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.

For the Windsor Spitfires, their target on trade deadline wasn't superstar John Tavares, rather experienced blueliner Ben Shutron.

WINDSOR: The trading deadline isn't quite a shuffling of the cards and a new deal. It's more like dumping a couple of orphans in your hand and hoping to draw an ace or a face. Or two.

Four teams had to like their chances going into the OHL deadline a couple of weeks back and nobody could have liked their chances more than the Windsor Spitfires. From Week One they've led the league and either topped the CHL rankings or been right there. Taylor Hall and Ryan Ellis and the kids they run with have ripped up the league.

Windsor wasn't the team that everyone was watching, but the Spitfires' general manager Warren Rychel was supposedly in the chase for the player everyone was watching: John Tavares. But that made sense only as a pre-emptive strike, heading off the acquisition of Tavares by one of the real contenders or wishful pretenders.

I wrote in this space before the deadline that a serious Windsor bid for Tavares would be like busting up a straight to draw to a flush—it could have been done but at a high cost and with considerable, maybe even reckless, risk. Not like the Spitfires management listens to me or anything like that, but the player I suggested a contender could and should acquire, defenceman Ben Shutron, ended up being precisely the main guy in the one big deal Windsor made.

Windsor acquired Shutron, centre Scott Timmins and goaltender Josh Unice for goaltender Brandon Maxwell, forward Jacob Lalonde, two second-round draft picks and a third-rounder. (Shutron and Lalonde are OAs.)

The key going the other way was Maxwell, who's playing for USA Hockey's under-18 development team.

"We really liked Maxwell but in the end we didn't have to give away anyone who was already playing for us," Windsor general manager Warren Rychel said.

The OHL's top team didn't want to mess with the talent and chemistry in place. No, what was needed—not desperately, but ideally—was experience on the back end, a d-man who you could throw out there in threatening situations to settle things down. Nobody fit that profile better than Shutron, who was named first star in Kitchener's win over Belleville in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference final. He was Kitchener's captain this year. There's no better experience or ringing endorsement than that.

Any player arriving in Windsor would have to be revved but no one more than Shutron who admitted that the Rangers' loss to Spokane in the Memorial Cup final haunted him. And probably still does. "I couldn't ask for a better second chance at it," he said after the Spitfires' 5-3 win over the Mississauga St Michael's Majors Thursday night at the WFCU Centre.

It was the 14th consecutive win for the Spitfires but it wasn't a great game. A curious one to be sure.  The Spitfires ran out to a 3-1 lead through the first 28 minutes of game action, outshooting the visitors 29-4. Factor in a couple of shots denting the posts behind Mississauga's beleaguered Chris Carrozzi and you get a sense of Windsor's dominance to that point. But over the next 10-minutes stretch (and thanks to a couple of dubious penalties called on Windsor by refs who will have better games, hopefully) the two teams combined for a total of one shot. As weird as anything you'll see. A flurry of shots right before the second intermission made the

scoresheet look a little less odd, but if you were there it was like the oxygen had been sucked out of the arena. The Spitfires might consider including these instructions in their program for such occasions.

 Windsor was never really threatened in the game and a couple of late goals by the visitors made the score look closer than it was. Mississauga didn't even bother pulling Carrozzi down a pair with a couple of minutes to go, like the Majors were just happy to get close. Still it was pretty unsatisfactory for the Spitfires given their high standards.

Shutron didn't have any impact. In fact, Windsor coach Bob Boughner didn't hesitate to describe the game as Shutron's "worst since he came here."

In fact, it was a far better game to get a read on what impact Scott Timmins might have on this team down the line. Timmins picked up his 30th and 31st goals of the season in the win. But there wasn't a need to get more O in Windsor, one of the reasons that there wasn't a hard push to get Tavares. If Timmins is a second PP guy, then the rich just get richer.

Unice didn't play. The guy who has got Windsor to this point, Andrew Engelage, did. Decent enough, I guess, but how impressive could he be when he saw just five shots through 38 minutes. Unice as goaltending depth, sure, it's a decent add. Maybe a kid who's back next year.

No, the trade will ride on the performance of Shutron, a native of Ottawa. It makes a lot of sense on a couple of counts.

No. 1: He has been there. Not just the OHL finals and the Mem Cup. No, he knows what it's like to be traded and to make it work. Shutron was Kingston's first-rounder, ninth overall, way back in 2004 and he was dealt to Kitchener last season in a move that looked an awful lot like this deal with Windsor. "I've been through this and it's hard in the time leading up to [a trade] because you know something might happen but you can't be sure," Shutron said. "It worked out last year and I think it's going to work out here."

No. 2: He has something to prove. It's not just a second chance at a national championship. Chicago drafted Shutron in the fourth round in 2006 and brought him to pro camps but even after a great run late last season the Hawks decided not to sign him. So, Shutron is playing for a pro job, auditioning on a stage where he'll get seen by NHL scouts. And if he can stick it to Chicago and land a deal, well, living well is the best revenge.

You can try to do too much at the trading deadline. "I remember [in the NHL] when I played on teams that added five or six guys and we never came together," Bob Boughner said. "What I like is that it was three players but just one deal … three players who had been on the same team and had a history of winning."

Shutron, a stay-at-home d-man who brings quiet, calm and reliability to the backline when he's on, isn't John Tavares. In fact, if you rolled Shutron, Timmins and Unice up into one, they wouldn't add up to the pro prospect that Tavares is. Tavares will be in the NHL next year barring unforeseen happenings, while Shutron is going to be trying to carve out a career with no guarantees. But the trade deadline isn't just about pro potential. It's about fit and it's about winning now. And it just might be that Shutron could mean as much to Windsor as Tavares will to London, or maybe even more.