Bad luck?
Game after game after game I keep wondering if this year's Trail Smoke Eaters are ever going to get a break.
The latest?
- Top pairing defenceman Cam Brodie gone for at least 6 weeks and maybe the season with an injury.
- Defenceman Paul Levarsky leaves the team right before the trade deadline to play pro hockey in Slovakia (forcing any deals to be for help on the back end).
- Defenceman Ryan Hill gets knocked out and injured for at least 2-4 weeks if not longer just after the Smoke Eaters make trades to get a full roster of D.
- Top goal scorer Brett Corcoran suffers an injury in the same game and only returns for a few shifts against Victoria.
- Point a game player Stefan Decosse gets hurt for the third time this season with no time table yet for his return.
Last minute departures and injures at the worst possible time leave the Smokies short on cards before the deadline. That leads to the toughest month of the year (10 road games and 13 total in January) with a shorter bench and several more injuries. Two of those injuries to top point scorers on a team that doesn't score enough goals. One of those injuries an aggravating one that didn't stop Grant Rollheiser from playing goal, but did somewhat limit him earlier this month. It hasn't stopped.
Following a team game in and game out. Getting to know the players and the coaches. Travelling with the team. Seeing every single game live in the arena. It's a new experience for me. Even if you follow a professional team as closely as any fan can, you never get this close to the journey. It's a pretty amazing thing for a hockey fan. However, since it's the first time I've done it to this extent, my ability to analyze their reality is limited by my scope.
When I look at the string of bad luck that this team has faced I don't know how to categorize it. Do all teams face these same hills and the best ones just find a way to climb? Does it feel like they never get the bounces because they're the team I follow and the team I grow to care about? I don't know.
What I do know is how it feels. It feels like every time this year's Trail Smoke Eaters make a mistake they get burned for it. It also feels like every time they score they had to fight, scratch, claw and kill to get that puck in the net. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but sometimes it really does feel that way. I'm not even saying this to be negative. These guys work damn hard day in and day out. They care and they want it, but it's never ever ever easy. It's a fight against the best teams (that they sometimes win) and it's a fight against the worst teams (that they sometimes lose), but it's never a cake walk. It's certainly never dull.
The Smoke Eaters came into this season with a lot of high expectations. They had a lot of returning veterans from a third place team. They won a playoff series and there was lots of excitement about making another run this year.
I'd say the "bad luck" of this season could be traced all the way back to losing their Coach and GM mere weeks before training camp. That forced a new coach to come in without time to analyze the roster before camp, or to do any of the off season recruiting himself. A new coach with someone else's roster and high expectations.
There are fans out there who will rip the Coach or the players because of these high expectations.
But lets not forget a couple of very important things about last season. First of all, they were 2 points behind second place Vernon and only 1 point ahead of fourth and fifth place Salmon Arm and Prince George. That's how tight it was from second to fifth. We're talking about three points. So we're not talking about a team that was coming back together after finishing first place by 20 points. We're talking about a good team grouped with three other good teams from second to fifth that all easily could have traded places in the regular season standings. This is not something I'm saying to denigrate their accomplishment as much as something I'm saying to show just how tight the BCHL is and just how many good teams there are. This is a very competitive and difficult league. They weren't leaving anyone in their dust last year, it was a dog fight. When it's that close, one or two changes can be huge set backs.
GOALTENDING
I got to the Kootenays in February of last year. Just long enough to see my share of Smoke Eaters game while also running around to different KIJHL rinks. What I saw was a good team with an outstanding goaltender. I've always believed strongly in the strength of the save percentage statistic as a measuring stick for goaltenders. Guess which goalie was tied for first place in save percentage last year?Cole Anderson of the Smokies and Riley Whitlock of the Capitals both posted outstanding 0.915 save percentages to lead the BCHL. Watching Anderson play last year, you could see just how important he was to the success of the team. He was a veteran goaltender in his final season of junior hockey playing incredible hockey. This year only Nathan Lieuwen (in 11 games) and Alex Evin have better save percentages than Anderson had last year. Arguably no goaltender this year means as much to their team as Anderson did to the Smoke Eaters last year.
Cole Anderson was not going to be replaced this year. That doesn't mean that Trail's goaltending is substandard or "the" problem on the team. Quite the opposite. Outside of maybe one or two games I would never point to goaltending as a main factor in a Trail loss. More often I'd say that Grant Rollheiser and Paul Barclay have kept the Smokies in games. Rollheiser sits tied for 12th in save percentage, but he's tied for 7th among goalies who have played at least 20 games. That puts him right in the middle of the pack among starting goaltenders. Do you know how many of the goaltenders ahead of him are his age or younger? 3 out of 11. One of those (Lieuwen) has only played 11 games. So among 18 year old and under goalies he's fourth in the league. All of this to say Rollheiser has at the very least lived up to expectations if not surpassed them.
However, neither Rollhesier or Barclay were going to come in to Trail and replicate the kind of year Anderson had. Only Alex Evin has numbers that would fit that goal and he's playing on the most talented roster in the BCHL. I don't think it ever would have been fair to expect that, and the loss of Anderson was always going to cost them some points that would have to be made up elsewhere.
RECRUITMENT
Lost in all the talk about how many guys were coming back this year was the fact that they lost some very important pieces of the team as well. F Joel Barrett (51 points or 0.9 points per game), F Matt Turner (43 points or 0.7 points per game and 137 penalty minutes), D Alex Greenlay (29 points or 0.5 points per game, 143 penalty minutes and the team captain), F Brian Kang (35 points or 0.6 points per game), D Patrick Copeland (26 points or 0.6 points per game) and D Justin Frechione (solid defensive D with 8 points).
We're talking about two or three top six forwards, two top four defencemen and another in the top six. That's some significant scoring, grit, toughness and defensive play to replace. The off seaosn recruiting before the season didn't replace those guys. In terms of permanent additions made before Coach Ingram joined the team, only gritty all around F Patrick Martin, young and improving D Braden Kinnebrew and the goaltenders remain. The team didn't bring in anyone in the off season that was going to immediately replace a guy like Barrett or Turner's production. They didn't bring in any defencemen who could replace the production or grit of Copeland and Greenlay.
Players who had smaller roles on last year's team were certainly expected to be in a bigger role this year. I think they've done that. Ryan Bulach has gone from 0.3 points per game to 0.7 points per game. Paul Mailey has jumped from 0.3 points per game to 0.4 points per game while playing a much more important two-way role. Scott Warner moved from 0.3 points per game to 0.5 while being put on the ice against the other team's best players every night. Cam Brodie jumped into a top pairing spot very effectively before he got hurt. Credit to them for stepping up.
However, last season's team had a new addition in David Arduin who topped the team in scoring. They had a new recruit in Stefan Decosse who put up nearly a point a game. They had three other new recruits (Paulsen, Warner and Bowman) who stuck with the team the entire season in important roles. I don't think it would be unfair to say that the Smokies staff under Tim Kehler had a better summer in 2006 than they did in 2007. It happens, not every new class of players will have the kind of success that the 2006 group did.
Ingram came in and saw that there wasn't enough new scoring on the team. He made a deal to add August Aiken ( which later indirectly impacted the David Arduin trade as the future considerations Westside got for Aiken came back to Trail in that deal when the team wasn't getting expected results). He recruited Steve Ourosov to add some offensive spark. He saw they still needed some help on defence so he added Ryan Hill and Paul Levarsky. However, what Ingram didn't have a chance to do was analyze the team's needs over an off season and recruit players to fill those voids. He can't be held accountable for that part of this team.
INJURIES
People say that any talk of injuries is just an excuse for not getting expected results. Sometimes that's a fair statement. But don't you think injuries to significant parts of the team can do enough to really change results in such a close league? There are no nights off in the BCHL this year. Even teams lower in the standings like the Bulldogs and Merritt can knock off the top teams at any time. The Bulldogs just beat Penticton this weekend.Compare last year's Smokies to this year's Smokies. Last year's team didn't really battle too many serious injury problems that I've been able to discover. Looking at their top 15 scorers only two played fewer than 50 games. Kevin Limbert played 48 games and Patrck Copeland played 45. At most we're talking about 12 and 15 missed games. When looking up and down that roster it's hard to find any significant, long term injuries to guys who would be top 6 forwards or top 4 defencemen. Nobody listed on the main roster (outside Connor Gregory) played fewer than 37 games last season.
This year?
- Top 6 forward Stefan Decosse has been injured three times and missed 25 of 47 games. More than half the year so far.
- Top pairing defenceman Cam Brodie is going to almost surely miss the rest of the regular season. That would mean he played 35 of 60 games.
- Top 4 defenceman Ryan Hill has will miss at least 10 to 15 games with a concussion. If not more.
- Offensively gifted local forward Logan Proulx never played a single regular season game with the Smoke Eaters due to an ankle injury.
- Jamie Paulsen missed the first two months of the season with an injury.
- Dylan Herold missed 14 games in the fall.
- Casey Shade missed 6 games in the fall with an injury.
- Scott Jago had to leave the team for medical reasons. His entire season has likely been lost outside of a chance he could play some AP games if he's feeling up to it now that he's working out with Castlegar in the KIJHL.
We're just talking about long term injuries here. Everyone gets nagging injuries throughout the year. However, when it comes to serious injuries and man games lost to them, it looks like this year's team has had much worse luck than last year's. There certainly could be some guys from last year's team that I didn't know about, but we're still looking at more injury trouble this year than last.
ADD IT UP
When you look at several of these factors I don't think it's hard to see why the Smoke Eaters are getting different results this season. You go from a 20 year old goaltender who was at least top 2 or 3 in the league to a couple of successful rookies who could never be expected to replicate those results. You go from a team that added at least five full time skaters and two goalies before the season started, to a team that added only two full time skaters and two goalies before the season started. You go from a team that lost very few man games to injury, to a team that has been missing one of their top scorers for more than half the year and has lost two of their top 4 defencemen for at least significant time or the rest of the season. A team that had another defenceman leave for Europe right before the trade deadline. A team that in my opinion, just hasn't had a heck of a lot of luck this year.
You have to be good to be lucky BUT you also have to be lucky to be good.
We've seen how good a healthy and focused Trail Smoke Eaters team can be. We've seen them play games like Tuesday's overtime loss against Penticton where their two-way play, strong goaltending and hard work keeps them stride for stride with the best teams in the league. We've seen them nearly beat Team Canada West. We've seen them get wins over Nanaimo, Salmon Arm, Penticton and others. Winning is not impossible this year, but in my view there sure have been some road blocks in the way.
My conclusion would be that this team deserves patience. This coaching staff deserves patience. They are all working very hard under what were not necessarily ideal circumstances at times.
Hey Smokies fans, lets look at things this way: the Smoke Eaters are just storing up good karma for when it really counts. After a significant run of bad luck during stretches of this year, it would only be right that the good luck would come in... oh... lets say March and April.
In the meantime, it's time to break this 7 game losing streak and put some pucks in the net. The rest of the season starts this afternoon against the Clippers.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment