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.

Many believed Rimouski weren't worthy of laying in the Memorial Cup but the Oceanic are starting to play like true contenders.

Early this season, it looked like the CHL had created a problem for itself when it awarded Rimouski with the 2009 Memorial Cup.

The format of the tournament is a sore point for a lot of people. Complaint No. 1 is the host team's guarantee of a berth in the big show. The point is even sorer and the complaints are even louder when the host team doesn't seem to possess the quality of the teams that win their way to the Cup.

That's how it seemed in the first month or so of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League season.

It wasn't all the fault of the Rimouski Oceanic. It had a lot to do with the other guys in the other leagues: a couple of powerhouse WHL teams in Calgary and Vancouver, a crew in Windsor that was running the table imperiously in the 'O'. They topped the national rankings, while Rimouski made the top 10 once - at that point the Oceanic hadn't played a game. Yup, No. 4 in the nation before the season, out of sight thereafter. Take a look at their schedule. Rimouski started out as a good but not great team, but by January, after a mid-winter swoon, an eight-game losing streak, the Oceanic's record was just 22 up and 21 down. The CHL's disaster scenario is the Memorial Cup host missing their league playoffs (see the Dukes of Hamilton, 11-49-6 in 1990). Rimouski? Well it didn't look like the Empress of Ireland again, but things weren't good.

Flash forward to March. Rimouski's 5-4 win in Shawinigan in the last game of the season left the Oceanic with a record 20 games over .500. They lost only one of their last 21 games, a one-goal loss at home to the Drummondville Voltigeurs who've been ranked in the top-5 nationally for most of the season. Factor in the Oceanic running out to a 3-0 lead in the opening-round series versus Chicoutimi and you have Rimouski making an amazing transformation from seeming embarrassment to the hottest team in the CHL. The best? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. But competitive in the Cup with home-ice advantage? Sure. Deserving a place in the national top 10? Arguably. If you made the rankings based on what teams have done since New Year's, doubtless.

I caught a Rimouski game in Gatineau a couple of weeks back. Though the Olympiques are close to the Oceanic in the standings, they give up as many as they score and certainly weren't the best measure of what the host might do in the Memorial Cup. The Olympiques are the defending 'Q' champions but this year's edition is down a couple of classes from that previous squad. Rimouski coach Clement Joudoin felt good enough about his team's chances to start his back-up netminder Matthew Dopud. The game went about as you'd expect: 7-2 Rimouski. Supposedly the Olympiques outshot the visitors 42-27. At least that's what the official scorer logged in. It sure didn't look that way from where I was sitting - though neither Gatineau goaltender distinguished himself.

Okay, you can get things wrong trying to judge a team based on one game. Check that: You will get some things wrong with such a limited window. Still, a couple of things impressed me.

The Oceanic will be tough to match lines with because they have depth up front. The measure of that depth - the second and third lines feature an array of highly-drafted kids from the class of '07. Deep, mature, experienced.

First line: Felix Lefrancois-Patrice Cormier-Jordan Caron.

Cormier should be familiar to you. He had a great world junior tournament, the rock in the middle of the checking line with Evander Kane and Stefan Della Rovere. It's a familiar story: The checking line for the under-20s features guys who go home to spotlight positions. At the under-20s we only had a chance to see a few aspects of Cormier's game: His strength and physical play. In league play you get to see the whole package. Others might post flashier numbers but they won't post them head-to-head against Cormier. Not for nothing did HockeysFuture.com rank him as the best prospect in the QMJHL. His numbers (23 goals and 28 assists in 54 games) don't translate into an upside of NHL first-line or all-star, but you could have a heck of a team five years from now if he's your second-line centre-which is what New Jersey might have to show for a pretty astute second-round pick last June. Maybe the best measure of his value: Rimouski's losing streak coincided with Cormier's time with the world junior team.

"Cormier raised his play and the team's play when he came back from world juniors," Rimouski coach Clement Jodoin said. "He came into his own … the player a lot of us expected him to be."

Unlike others on the world junior team, Cormier had limited experience outside the Q before this year's tournament. Others had been on the radar in the regional under-17 and national under-18 teams-he had played for New Brunswick at the Canada Winter Games and Team Atlantic at the under-17s, but didn't make it out of the under-18 summer camp because of injury.

"The world juniors was a great experience for me," Cormier said. "It gave me a lot of confidence when I came back. It was momentum. Back in Rimouski it wasn't picking up where we left off. It was like a second season for us. We had injuries before but had players coming back. We've played all year but the team since January is the team we can really be."

Jordan Caron might know from his appearance at the Prospects Game in Oshawa back in January. He's a late-90 birthday, a big, strong kid who fits the power-forward mould at the next level. I saw one independent ranking that did not place him among the top 100 draft-eligibles this year. That's a pretty egregious oversight. One scout told me that Caron's a first-rounder, a lot closer to NHL Central Scouting's ranking of Caron as No. 20 among North American skaters in its mid-season survey. Another told me that any knocking of Caron comes simply because "he's always compared to Cormier, who's only a few months older but seems a lot further along."

Though he plays on Cormier's right side, some see Caron as a centre in the pros (though not Jodoin). If he's not a first-rounder right now, he might be with a big Memorial Cup.

Caron looked like a first-rounder to me in the game against Gatineau - at least in flashes. His goal, the icing on the cake in the third period, came with the Oceanic shorthanded. Coming down the left wing, it looked like he might just dump the puck in and get off for a change. Instead, alone, with a defenceman in lock-up position and another guy back, Caron gathered speed, made a little daylight for himself and wired a 45-foot slapshot high to the glove side. Impressive stuff. If some of his other 35 QMJHL goals this season were like that, he'll be celebrating Friday night at the draft.

Jodoin says that, like Cormier, Caron had a transformative experience on the national stage, however brief it might have been in Oshawa. "It was a question of confidence," the coach said. "He went there and it sank in. He thought, 'I can play with these guys.'"

Which must be an answered prayer for Felix Lefrancois - that he gets a chance to play with these two.

The next two lines aren't shabby either. Second line: Phillippe Cornet-Keven Veilleux-Olivier Fortier. Third line: Logan MacMillan-Luca Cunti-Emmanuel Boudreau. You have 2007 first-rounders in the rangy Veilleux, the Q's player of the month for March, and the industrious MacMillan, a pick-up in trade from the Halifax Mooseheads. You have a pretty-skilled kid in Cunti, one of the few Swiss prospects who has made the jump to the CHL. And you have a diligent two-way player in Fortier, the captain who played on a couple of national under-18 teams.

I've always liked the fleet Fortier from what I saw of him in 'Q' league play in his rookie season and with the under-18s. Since then he has been a bit star-crossed. After being drafted by the Montreal Canadiens with a third-round pick in '07, he has struggled to find the offence that was expected of him - in his draft year he scored 28 goals and 36 assists in 69 games but in '08 picked up 23 and 23 in 67 contests. This winter was pretty much a write-off for him due to a knee injury (just eight goals in 29 games) but he proclaimed himself 100 percent after the game in Gatineau.

"I hoped I'd be on the radar with Hockey Canada to play [the checking-line role]," Fortier said. "It was tough to be not able to play for so much of this season, but I'm lucky that I get a chance with this team to play in a championship at home and show what I can do."

Maybe the pressure is off for Fortier now - the Canadiens signed him to a three-year deal last week. Maybe that frees him up to play his best game in the last game of his career.

Veilleux, a second-rounder to Pittsburgh, and Cunti, a third-rounder to Tampa, stood out against Gatineau.

Veilleux picked up a goal and three assists and looked too big for the Olympiques to match up with on the cycle. He missed more than half the season with a shoulder injury, the 6-foot-5 centre has been almost a two-point-a-game player.

Cunti picked up a goal and a pair of assists-the goal being a highlight-reel undressing of a Gatineau defenceman and a slickly finished top-corner snap from in tight. He played last season for the Chicago Steel in the USHL and, according to Jodoin, he's "getting more and more comfortable in the North American game."

How good can Rimouski be in a Memorial Cup? I thought their back end looked a little suspect-some bad giveaways and nervous handling of the puck. Sounding out a few scouts who have seen more of the Oceanic, I was assured that it was probably a bit of a one-off. Jodoin went out and acquired overage-blueliner Sebastien Piche from Lewiston - when Jodoin coached the Maineacs to the Memorial Cup in 2007, it was a defence-oriented club and Piche was a rock for that club. And there's no knowing where Rimouski's goaltending stands - starter Maxim Gougeon has a pretty impressive won-loss record but Jodoin can't have the confidence in him that he had in Jonathan Bernier in Lewiston a couple of springs ago.

At their worst, at about the two-thirds mark of the season, Rimouski was not a great club. Now at least the Oceanic can be perceived as a threat. No mistaking the hosts for the Dukes of Hamilton.