Lists are for discussing around the round table, or perhaps even arguing over. If you haven’t seen it, TSN has released its list of the top 40 Canadian players in the history of the World Junior Championship. TSN put together a 25-person panel and aired a show on the list on Wednesday evening.
I was privileged to be one of the 25 panellists but I had no idea how tough it would be to narrow the list of players to 40. I spent two nights working on this project and could have spent a month, and I still would have been moving names around.
If you haven’t seen the list — it’s headed up by Jordan Eberle, Eric Lindros and Wayne Gretzky — it’s right here.
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Here’s Gary Belsky, in Time, writing about the NHL and the mess in which it finds itself:
“You may not have noticed that the NHL hasn’t started its season yet, which is arguably Problem #1 for the wannabe major league: Ice hockey is fourth in a three-horse race of  pro team sports vying for the affection of casual U.S. fans. Problem #1A is the lockout of players that’s been in force since Sept. 15, which has resulted in the cancellation of nearly 550 regular-season games to date. But in the event you are following the inaction rinkside, don’t be fooled when league officials or anyone else claims that the main issue is greedy players. The real problem in hockey is not in the locker room, but in the owners’ suites and commissioner’s office.”
This is a most compelling column and it’s right here.
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So as the WHL begins its Christmas break you may be wondering if WHL vs. Portland Winterhawks is a dead issue.
It isn’t.
The Winterhawks, I am told, continue to explore their options, one of which is to plead their case at a board of governors’ meeting that is scheduled for February.
The Winterhawks plan right now is to do just that and see what happens at that time.
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Meanwhile, Sam Adams, the outgoing mayor of Portland, “announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t ask his City Council colleagues to vote on his $31.5-million proposal to renovate Veterans Memorial Coliseum” for the Winterhawks, writes Beth Slovic of The Oregonian.
The vote has been scheduled for March 13, which is after the WHL’s board of governors will have met. Winterhawks owner Bill Gallacher has said he is prepared to put $10 million of his own money into the project.
Slovic’s story is right here.
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The New York Post’s infamous Page Six is usually reserved for the Kardashians, Paris Hilton and their ilk. So what is Portland Winterhawks D Seth Jones doing there? Check it out right here.
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D Connor Sutton of the Lethbridge Hurricanes had his junior A rights change hands on Wednesday. The SJHL’s Battlefords North Stars dealt Sutton, 18, and future considerations to the BCHL’s Salmon Arm Silverbacks for F Troy Petrick, 19. . . . Sutton, who turns 19 on Jan. 12, is from Cochrane, Alta. He has one goal in 12 games with the Hurricanes.
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From Cause We’re Canadian (@MadeInCanada): “We all watch the zamboni, just to make sure he doesn’t miss a spot #canadianproblems”
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Kootenay Ice F Sam Reinhart (@Samson Reinhart) lets out a secret: “We have all changed the date on an assignment to make the teacher think it was completed on time”

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Hockey enforcers paying horrible price

By now it is rather apparent that Derek Boogaard, the New York Rangers’ enforcer, was a troubled young man.
Boogaard was 28 years of age when his body was discovered in his Minneapolis apartment on May 13 at 6:30 pm. One season into a four-year, US$6.5-million contract with the New York Rangers, Boogaard hadn’t played since suffering a concussion in a fight during a game on Dec. 9.
It was the 66th and final bout of his NHL career.
According to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners’ Office, which issued its report on Friday, “Cause of death is mixed alcohol and oxycodone toxicity.”
Oxycodone is used to treat moderate to severe pain. It is a narcotic pain reliever and is highly addictive. It has, in fact, been compared to heroin; in some corners, it is referred to as Hillbilly Heroin. It is evil.
What was especially chilling, however, was one sentence in an ensuing statement from Boogaard’s family.
“After repeated courageous attempts at rehabilitation and with the full support of the New York Rangers, the NHLPA, and the NHL,” the statement read, “Derek had been showing tremendous improvement but was ultimately unable to beat this opponent.”
Boogaard, the 6-foot-7, 270-pounder who had laid out many an opposing player, lost his last fight.
On the heels of that statement came a story by Allan Maki in The Globe and Mail in which Kurt Walker, another former NHL enforcer, talked of gobbling pain killers — especially Xanax and Valium — like Christmas candy. It took an intervention and rehab to save Walker.
Boogaard wasn’t so fortunate.
When the Rangers sent Boogaard home in March, it was reported that they wanted him to begin working on his conditioning for next season. However, Larry Brooks of the New York Post reported Sunday that “management essentially staged an intervention with Boogaard at the club's practice rink in late March that resulted in (his) re-entry into the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program.”
And we now know how that turned out.
What we don’t know is how many concussions Boogaard suffered during a hockey career that, according to hockeyfights.com, included 184 bouts since the fall of 1999, or how much those fights impacted Boogaard’s abbreviated life.
But the fact that he was using Oxycodone is frightening, as is the story that Walker told Maki.
It turns out that a lot of this will be familiar to medical professionals working with patients who are trying to deal with chronic pain.
One such professional, who has been working in the acute side of a B.C. hospital while following the concussions-in-hockey debate, wrote via email:
“I am seeing patients whose lives have been ruined by chronic pain treated with narcotics and then having to deal with the impact of addictions. Many of them having emotional or cognitive issues going into it. Lots of post-traumatic stress and abuse and psychiatric diagnoses.”
In other words, people like Derek Boogaard and Kurt Walker are hardly alone out there. The question, however, is how many former and present-day hockey players are fighting this same battle?
The evidence proving concussions are a horrible hockey problem now is so one-sided as to be laughable. (See the latest issue of Macleans or visit macleans.ca for even more evidence, including the case of Eric Lindros, who had what should have been a hall-of-fame career short-circuited by concussions. In this same story, former WHLer Kevin Kaminski explains how he believes post-concussion syndrome cost him his marriage.)
Boogaard, meanwhile, was working on a book — Meet the Boogey Man: Fighting My Way to the Top — with author Ross Bernstein. Appearing on Puck Daddy Radio last week, Bernstein told of being on a golf course one day last summer when Boogaard called him.
“I need you to come get me,” Boogaard told Bernstein, who promptly asked: “Well, where are you?”
Boogaard’s response was: “I don’t know.”
Devin Wilson, a former teammate of Boogaard’s with the Prince George Cougars, was in the process of purchasing a New York condo with his buddy. Thus, Wilson was able to watch Boogaard as he attempted to deal with his latest concussion.
"It was frustrating because we couldn't go out without his head spinning again,” Wilson told Jason Peters of the Prince George Citizen. “One thing that nobody knows is that riding in cabs through New York, he would just start spinning. He'd have his hands on his head and he'd say, 'I need to get out right now' and we'd end up walking like 60 blocks home. I knew (the concussion) was bad.”
Boogaard’s family has turned his brain over to Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. If, as anticipated, Boogaard’s brain shows signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) it will mean that the veritable flood of evidence has moved closer to the WHL’s doorstep.
At the time of his death, Boogaard was only eight years removed from having played in the WHL, where he was involved in 70 fights in 172 regular-season games.
All of this should be enough to make any parent wonder about sending a child off to play in a league that outlaws neither fighting nor headshots.
Stu Grimson, a former WHL/NHL enforcer who practises law in Nashville and also works as an analyst on Predators’ broadcasts, admitted to Maki that recent developments have him feeling conflicted.
“Part of me says, ‘How does a sport so bent on cutting down blows to the head still allow two players to throw bare-fisted punches at one another's head?’ How do you reconcile that?” Grimson said. “But part of me also says the way the sport is played, if you have someone like me on the bench, the other team knows it could be held accountable. It's a tough issue.”
There is no denying that it is a tough issue.
But is it any tougher than what Boogaard went through? Or what Kurt Walker and who knows how many others are going through?

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
     
gdrinnan.blogspot.com
     
Taking Note on Twitter

Friday . . .

The rivalry between the Vancouver Giants and Kamloops Blazers heated up Friday night and the teams didn’t even play each other. The Giants acquired RW Randy McNaught, 20, from the Saskatoon Blades for a fifth-round pick in the 2011 bantam draft. McNaught started his WHL career with the Chilliwack Bruins and was dealt to the Blades last season. . . . In 65 games with the Blades, he had 163 penalty minutes. . . . McNaught, who was returned to the Blades by the New York Rangers on Friday, and Kamloops D Josh Caron are two of the WHL heavyweights. They were in Traverse City, Mich., for a prospects tournament, McNaught with the Rangers and Caron with the Minnesota Wild. Yes, they scrapped. “I fought him,” Caron told me after returning from the Wild’s camp. “That was good; he’s a tough kid.” . . . Fans in Whitehorse should get ready, too, because McNaught and Caron will be bringing their rivalry to an arena near you. The Blazers and Giants are to play in Whitehorse on Feb. 12 in what originally was to have been a Kamloops home game. . . . “He's a tough player,” Vancouver GM Scott Bonner told the Vancouver Sun of McNaught. “With all our skill guys, we just want to make sure they feel secure.”
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The trade leaves Saskatoon with five and possibly six 20-year-olds. G Steven Stanford got the start last night against the visiting Prince Albert Raiders. Also dressed were F Marek Viedensky and D Teigan Zahn, the team captain. . . . Also in the picture are F Sena Acolatese, who also can play defence, and F Jeremy Boyer. F Gaelan Patterson, another potential candidate, is with the NHL’s Calgary Flames.
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The acquisition of McNaught leaves the Giants with three 20-year-olds, the others being F Craig Cunningham and F Matt MacKay.
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The Brandon Sun is reporting that “the book is closed on the 2010 MasterCard Memorial Cup and it’s written in black ink.” . . . The four-team tournament, won for the second season in a row by the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires, was played in Brandon’s Keystone Centre, May 14-23. The host committee had guaranteed an $800,000 profit and it met that projection.
The City of Brandon and the Manitoba government backed that guarantee but their financial support wasn’t needed.
“We set out to make it the best Memorial Cup for everybody and we did that,” Jeff Cristall, the host committee chairperson, told The Sun. “That we managed to meet our financial commitments without the support having to come in, I think is just sort of the icing on the cake for us. As people who run things, we didn’t want to have to use the guarantee. … It was by the skin of our teeth, but that’s the way it turned out.”
The Sun reports that the estimated economic spinoff for Brandon was $13 million.
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There would appear to be some confusion regarding the draft picks involved in Friday’s trade in which C Thomas Frazee moved from the Moose Jaw Warriors to the Regina Pats. . . . According to the Pats’ news release, one of the things they gave up in exchange was their second-round bantam draft pick in 2012. . . . According to a news release from the Warriors, they received Regina’s second-round pick in 2011.
The Moose Jaw Times-Herald reported: “The Warriors . . . dealt Thomas Frazee and their fourth-round pick in 2011 and a sixth-round pick in 2012 to the Regina Pats for their second-round pick in 2011 and the Pats’ fifth-round pick in 2013.”
The Regina Leader-Post reported: “Regina picked up (Frazee) along with a fourth-round pick in the 2011 bantam draft and a sixth-rounder in 2012. Going the other way was a second-rounder in 2012 and a fifth-rounder in 2013.”
Presumably someone will sort that out before the 2011 bantam draft, perhaps sometime after the WHL gets its website up and running and has placated its legions of upset fans.
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By the way, the Warriors have four 20-year-olds on their roster, but F Brendan Rowinski (knee) is out until sometime next month. The deadline for getting down to three 20-year-olds is Oct. 14.
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Unfortunately for the WHL, the opening of its regular season is being overshadowed by whatever is going on with its website.
People are tweeting about it, NHL scouts are talking about, fans are upset about it.
Talk about poor timing for a system failure, or whatever you want to call it.
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Scott Clark, a native of Regina, is the first general manager of the Moose Jaw Multiplex, which is to be the new home of the Moose Jaw Warriors next season.
Moose Jaw couldn’t have hired a better man for the job.
Clark, 47, has spent 23 years working in many areas with teams and facilities in Canada. In the WHL, he has worked in marketing with the Regina Pats and Kootenay Ice. He won the WHL’s marketing award in 1999 while with Regina. He also was in marketing with the OHL’s Oshawa Generals while Eric Lindros was playing with them.
For the last eight seasons, he was been manager of sales channel development with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Clark begins his new job Oct. 15.
(Thanks to the Regina Leader-Post for this information.)
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FRIDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS:
CHILLIWACK 4 AT VANCOUVER 9: The Giants trailed on four occasions but scored six straight goals to win going away. . . . F Brendan Gallagher had five points, including two goals. His line totalled 10 points, as Slovakian winger Marek Tvrdon had two goals and an assist, and C Craig Cunningham had one of each. . . . F Ryan Howse scored three times for the Bruins. . . . Vancouver had a 45-29 edge in shots. . . . Attendance was 8,109. . . . The Vancouver Sun reports that Michael Buble, who owns a piece of the Giants, had to miss the opener because he “was in Dublin, Ireland, performing for 45,000 Irish fans at the new Aviva Stadium.”
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LETHBRIDGE 5 AT CALGARY 3: The Hitmen hoisted four banners into the Pengrowth Saddledome rafters and then were beaten by the Hurricanes. . . . Lethbridge came back from a two-goal deficit and counted three times on the PP. . . . Attendance was 9,251. . . . Calgary was 3-for-8 on the PP. . . . F Austin Fyten had three goals for Lethbridge, which didn’t make the playoffs last season while the Hitmen were winning the WHL championship. . . . Fyten also drew an assist on the winning goal that came off the stick of F Cam Braes, his second of the night. . . . Lethbridge G Brandon Anderson stopped 30 shots. . . . The Hitmen had a 21-5 edge in shots midway through the game.
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REGINA 4 AT BRANDON 5: The Wheat Kings got off on the right foot, outshooting the visitors 13-1 in the early going. . . . Brandon took 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2 leads, only to have Regina tie it each team. . . . However, the home side took control with two PP goals late in the second period. . . . Regina had F Thomas Frazee, 20, in the lineup after he was acquired earlier in the day from the Moose Jaw Warriors. But the Pats were without F Carter Ashton, 19, who is making his way back from the camp of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning. Ashton is expected to play Sunday against the visiting Wheat Kings. . . . Attendance was 5,287. . . . F Mark Stone had four assists for Brandon. . . . Regina was 0-for-3 on the PP; Brandon was 3-for-6. . . . Brandon G Liam Liston, 17, picked up the victory in his first WHL start. He got the start over two 20-year-old veterans — Andrew Hayes and Jacob DeSerres.
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SEATTLE 3 AT EVERETT 4: The Silvertips overcame a 2-0 first-period deficit to win their home-opener. . . . F Tyler Maxwell pulled Everett into a 3-2 tie at 1:56 of the third period and he got the winner, off an assist by F Landon Ferraro, with 38 seconds left in the third period. . . . Everett D Ryan Murray had three assists. . . . Attendance was 6,599. . . . Everett D Alex Theriau took a checking-from-behind major and game misconduct at 13:28 of the third period and the score 3-3.
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SWIFT CURRENT 4 at MOOSE JAW W 1: The Broncos broke open a scoreless game with two goals in the opening two minutes of the second period and went from there. . . . The teams meet Saturday in Swift Current. . . . Attendance in the Crushed Can was 2,774. . . . Broncos F Stepan Novotny scored 35 seconds into the second and F Taylor Vause made it 2-0 on a breakaway at 1:53. . . . “We made mental errors trying to force issues and gave up 14 odd-man rushes throughout the game. That’s unacceptable. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is,” Moose Jaw head coach Dave Hunchak told Mathew Gourlie of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald. “We didn’t give up 14 all year yet and we do it in the home opener.” . . . F Brad Hoban scored the Broncos’ last two goals, the second into an empty net. . . . The Broncos lost D Tanner Muth at 3:27 of the first period. He took a holding penalty just 52 seconds into the game and, at 3:27, it was pointed out to the on-ice officials that Muth wasn’t listed on the game sheet. The Broncos were hit with a bench minor for using an ineligible player and Muth got an early shower. . . . Moose Jaw D Dylan McIlrath, who was returned Friday by the New York Rangers, didn’t play. He will dress for Saturday’s rematch.
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PRINCE ALBERT 2 AT SASKATOON 3: The Blades erased a 2-1 third-period deficit and won on two goals from F Darian Dziurzynski. . . . He tied the score at 7:56 of the third period and won it at 18:14 on the PP. . . . Saskatoon G Steven Stanford stopped 35 shots. . . . Saskatoon D Dalton Thrower, who turns 17 in December, scored his first WHL goal. It came in his 56th regular-season game. . . . Attendance was 5,446. . . . The teams meet Saturday in Prince Albert.
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RED DEER 4 AT EDMONTON 1: The Rebels scored the first four goals, opening up a 4-0 lead early in the third period. . . . D Matt Dumba, the fourth overall pick in the 2009 bantam draft, got his first WHL at 6:32 of the first period. He had two assists in six games last season. . . . Red Deer G Darcy Kuemper stopped 27 shots. . . . Attendance was 6,320. . . . D Alex Petrovic drew two assists for Red Deer. . . . The teams meet again Saturday in Red Deer.
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PRINCE GEORGE 2 at KAMLOOPS 5: LW Dylan Willick, who is from Prince George, scored twice to lead the Blazers. . . . He was credited with his first goal at 10:42 of the first period when a shot by D Linden Saip, on a Kamloops power play, appeared to glance off him. Willick said after the game that he wasn’t certain that it was his goal and that team officials would check the video. . . . Kamloops C Chase Schaber had a Gordie Howe hat trick — a goal, an assist and a scrap with Prince George D Martin Marincin, a Slovakian. . . . The night’s other bout featured LW Bernhard Keil of the Blazers, who is from Germany, and Cougars F Parker Stanfield. . . . Kamloops G Jon Groenheyde was outstanding, with 39 saves. . . . Prince George F Brett Connolly, who was reassigned earlier in the day by the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, flew into Kelowna late in the afternoon and arrived in Kamloops in time to play. He scored the Cougars’ first goal. . . . Attendance was 4,597.
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
gdrinnan.blogspot.com
Taking Note on Twitter