With NHL arenas gone dark, you have to get out to rinks these days to search for bright spots to be salvaged. If you’re too tired of lockouts or too practised in them or both, you manage to find a good story or a player worth watching. In Oshawa, you’ll find both in Boone Jenner. And that you have been able to find the Generals centre and captain there this fall is a somewhat happy by-product of the Bettman-Fehr stalemate.
In the normal course of things, Jenner would have reported with rookies and other prospects to Columbus’s training camp in September and would have hung around for as long as the Blue Jackets wanted him. That’s how it is for most junior clubs: Their ramp-up to the season is disrupted by the temporary absence of their best 18- and 19-year-olds, with the possibility that stars might stick around for the entire NHL season. The latter probably wasn’t in the cards for Jenner, but still, a high second-round pick in 2011, he probably would have made it to the last cuts and might have even had a chance to play with the big club at the start of the season.
“I didn’t think about camp with the Blue Jackets or a lockout,” Jenner says. “I just did my work in the summer like I did the summer before.” It paid off. Jenner has been among the Ontario Hockey League’s scoring leaders all season and had nine goals through the first 10 games. And through that stretch, Oshawa had seven wins and just two losses in regulation, good for first in their division. Jenner’s and the Generals’ play in the early going has been enough to make fans, and maybe even the team itself, forget that this was supposed to be a period of transition.
The Generals have only made it past the first round of the playoffs five times since winning the OHL championship in 1997. And insiders in the CHL and the NHL alike have regarded Oshawa as an underachieving squad, given its solid available talent the past couple of winters. In the off-season, the team underwent an extreme makeover, hiring Jeff Twohey—former GM of the archrival Peterborough Petes—from the Phoenix Coyotes scouting department to run the show. Twohey in turn brought in D.J. Smith to coach. Smith had been an assistant with the Windsor Spitfires. Both had anticipated a learning curve. “We thought it would take some time to get to know the players and establish a new culture in the organization,” Twohey says. “It’s gone a lot more quickly than we had planned. And a lot of that comes from Boone and from him being here from August on.”
In fact, Jenner’s input with the new occupants of the Generals front office goes back even further than that. Jenner was spending his summer on his family’s farm in Dorchester, Ont., when Twohey called to invite him to lunch before the start of training camp. “I knew Jeff a bit from my draft year and the interview process,” Jenner says. “We had a good talk about the team.” According to Twohey, Jenner has established himself as not only a Most Valuable Player candidate and team leader but also an off-ice asset. “We’ll sound him out about things generally, but sometimes when it’s necessary he’ll come to us if it’s important,” Twohey says.
Jenner’s most important contribution remains what he gives the team on the ice: At six-foot-two, 204 lb., he’s a first-line centre who, from the shins up, is as complete as any junior. A 5–3 victory over defending OHL champion London was a case in point. The Generals were at home but facing the back end of the dreaded three-in-three: 180 minutes of game action shoehorned into about 50 hours of real time. For first-year juniors, even linemate Tyler Biggs, Toronto’s first pick in 2011, it was their real OHL initiation. Jenner was ubiquitous, from the ceremonial faceoff through to the last minute. He was matched against Knights star Max Domi and leaned all over the dynamic skater. Jenner ended up with a goal and a plus-1, but his value wasn’t on the scoresheet. He dominated in the faceoff circle, where he’s the OHL’s best this season (he was second at the world juniors with a nearly 70 percent success rate). Most impressively, though, when the game was winding down and it looked like London might rally for a tie, Jenner managed to force turnovers with London on the power play and for one long stretch controlled the puck alone against the boards with three opponents trying to get it away.
The only knock against Jenner, the only reason that he fell to the second round, has been his blades—he’s perceived as a good but not elite skater. He might be in the process of rewriting the book on his game. “He’s better, but even if he’s not ever going to be considered a great skater, he’ll figure out a way to succeed as a pro,” Twohey says.
So far this year, Jenner’s figuring out his game and helping the Generals’ staff get up to speed. The NHL lockout has been pretty good news in Oshawa, thanks to a kid who didn’t get to go to camp.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.
Leading The Troops: Oshawa’s Boone Jenner
