Two plus two equals trade

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
Two WHL teams plus two players who want out equals a trade.
That is what happened as Kamloops and Medicine Hat swapped forwards Thursday, John Stampohar Jr. joining the Blazers and Cole Grbavac going to the Tigers.
Grbavac, 18, left the Blazers on Monday, saying he was unhappy with his icetime and uncomfortable in his role.
At the same time, Stampohar, 19, was saying pretty much the same thing in Medicine Hat.
“Yeah, I needed a change of scenery,” Stampohar said yesterday. “I had a great time in The Hat but I had to make decisions that were the best for my career as a player.”
Stampohar, 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, is in his third WHL season. He has eight points, four of them goals, in 95 regular-season games, all of them with the Tigers. He also has 159 penalty minutes, but keep in mind that the WHL chooses not to include misconducts and game misconducts in its totals.
Stampohar had six fights in his first season and 13 last season.
This season, in six games, he has one assist and 12 penalty minutes. He has been involved in one fight; he suffered a broken nose in the scrap with defenceman Drew Nichol of the Edmonton Oil Kings on Sunday. The fight occurred after Stampohar was hit with a major penalty for interference for taking out Edmonton forward T.J. Foster.
The WHL office later suspended Stampohar for four games, meaning he won’t be eligible to play for the Blazers until they open their East Division swing against the Regina Pats on Oct. 16. He sat out the Tigers’ 6-5 shootout loss to the Rockets in Kelowna on Wednesday and will miss the Blazers’ three home games this weekend.
Because of the suspension, Stampohar didn’t make the trip with the Tigers. He is scheduled to fly to Kamloops today.
The Prince George Cougars are here tonight, followed by the Chilliwack Bruins on Saturday night. Both games start at 7 o’clock. The Tigers are here Monday at 2 p.m.
Grbavac, who said he was “surprised and happy” with the trade, will join the Tigers in Chilliwack today and expects to play tonight against the Bruins and Saturday against the Vancouver Giants.
“As of now, I’m playing (tonight),” Grbavac said from his home in Calgary, adding that he has been told “I probably won’t dress Monday. . . . I want to play.”
Grbavac suggested his not playing Monday might have been a condition of the trade, but Kamloops general manager Craig Bonner said that wasn’t so.
Grbavac, 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds, was pointless with two fights in eight games this season with the Blazers, after totaling seven points and 13 bouts last season.
Stampohar, then 17, joined the Tigers out of the Minnesota high school ranks where he was reputed to have at least some offensive touch. As a 16-year-old junior at Chisholm High School in Hibbing, he had 38 points, including 24 goals, in 27 games and was an honourable mention on the 2007 Associated Press all-state team.
These days, he said, all he wants is a chance to show what he can do.
“All I wanted was to play,” Stampohar said. “I know I need to bring some toughness as I am a big player. The opportunity to improve my offensive game is a huge bonus.”
The Blazers spent a good part of this week working on motivational and leadership skills with Major David Andersen, who spent 21 years in the U.S. Marine Corps before retiring on Sept. 1, 2006.
Andersen, 45, first met Blazers head coach Barry Smith in Waterloo, Iowa., in 1996. Smith was the head coach of the USHL’s Black Hawks; Andersen was the commanding officer of a Marine Corps artillery unit in Waterloo.
Andersen now is the owner, camp director and head leadership instructor for Boot Camp Hockey, which is billed as an elite hockey and leadership training camp in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Boston.
Three years ago, Andersen spent a week with the WHL’s Everett Silvertips.
“He did some stuff with Everett,” Smith said. “I was thinking about it and I thought, you know what, I think we would like to go in that direction.”
With the Blazers, Smith said Andersen worked “more on leadership, loyalty, playing together as a team.”
Andersen, according to Smith, spent time relating “what you do in the Marines to what you do as a team.”
The Blazers will get their first chance to implement those lessons tonight against the Cougars, who have lost three in a row.
JUST NOTES: Stampohar’s father, John Sr., played for the Flin Flon Bombers in 1976-77, earning three points and 172 penalty minutes. In those days, the WHL included all penalties in its totals. . . . F Colin Lidster, a fifth-round pick by the Blazers in the 2004 bantam draft, was traded yesterday by the BCHL’s Trail Smoke Eaters to the AJHL’s Grande Prairie Storm. Lidster, who is from Kamloops, never did report to the Blazers, saying he was going to take the NCAA route.
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
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