brampton as a one-line team. Back to the present: Caught them beating the Majors in a shootout in Mississauga Wednesday for their twelfth consecutive win. They look full value for two points, coming from a couple of goals down. Cody Hodgson's shootout winner was a clinical roof shot. You can ride one line and good goaltending a long way in major junior and there's plenty of reason to think that the Battalion have more than that going for them.

Item Two: Several on the comment board teed off on me for a column about the risk of injury to 18-year-olds moving straight from junior to the NHL. I don't know whether they were tempting fate or I was, but the news (or, to my mind, proof) came a week back when the Thrashers announced that Zach Bogosian, the No. 3 pick in the 2008 entry draft, will be sidelined for six weeks with a broken leg.

It seems like, as breaks go, this one isn't catastrophic and that he should be okay. But a break in an 18-year-old's leg is a little more worrisome than the same in a 28-year-old's pin. There might be some physical growth left for Bogosian and that's a complicating issue with breaks like this. (I have one friend who walks around with an inch worth of padding in one shoe, the price he paid for a break at that same stage of his hockey life.) Bogosian will likely get through this okay - he struck me as a physically mature kid. But it has to be a threat to his confidence - if it were a 28-year-old breaking his leg, would the Thrashers be looking to fly his parents down for moral support? It's tough enough for any kid to adjust to the NHL game, tougher still when he'll be coming back and rehabbing and working through muscle atrophy. I hope that this is an I Told You So item that I won't be revisiting anytime soon.