It turns out it was not a threat, but a promise when Will Bitten’s father said the skilled centre would not return to the Flint Firebirds.
In February, when Flint had the second mass firing of its coaching staff, Mike Bitten told The Hockey News there was “no way” his puck-chasing progeny would play in Flint this season. Now that Will Bitten has the leverage that comes from the Montreal Canadiens investing a third-round choice in him, it’s more or less become official that the Gloucester, Ont., native is a prospect without a team.
Bitten, a Franco-Ontarian who had 30 goals and 65 points in 67 games despite the stressful environment in Flint, would also like to be in an OHL community where it would be possible to take some post-secondary studies in French. Only the Ottawa 67’s and Sudbury Wolves are based in cities with full-fledged bilingual universities.
Former Firebirds coach John Gruden has landed on his feet with the Hamilton Bulldogs, where coincidentally Flint GM George Burnett was based last season. The 67’s also need to shore up their 1998-born cohort in service for their bid to host the 2018 MasterCard Memorial Cup, and getting Bitten would address that need. Ottawa was already flush with extra OHL priority-selection picks before it moved Philadelphia Flyers first-rounder Travis Konecny to Sarnia in January.
Any team that has a hole at centre—so basically, everyone—is likely interested in Bitten.
It’s hard to find fault with the 2016 70th-overall pick making such a demand. It’s typical for a 18-year-old who is a middle-round NHL draft choice to ask for a trade. The standard player agreement that Bitten would have signed after being selected by the dearly departed Plymouth Whalers is also ostensibly a two-way street. It’s incumbent on the team to provide certain necessities, such as a stable environment, which wasn’t happening in Flint until the OHL intervened last winter.
Kootenay Ice GM rips ‘broken’ import draft
There must be a better way to attract superior European prospects to Canada than a formal draft that everyone knows is not a draft.
Kootenay Ice president and GM Jeff Chynoweth used the No. 1-overall choice of the import draft in late June to select 17-year-old Russian forward Klim Kostin, who has apparently signed in the KHL. Chynoweth did what anyone with the first pick in a draft does, which is take the best player available. Under CHL rules, a team also can’t trade an import pick’s rights for at least a season, which is intended to avoid a public dispute when a team selects a player when the word it out he will only play somewhere else.
There is surely no legally palatable way to make a 17-year-old European player enter a binding agreement to come to the CHL, which has 60 teams spread from Sydney, N.S., to Portland. Also, if teams opt to use their pick on an NHL prospect whose organization would like him to play junior in North America, that’s just good networking.
It would be regressive to not have an open market for skilled European skaters, but it’s worth wondering whether there should be an alternative for a team that doesn’t want to get into the import game. As it stands, it certainly widens the gap between big-market and small-market teams, but it’s also essential to helping Canadian and American players develop.
Nice start for Nico
Given the success of Swiss-developed players in Halifax, it was no surprise that right winger Nico Hischier was selected by the Halifax Mooseheads with the sixth pick of the import draft.
The 17-year-old, who competed in the world junior championship last season, has found some early chemistry in the preseason with countryman Otto Somppi, a Tampa Bay seventh-rounder. Halifax, which rebuilt last season and missed the playoffs, is also weaving 16-year-old blueliner Jared MacIsaac its their young nucleus.
The Winnipeg Jets’ Nikolaj Ehlers—who spent most of his youth playing in Switzerland—and San Jose Sharks’ Timo Meier went ninth overall in back-to-back NHL drafts after excelling in Halifax. It’s not hard to see why the Mooseheads presented promise for Hischier.
Halifax’s recent run of successful import players embodies the import draft. But to the point Chynoweth raised, it’s not the reality for many CHL franchises.