Wheat Kings and Thunderbirds grinding out the WHL final

Jayce Hawryluk scored in overtime to get the Wheat Kings a 3-2 win.

Two games into the WHL Championship Series and we’ve been treated to hockey at a pretty high level. The Brandon Wheat Kings held serve this past weekend against the Seattle Thunderbirds and have a 2-0 series lead but those wins didn’t come easy.

Brandon squeaked out two 3-2 overtime decisions in games that really could have gone either way.

In both games the Wheat Kings had to come back to tie the game in the third period and then won on goals that weren’t exactly things of beauty.

In Game 1, Tanner Kaspick batted a rebound off the back glass out of the air and past Seattle goalie Landon Bow. The next night it was Jayce Hawryluk, who flung a puck from below the goal line that hit a Seattle skate and snuck past Bow.

They say any shot in overtime is a good shot and the Wheat Kings have proved that to be true.

While you’d like to see championship games won with beauty goals, both overtime winners did go with the flow of play. Brandon out-shot Seattle 14-2 in the two overtime periods and was driving the play.

The Series will now shift back to Seattle for—potentially—three games, provided Seattle stays alive with a win in either Game 3 or 4. The Thunderbirds have one of the best home-ice advantages this season and are far from dead yet.

While they’ve lost, they have shown they can play with the high-powered Wheat Kings. They’ve made it hard on Brandon by taking away time and space on the ice with a strong defensive structure. Bow has been great in net and they have limited a Brandon team that was averaging more than four goals a game to just three in two overtime affairs.

This series appears to be far from over as the venue changes.

“We’ve got to play with one more notch,” Seattle head coach Steve Konowalchuk said after Game 2. “We’ve got to go out and have a lot of fun and maybe pick it up another 10 percent.”

How good is Nolan Patrick?
There is still a great deal to sort out ahead of the 2016 NHL Draft this coming June, but watching Brandon’s Nolan Patrick play you almost can’t wait until 2017. The centre isn’t eligible this year due to a late birthday, but he’s making a pretty strong case to be in the running for first-overall next year.

Coming off an impressive 102-point regular season, he’s leading the WHL playoffs in scoring with 27 points in 18 games. So far in the final he’s scored twice, both goals tied the game and his snipe in Game 2 was about as good as it gets.

Seattle’s Landon Bow couldn’t stop the short-handed rocket Patrick fired—could anyone have?

“My linemates have been huge,” Patrick said after Game 2. “They’ve been finding me. On my goal there, Ivan (Provorov) made an unbelievable saucer pass on the penalty kill. I just saw an opening.”

The Wheat Kings have a lot of talented players but the Winnipeg native may end up being the best of the whole bunch before he’s done.

Rockets looking for new coach
For the third straight off-season the Kelowna Rockets will be looking for a new bench boss. On Monday the team announced that they had parted ways with first year head coach Brad Ralph.

Despite losing a key player in Nick Merkley and his No. 1 goalie Jackson Whistle, Ralph still managed to get his club to the Western Conference Final. He went 48-20-4-0 in his one-year stint with the Rockets but that, apparently, wasn’t good enough. Ralph was hired after last year’s head coach, Dan Lambert, who won the WHL Championship in his first season and moved on to take an assistant job in the NHL.

The Rockets have a solid roster returning and a stable organization, so general manager Bruce Hamilton should be able to attract a top-end coach to come in and take over.

Giants on the move
The Vancouver Giants held a press conference last week to announce that they are moving from Pacific Coliseum in downtown Vancouver to the suburban Langley Events Centre for the 2016-17 season. The arena in Langley is smaller, holding around 5,000 fans, but should provide for a more intimate setting than the much larger Coliseum allowed for.

They will still be known as the Vancouver Giants and plan on playing at least two home games back at Pacific Coliseum this coming season.

The Giants have been a team in flux over the past few campaigns with a seemingly never-ending rotation of head coaches and players and this move could help stabilize the franchise. Vancouver is still in search of a head coach to replace Lorne Molleken and a GM to take over for Scott Bonner.

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