Blazers search for scoring

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
For much of this WHL season, finding offence hasn’t posed a problem for the Kamloops Blazers.
Going into this week’s games, the Vancouver Giants were the only one of the Western Conference teams to have outscored the Blazers.
Of late, however, the Blazers have been riding one line — C.J. Stretch between Shayne Wiebe and Jimmy Bubnick.
Stretch is on a 13-game point streak, with 22 points, including 12 goals, over that span. In those 13 games, the Blazers scored 48 goals, so Stretch has been in on almost half of them. During those same 13 games, Bubnick put up 18 points, including five goals, and Wiebe earned 16 points, six of them goals.
Those three players, then, accounted for 23 of the 48 goals scored during that stretch.
At the same time, most of the other forwards have come up dry — Tyler Shattock has three goals, Kenton Dulle and Scott Wasden two each, Dalibor Bortnak and Brendan Ranford one each.
The Blazers won eight of 11 but now have lost two straight, thus the concern. Which is why the deck has been shuffled in time for tonight’s game against the Seattle Thunderbirds at Interior Savings Centre. Game time is 7 o’clock.
Head coach Barry Smith knows that one line can’t carry a team far in this league, so he has moved Ranford and Shattock alongside Stretch, while putting Wiebe on the wing with Bortnak and Bubnick.
A third unit has the team’s three 20-year-olds — Dulle, Seth Compton and Wasden — skating together. That leaves newcomer Colin Smith, the seventh overall pick in the 2008 draft, to play between Ryan Hanes and Brett Lyon.
Smith really would like to see Ranford, a 16-year-old freshman, come to life. Ranford, the 15th overall pick in the 2007 bantam draft, won the Alberta Midget Hockey League scoring title as a 15-year-old last season, but has only one point, a goal, in his last 11 games. He missed six games, too, while at the Under-17 World Hockey Challenge in Port Alberni.
“He’s a 16-year-old who had a pretty good (season),” Smith said, “and never really hit any down spells. I think he got a little worn out mentally and physically at the Under-17.”
Even though Ranford, like his teammates, enjoyed a nine-day Christmas break, Smith is of the opinion that Ranford paid an emotional price for raising his level of play in Port Alberni.
“He hit a bit of a wall,” Smith said. “The emotion is pretty high there. And he played a lot so I think all that combined . . . and it was probably time for him as a 16-year-old to hit the wall.”
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Colin Smith, who is no relation to the head coach, will play his first game in The ATM tonight.
Smith, 5-foot-9 and 145 pounds when he was drafted, is third in the Alberta midget league scoring derby, 11 points off the lead. He has 50 points, including 21 goals, in 30 games with Edmonton CAC Gregg Distributing, the same team for which Ranford, then 15, won the scoring title last season.
Last season, Smith had 106 points, including 70 assists, in 33 games with the Edmonton CAC bantam team.
“I’m going to move him around a bit,” Smith, the head coach, said. “He may see a little bit of time on the power play. He’s not a fourth-line, grind-it-out guy, so I’m looking to move him around.”
Smith, the player, made his WHL debut in his hometown on Dec. 5 as the Oil Kings beat the Blazers, 3-2. He will return home in time to play in the AMHL all-star game Sunday in Edmonton.
JUST NOTES: G Justin Leclerc will make his second straight start, and fifth in six games, for the Blazers. . . . D Michal Siska (ankle) won’t play. He may skate today and, if that goes well, could play Saturday against the visiting Medicine Hat Tigers. . . . D Brandon Underwood (thumb) is likely out at least two more weeks. . . . C Mark Hall (knee), who has yet to play this season, is to see a doctor this week. Hall said he hopes to resume skating Thursday. . . . The Blazers also will scratch D Daniel Medland-Marchen, C Jake Trask and F Cole Grbavac, with D Josh Caron and Hanes getting back in.
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca