The London Knights looked like they were out to prove a point, as much as win, during their 1-0 closeout victory in the OHL final on May 11.
The penultimate win against the Niagara IceDogs was a 6-5 overtime contest that required Mitch Marner, Christian Dvorak and the Knights to surmount a two-goal third-period deficit. So in the clincher, London—to a man—nursed an early lead the way a graduate student makes a pint last for an entire evening. Dale Hunter’s team limited Niagara to 18 shots and got goalie Tyler Parsons a shutout that put a bow on their OHL record 13th consecutive playoff win.
That speaks to how good Hunter’s Knights are at dictating the terms of engagement—they’re going to play their game, albeit not always the same one. And that makes it hard to pick nits. London is a mind-bending 33-5 across their past 38 games, which includes a 16-2 playoff record with a plus-44 goal differential. Only five other OHL champs have had a 40-goal differential since the league expanded to a 16-team post-season. Four made it to the MasterCard Memorial Cup final.
There is a lot to love about the Knights’ prospects in Red Deer.
Strengths
Can’t spell ‘dominant’ without D, M, T
The first line of centre Dvorak, Marner on the right and left wing Matthew Tkachuk combined for 119 points in the OHL playoffs. Dvorak, co-captain and an Arizona Coyotes prospect, finished third in scoring, nine points ahead the highest-scoring non-Knight. The Toronto Raptors should pass the round ball as unselfishly and as smoothly as this line moves the puck on springtime ice.
| Pos | Name | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PTS/G |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RW | Marner, Mitchell | 18 | 16 | 28 | 44 | 30 | 8 | 2.44 |
| LW | Tkachuk, Matthew | 18 | 20 | 20 | 40 | 23 | 42 | 2.22 |
| C | Dvorak, Christian | 18 | 14 | 21 | 35 | 29 | 4 | 1.94 |
| D | Juolevi, Olli | 18 | 3 | 11 | 14 | 15 | 4 | 0.78 |
| C | Pu, Cliff | 18 | 8 | 5 | 13 | 9 | 6 | 0.72 |
| RW | Piccinich, JJ | 18 | 2 | 10 | 12 | 1 | 4 | 0.67 |
| RW | Berisha, Aaron | 18 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 6 | 6 | 0.61 |
| D | Mete, Victor | 18 | 4 | 7 | 11 | 15 | 0 | 0.61 |
| D | Graves, Jacob | 18 | 0 | 10 | 10 | 26 | 29 | 0.56 |
| C | MacDonald, Owen | 18 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 1 | 16 | 0.39 |
| RW | Yakimowicz, Chandler | 18 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 1 | 10 | 0.33 |
| C | Thomas, Robert | 15 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 0.33 |
| LW | Bernhardt, Daniel | 14 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0.21 |
| D | Jamieson, Aiden | 16 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 8 | 9 | 0.19 |
| D | Crawley, Brandon | 17 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 17 | 18 | 0.18 |
| LW | Jones, Max | 6 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 23 | 0.33 |
| D | Bouchard, Evan | 10 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0.2 |
| D | Mattinen, Nicolas | 5 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0.2 |
| LW | Heffernan, Chad | 18 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 21 | 0.06 |
| G | Parsons, Tyler | 18 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0.06 |
| G | Burke, Brendan | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| RW | Sherwood, Kole | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 0 | 0 |
| D | Martenet, Chris | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 6 | |
| Pos | Name | GP | W | L | OTL | SO | GAA | SV% |
| G | Parsons, Tyler | 18 | 16 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2.15 | 0.925 |
| G | Burke, Brendan | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
With extra media timeouts at the Memorial Cup versus the typical OHL game, Hunter will be able to double-shift the Dvorak line when needed. The most anticipated game within a game on offer in Red Deer might be the big line against Ivan Provorov in the Knights-Brandon Wheat Kings contest on Victoria Day Monday. Hunter will have last change for that game.
Four lines that can score
London is deep, too, and its complementary scorers can utilize facing a lower quality of competition since opponents’ front-line players draw Marner duty. Owen MacDonald and his wings, Maple Leafs fourth-rounder JJ Piccinich and St. Louis sixth-rounder Chandler (C.J.) Yakimowicz, each bring a 200-foot game. Sophomore centre Cliff Pu has also elevated his game during the playoffs.
Defensive efficiency
Shot counts in junior hockey often have to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, Knights goalie Tyler Parsons had only had three 30-shot games in the past three series, and two were overtime contests. With likely NHL first-round choice Olli Juolevi anchoring their back end and Victor Mete also moving the puck ahead, the Knights are good at limiting teams to one shot per offensive zone sortie before quickly getting back on the attack.
Weaknesses
All of these should have a Maybe affixed.
Discipline and penalty killing
The Knights, apart from their six-game first round against Owen Sound, have not had a series last long enough for both teams to let the hate flow through them. Their penalty kill was just okay, operating at 75-percent efficiency (51-of-68) in the OHL playoffs. Typically, one would expect the last team skating to have a PK north of 80 percent. Being short-handed more than four times in a game during a short tournament is perilous. The Knights were down a man 3.78 times per game in the OHL playoffs.
A young goalie
The Tyler Parsons project has paid off well for London, as the 18-year-old roller hockey convert has got on the NHL Draft radar by evincing fluidity in the net. Parsons had a 2.15 GAA and .925 save percentage while seeing 28.73 shots per game in the OHL playoffs. One red flag—and with London, you really have to look for ’em—was in that 6-5, Game 3 win against Niagara. The well-coached IceDogs got the drop on London with a couple blocker-side goals.
Through Parsons, though, the Knights are much more set in net coming into the Memorial Cup than they were in 2013 and ’14, when they did not make the final.
Parsons has played all but three minutes for the Knights in the playoffs. (Aaron Bell/OHL Images)
Getting out of their comfort zone
The automatic question with a playoff juggernaut before the Memorial Cup is whether it has had sufficient adversity. That question tends to get asked with greater volume if the 16-1 or 16-2 playoff team is from a league whose name begins with Q.
It’s concern trolling. More than a few teams, of course, have been unable to carry over total dominance in league playoffs to the Memorial Cup. Then there’s the convenient example of the Nathan MacKinnon/Jonathan Drouin 2013 Halifax Mooseheads.
Halifax lost their second game 5-2 to the Saskatoon Blades, the host team. That helped build a sense of mystery for their final round-robin game against London, with both teams coming in at 1-1 with a chance to go directly to the final. En route to Credit Union Centre for the game, though, a Mooseheads fan told two reporters, “We only lose when we don’t take the other team seriously.”
The Mooseheads pumped London 9-2. That Saskatoon loss came down to Halifax’s focus, not because of a lack of losses to Gatineau.
The Marner Knights have had Beast Mode as their neutral setting for the past six weeks. How they would respond to being in genuine peril is a big hypothetical. Of course, first someone needs to put them there.