The Kelowna Rockets’ braintrust first saw C Colin Long while he was with the California Wave at a bantam tournament in Medicine Hat. Actually, it wasn’t even the braintrust; it was Lorne Frey, the Rockets’ veteran assistant general manager, director of player personnel and head scout.
“He’s Lornie’s guy,” Bruce Hamilton, the Rockets’ president and GM, says. “Lornie saw him and then forged a relationship with his dad.”
The Rockets used the, uhh, 210th pick of the 2004 bantam draft on Long and then kept him on their roster as a 16-year-old; their belief was that they would lose him if they didn’t.
And now Long, at the age of 18, is threatening to become the first Kelowna/Tacoma Rockets player to win a WHL scoring championship. (Kelowna’s Jesse Schultz, with 104 points, finished four points behind scoring champ Erik Christensen of the Kamloops Blazers in 2002-03.)
Long has 69 points in 47 games and a four-point lead over Chilliwack Bruins F Mark Santorelli. Long is doing OK for a guy who last season totaled 28 points in 69 games.
”I’d by lying,” Hamilton says when asked if he saw this coming, “but I knew he was a very skilled player.”
The difference, according to Hamilton, is the commitment Long has made to the organization’s off-ice program.
”When last season ended and he had to stay until the end of June to finish school, he started going to the gym every day,” Hamilton says. “He bought into the conditioning program.”
Of course, the arrival of LW Jamie Benn, who joined the Rockets from the BCHL’s Victoria Grizzlies on Oct. 1, hasn’t hurt either.
”Long was a big part of the package” in landing Benn, Hamilton says, adding that the Rockets pointed at Long and told Benn: “There’s the guy you’ll be playing with.”
Benn, a fifth-round pick of the Dallas Stars in the NHL’s 2007 draft, has 25 goals.
And then there’s RW Brady Leavold, 20, who skates on a line with Long and Benn.
One day after landing Benn, Hamilton acquired Leavold from the Swift Current Broncos for a conditional bantam draft pick.
As Hamilton puts it: “We needed someone to keep the flies off the other two.”
While Leavold plays with an edge and a whole lot of trash-talking, he also has career highs in goals (15), assists (26) and points (41).
It’s worth noting, too, that Leavold is plus-25 with the Rockets, while Benn and Long each is plus-24.
Remember, too, that the Rockets, who struggled to score even in practice last season, didn’t make the playoffs for the first time in franchise history in 2006-07. And now here they are, a recent seven-game winning streak having pushed them to the edge of the race for first-place overall.
“Before the season, I looked at our schedule,” Hamilton says, “and I said I would be happy if we were close to .500 at Christmas. We didn’t give ourselves a great chance (with that schedule).”
But there was method to Hamilton’s madness. The Rockets, last season, were 6-26-2-2 on the road.
“We wanted to play a lot of road games before Christmas,” he explains, “because we were so bad on the road last season that it was important for us to learn to play on the road.”
And now the Rockets can boast of a 14-8-1-3 record away from home, the fourth-best road record in the WHL.
Yes, it’s safe to say that the Rockets are a long, Long way from where they were last season.
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With the Rockets without their captain, LW James McEwan, 20, Hamilton said he wasn’t close to adding a 20-year-old at last week’s trade deadline. Such a move would have resulted in Hamilton having to release McEwan.
“What McEwan does for our team . . . there’s no way I was going to sell him out,” Hamilton said. “Even when he’s hurt, he has significant impact in our dressing room, especially with our young guys. And he’ll be ready in March.”
McEwan suffered a severe skate cut to a wrist earlier this month and needed surgery to repair the damage.
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