Blazers, Giants make deal

Craig Bonner, the first-year general manager of the Kamloops Blazers, is in charge of a team that has lost three in a row after starting with two victories and a shootout loss. . . . So what’s a GM to do when his club struggles? If you‚re Bonner, you hit the road. . . . He watched the Medicine Hat Tigers play the Hitmen in Calgary on Tuesday, was in Swift Current watching the Broncos play the Red Deer Rebels on Wednesday and will watch the Lethbridge Hurricanes play the Hitmen in Calgary on Thursday. . . . Bonner then will join his team, which lost 6-2 to the visiting Spokane Chiefs on Tuesday after being swept by the Kelowna Rockets, 6-2 and 5-3, in a home-and-home weekend series, in Edmonton on Friday. Yes, you can bet the winds of change are blowing towards Kamloops. . . . But Bonner knows, to steal an over-used cliché, that this is a marathon and not a sprint, so don’t be looking for any earth-shattering trades.
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The Blazers, in fact, just announced a deal with the Vancouver Giants.
Kamloops has acquired F Sahir Gill, 16, from the Vancouver Giants in exchange for a conditional 2010 second-round bantam pick. Gill, 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, is from Terrace, B.C. He was a seventh-round pick, 151st overall, in the 2007 bantam draft. Gill has one goal in six games with the BCHL’s Vernon Vipers. . . . That is the second deal between the Bonner brothers. Over the summer, Scott Bonner, the Giants’ GM, got a conditional 2009 pick from his brother, Craig, for D Linden Saip, 17, who is on the Blazers’ roster.