Casey not striking out with Giants

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
Casey Pierro-Zabotel is a man of few words.
This season, his stick is doing most of his talking.
Pierro-Zabotel, a 20-year-old from Kamloops, goes into this weekend as the WHL’s premier offensive player. A centre with the Vancouver Giants, he leads the WHL in assists (67) and points (99) and has set franchise single-season records in both categories.
Since joining the Giants in mid-November of last season, he has 147 points in 106 games.
“It’s been going pretty well,” says Pierro-Zabotel, who left the BCHL’s Merritt Centennials to join the Giants after being a third-round selection by the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL’s 2007 draft.
Originally, he had committed to attend Michigan Tech but came to realize that the academic way wasn’t for him. So he left his comfort zone in Merritt and headed for Vancouver. There was only one player on the Vancouver roster whom he knew — he and defenceman Justin Palazzo had played minor hockey together in Kamloops — but once Pierro-Zabotel got over a bad case of nerves, well, he has been lights out.
“I was really nervous coming into Vancouver because I had heard some stories about Don and how hard practices are,” Pierro-Zabotel says, referring to Giants head coach Don Hay, who also is from Kamloops. “That’s mainly what my nerves were about.
“But after my first practice and my first game I felt really good.”
He helped the Giants, who had won the Memorial Cup the previous season, to a 49-15-2-6 record last season, but it ended with a six-game second-round playoff loss to the eventual Memorial Cup-champion Spokane Chiefs.
To date, this season appears to hold even more promise.
The Giants, who are at home to the Kelowna Rockets on Friday, are 48-5-1-3. This is the fourth straight season in which they have recorded at least 100 points, which ties a WHL record held by the Kamloops Junior Oilers/Blazers (1983-87).
“We talk about it a little bit but not too much,” says Pierro-Zabotel, who brings his Giants to Interior Savings Centre on Saturday night. Game time is 7 o’clock. “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves because we still have lots of games left. We want to keep getting better every day and keep winning . . . that’s the main thing.”
When Pierro-Zabotel left Merritt for Vancouver, the buzz was that he was lazy defensively and that he had poor work habits. If that, indeed, was the case, Hay cured him of that in a hurry.
“I think his consistency has a lot to do with his conditioning,” Hay told the Vancouver Province’s Marc Weber earlier this season. “He pays more attention to the details of the game and he’s just a really solid player who makes solid plays.”
The 6-foot-2, 210-pound Pierro-Zabotel says a lot of his success is due to his confidence level, which has never been higher.
“I had a really good summer of offseason training and that really helped me out coming into this season,” he says, adding that he worked a lot on his quickness and strength.
“I noticed right away, as soon as I got here this season, that it helped me out,” he says.
It hasn’t hurt, of course, that he has found some chemistry with Vancouver sniper Evander Kane, who has netted 36 goals playing on his left wing. However, the right side of the line has featured a virtual cornucopia of skaters, including Craig Cunningham, Garry Nunn, Mike Piluso and even Jon Blum, who just happens to be perhaps the league’s premier defenceman. Blum has taken some turns up front on the power play.
These days, there is one person Pierro-Zabotel might be seeing as much of as Kane. That would be Pierro-Zabotel’s wife. That’s right . . . Pierro-Zabotel and Levi Gottfriedson, the daughter of Kamloops Indian Band Chief Shane Gottfriedson, were married during the WHL’s Christmas break.
“It was really good,” Pierro-Zabotel says of the wedding, adding that they are living with “friends” in the Lower Mainland and that married life “is really good.”
It certainly would seem to be agreeing with Pierro-Zabotel. After all, he was named the WHL’s player of the month for January, thanks to 28 points, including 19 assists, in 15 games.
Should he hang on and win the scoring title — he goes into weekend games with a three-point lead over Calgary Hitmen forward Brandon Kozun — Pierro-Zabotel wouldn’t be the first married player to do it.
In 1989-90, Len Barrie of the Blazers put up 185 points and won the scoring title while married to Kristy, with whom he has two children, Victoria and Tyson. Tyson, of course, is a defenceman with the Rockets.
On the subject of families, yes, Pierro-Zabotel will have his own cheering section at Interior Savings Centre on Saturday.
“Every time I come to Kamloops, it’s really good playing in front of family and I always want to beat the Blazers,” he says.
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca