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.

There is very little separating the Spitfires and Battalion in the OHL championship series.

In December it didn't look like the Windsor Spitfires would face much of a challenge in the OHL on their run to a berth in the Memorial Cup. That's not how it looked by the end of the regular season and that's not how it looks now.

You couldn't ask for a better final than Windsor vs. Brampton. You couldn't dream it up.

Windsor was the best team in the league from the start of the season. Brampton's captain, Cody Hodgson, who was named the OHL's most valuable player Tuesday, was its best all-around talent. The Spitfires' Ryan Ellis was named the league's best defenceman. Battalion centre Matt Duchene has been the subject of a lot of talk this spring, speculation that he will go in the top three of the NHL Entry Draft and opinion that he might be the best draft-eligible talent in the whole shooting match. And if the 2010 NHL Entry Draft were to be held today Windsor forward Taylor Hall would be the first name called. Brampton's Evgeni Grachev is the O's best first-year player and its best import but not very far ahead of Windsor's Andrei Loktionov on either count. You could draw a pretty decent league all-star team just from the talent in these two lineups.

So how do you sort it out?

The easy answer: Play the games.

But you've read this far looking for a prediction, so here it goes.

I have to go with Windsor to win a long series and I offer that up with not a lot of confidence.

I saw dozens of OHL games this season and the Spitfires, at their very best, were the very best team I saw.

I'm choosing my words even more carefully than I'm making my pick. The qualifier is "their very best." I thought that the Spitfires were at their very best in the first half of the season -- even though they added important pieces at the trade deadline after the world juniors. I do think there was a fall-off later in the regular season and coach Bob Boughner confirmed as much Wednesday. He admitted that motivating and focusing his players was difficult "when they didn't have anything to play for."

The Spitfires were so good for so long at the start of the season that they had effectively clinched the Western Conference's first seed in late January. Even though they went into London in February and won a couple of much-anticipated contests against a Knights team fortified with John Tavares, it seemed the Spitfires were playing within themselves.

In picking Windsor I'm making a small leap -- and a leap that probably accounts for my reluctance to wager anything more than a toonie on any game in any sport. I think that the Spitfires are quite capable of raising their game to that level once again. They basically turned it on when they needed to in a six-game series win over Plymouth. Ditto in a five-game victory over London in the conference final -- though that series could just as easily have been a win for the Knights in the same number of games.

By all professional readings of the Spitfires' play in the post-season, Windsor goaltender Andrew Engelage has been as good as he has been in any stretch this season. The numbers won't blow you away, mind you: in the post-season he has a 3.18 GAA and a .897 save percentage. That's way off the lead in playoff stats -- J.P. Anderson of St Mike's 2.50 and Plymouth's Matt Hackett .930 still show the way. But on save percentage at least, Brampton's Thomas McCollum is barely ahead of Engelage at .899 but has a 2.62 GAA thanks to a tighter Battalion defence. On form you'd say that Brampton should have a significant advantage in net, given McCollum's status as a first-round draft pick of the Detroit Red Wings (and Engelage's passing through the NHL draft uncalled) and given McCollum's regular-season stats since coming over from Guelph in a trade: 1.92 GAA and .929 save percentage. But Engelage's regular season was lost in the mix: .914 and 2.35. He was perceived as a possible weak link in chatter all season. But if, as scouts are saying, he's playing as well now as he has at any point in the season, he's a pretty strong weak link ... if you get my meaning.

During the regular season a few in OHL circles thought that the only way Windsor could fall short of the Memorial Cup would be if a goaltender came along and stole a series. The most likely candidate for that was Belleville's Mike Murphy, who was just named the OHL's goaltender of the year for the second consecutive season. As impressive as Murphy's 2.08 was, his .941 save percentage was daunting stuff for any team to face. Can McCollum do it? Maybe he can steal a game or two. To pull that off he'll have to play better than he has lately. Or maybe he won't have to.

A lot of things can tip the balance of this series. Injury is the first thing that comes to mind. There's nothing catastrophic at this point, just the usual bumps and bruises that the players are soldiering through.

If you believe in karma, well, Hodgson played his very best hockey when it mattered most, starting with the under-18s last spring and carrying through the world juniors where, game in and game out, at both ends of the rink, he was Canada's best player. And while other players in this series on both teams have had their slumps or struggles or off nights, Hodgson goes whole games without a bad shift.

I'll set karma aside and just work through it item by item.

It's a wash on speed, I figure. It could be a wash on power plays though maybe Brampton has a better penalty-killing unit. Windsor plays bigger. If it's a wash on goaltending, then I'd like Windsor on the basis of home ice, if nothing else.