The usual template for a junior team goes like this: two or three elite players, legitimate pro prospects, with support from about a dozen solid juniors, and, at the bottom of the depth chart, a couple of 16- and 17-year-olds who’ll see limited time. That is to say, junior teams are top heavy in terms of talent and distribution of ice time, more so than the pros.
For a team in the running for the Memorial Cup, you’re looking at line-ups loaded with 19-year-olds, seasoned junior players, physically mature enough to withstand the physical grind of four playoff rounds to get to the promised land. The way it plays out, those contenders will mortgage the future, or at least take out large home loans, in trading for experience and depth to make a push for a title — a strategy that necessitates a rebuilding program the next season. In the CHL this passes for the cycle of life.
The Kelowna Rockets might be forcing a reconsideration of all these first principles. The CHL’s top-ranked team throughout most of the season has turned the conventional wisdom inside out and upside down.
Friday Night Hockey: Catch the Kelowna Rockets taking on the Vancouver Giants on Mar. 14 at 10:30 p.m. ET / 7:30 p.m. PT on Sportsnet ONE. | TV Schedule
Asked why his team has been able to run out to the best record in the WHL, general manager Bruce Hamilton offers up a concept of team building that’s radical at this level of the game.
“We’re four lines deep,” Hamilton says. “We don’t have any stars. We roll four lines. We have Myles Bell with 40 goals, but really our ice time is spread pretty evenly. Other than Myles we have a bunch of players with 10 goals or above. Other teams are looking to match lines but we have confidence in players that goes right down the line-up.”
The stats tell at least part of the story. Bell, a sixth-round pick of the New Jersey Devils in 2013, leads the team with 41 goals and 33 assists but 23 other players in the WHL have racked up more points. Seven players in the league eclipse Bell’s total in goals but Hamilton is convinced that he’d be close to the league lead in a different situation that leaned on him for more offence. “We don’t even have a No. 1 power play,” the GM says. “That’s just the way we distribute ice time.”
Look farther down the team stats to find proof of that. Centre Ryan Olsen has 30 goals, but 11 more Rockets have at least 10 goals and no more than 24. It could well turn out that the team will end up with eight 20-goal scorers in the line-up.
Depth stretches right down the line-up through a six-deep blueline crew and a goaltending tandem that more evenly distributes starts than most: Jordan Cooke, the ostensible No. 1, is second in the league with a 2.27 GAA and has a tidy .922 save percentage but 12 other WHL goaltenders have played in more games this year.
It goes beyond numbers as well. The two youngest forwards in the four-line rotation, 16-year-old right-winger Nick Merkley and 17 year-old centre Rourke Chartier, aren’t passengers by any stretch. In fact, they set the tone. “They’re the ones who get us going most nights recently, playing with (overage left-winger Marek] Tverdon,” Hamilton says.
Such equanimity might play well in many workplaces but in a junior-hockey environment it could be toxic — that is, when you have a bunch of young players with voices in their ears and dreams of landing in the NHL, they all want more ice time. Sharing just doesn’t play. The Rockets’ team dynamic would be a tough one to sell. Coach Ryan Huska was able to get the players to buy in simply with results. “Winning makes that message a lot easier to deliver and the type of player we’ve managed to get into our organization is looking for that,” Huska says.
The formula has been great in the regular season but how it will play out in the spring is another thing entirely. The Rockets have come in waves with fresh legs and opponents have tired under the pressure, but when the playoffs begin, TV timeouts will buy the other guys time.
Hamilton and Huska suggest that won’t force any major shift in their strategy and Friday’s game in Vancouver might prove a lab test of that theory. So too will the WHL playoffs. Kelowna has to go into the post-season as a favourite but not exactly a prohibitive one — the league goes as deep in contenders as the Rockets do in scoring. Kelowna wouldn’t be a one-off. The fact that they lost the first three games to Seattle in last year’s opening round before roaring back with four straight wins was more than a hint that the core of this team has the right stuff.
“That’s when they learned how to win,” Hamilton says. The worst news for the others might be the fact that Kelowna looks to have most of the roster back again next season.
It’s hard to imagine that other teams in the CHL could use Kelowna’s team as a model, though success in the post-season will at least force them to reconsider the conventional wisdom.