Memorial Cup: The format still stinks

Sportsnet renewing its television deal with the Canadian Hockey League meaning there's no chance of overhauling the outdated format for the Memorial Cup.

As awesome as the Windsor Spitfires' win for a town and a team, the fact remains it's a tournament where, as super-commenter Dennis Prouse put it, "all you need is a 1-2 record to make the playoffs."

You know what this means, though? In the big picture, there was a point behind the booing at the Rimouski Colisée yesterday. You just have to believe it wasn't being vented at the teenagers on the Kelowna Rockets, but at the highers-up such as CHL president David Branch, who refuse to ditch the overly drawn out, outdated format since it's a cash cow (and TV ratings were up from last season, but here one could point out that's not saying much since a U.S. team represented the WHL in 2008).

Regan Bartel, Kelowna's play-by-play man, stuck up for his guys, and there's not a word there that's wrong. Teenaged players should not be booed, but the adults who left them hanging in the wind should:

"... I was a little turned off by the reaction of the crowd at the Colisée over the booing every time the Rockets touched the puck. The booing was the result of the fans belief that the Rockets threw Tuesday's game against the Spitfires when they had a chance to eliminate them from the tournament. Essentially it looked like the fans are blaming the Rockets for the demise of both Rimouski and Drummondville. Windsor would beat Rimouski in the tie breaker before eliminating Drummondville in the semi-finals. To say the Rockets threw the game is laughable."

Obviously, that game was on the level. This was no repeat of the stunt Mike Keenan pulled at the 1980 tournament, when his Peterborough Petes lost the last game of the round-robin so they could face Cornwall instead of host Regina in the final. (That debacle prompted a change in format.)

In this case, Windsor was the No. 1-ranked team. Kelowna probably had trouble getting motivated to play their final round-robin game since there was nothing at stake for them, since they were assured a spot in the final. Each Québec team had a chance to oust Windsor in win-or-go-home match and didn't get it done.

The point is the Canadian Hockey League has a problem if customers perceive that it could be to a team's advantage to dump a game. Meantime, the fact a team does not need to win the majority of its round-robin games and can still win the championship is kind of chintzy.

The rub is that in 1980, as Gregg Drinnan related in a great retrospective on the '80 debacle, Branch's predecessor, the late Ed Chynoweth and the other powers-that-were had the humility to realize bad policy could lead to bad results.

"We were lucky for eight years under this system ... There's no sense moaning over what's happened now. Everybody coming into this knew the rules, knew the pitfalls and whatever. It's just unfortunate that this had to happen in our league's turn as host and in the host team's own city.

"Still, we (in junior hockey) do recognize that we do get ourselves into some great holes with the way we conduct ourselves at times."

More Drinnan:

"Brian Shaw, the WHL's chairman of the board, added: 'We, as adults, have put the youngsters in a precarious position because there is a loophole or two in the formula as we know it.

" 'The format, as it stands, is all right as long we put in a modification to prevent a recurrence of what happened Friday night. This formula is the best to bring together competitors from across Canada.

" 'There was a suggestion to go back to an East-West final, but we're involved with the education of our players. We don't want them out of class for the length of time it would take. With the present round-robin taking exactly one week, they don't miss too much school.' "

You wouldn't hear that kind of candour today, even with the increased lip service major junior hockey pays to education. Everything is tamer than it was 30 years ago. Tamer players, tamer fans, and certainly a tamer media. Thank goodness for those Spitfires:

Monday morning with Mr. Canoehead...

Let it bounce off you like raisins off an Oldsmobile ... check out Puck Daddy's post on the Memorial Cup, by the way ...

Mark Teixeira hitting a home run at Coors Field East the new Yankee Stadium on a pitch where he broke his bat. There would be calls for a Congressional inquiry if someone built a park in Denver or Houston where it was that easy to hit a home run.

Broadcasters who don't realize you "can't succeed by forcing zany or funny or irreverence," as Phil Mushnick put it. That would include TSN's Darren Dutchyshen joking about Pittsburgh Penguins star Evgeni Malkin's parents "having sexy time" while recapping a playoff game last week. It's not insensitive, it's just witless. Borat references were old three days after the movie came out, let alone almost three years later.

The same goes for Rogers Sportsnet baseball commentator Darrin Fletcher eating on-air during a recent Jays game. They're just having fun, damn it, so what if it's bad broadcasting?

Knowing that if the NHL moves the start of the Stanley Cup final ahead to this weekend, it will only be because of a bout of temporary sanity. It means cheering for Detroit to oust Chicago on Tuesday, which is a small price to pay.

An altogether stinky sports Sunday: Blue Jays lose sixth in a row, the Memorial Cup finally was basically over halfway through the first period, the NBA playoff game was a hackfest (61 fouls called in Orlando's win) and having to fake an interest in the Indianapolis 500. There's a lot to be said for being aloof and acting above it all.

Windsor wins Memorial Cup, scores one for Malcolm Gladwell

The Windsor Spitfires, junior hockey champions, were a great third-period team.

And a great second-quarter team.

The wordsmiths covering the Memorial Cup can capture the spirit of Windsor's triumph for the papers and the sportscasts. The Spitfires, representing a city devastated by the bottoming-out of the U.S. auto industry, are the first team to win the Memorial Cup after losing its first two games of the tournament. They are just a year removed from captain Mickey Renaud's death from a rare heart ailment age 19, which GM Warren Rychel said at the time was "the biggest tragedy in Spitfire history."

(Puck Daddy has did it justice, brilliantly.)

A broader if not necessarily larger truth could be Rychel and coach Bob Boughner, who as our own Trevor Stewart explained last November, have a special eye for talent. This is kind of a complicated post and you're excused for not reading.

The book Outliers shone a light on the disproportionate number of elite hockey players born in the first three months of the year. The Spitfires actually had the fewest (7) of the four teams at the tournament. The tourney MVP, good Kingston boy Taylor Hall, is a November baby, who is not eligible for the NHL draft until 2010. Windsor's captain and No. 1 goaltender were also born late in the year. The runners-up, the Kelowna Rockets, whose Western Hockey League drafts players at age 15 (a year earlier than the other two leagues), had the most, 10, which is fairly typical. The point is the obvious: Maybe one way to get a read on a major junior team's front office is to see how many regulars it has who were born outside the Jan. 1-March 31 window.

This does not explain the outcome of today's game. That debate could be steered around to the ridiculously long layoff Kelowna had between meaningful games. The Spitfires scored on their first three shots before the Rockets could even skate off the rust from four days between games, for pity's sake. As defenceman Ben Shutron told Gare Joyce of sportsnet.ca, they were "the best-conditioned team in the tournament."

However, what made that possible? They had to get there first. Looking at the rosters for the two finalists hints at Malcolm Gladwell's point in Outliers about how we are not "always particularly smart about how to make the best use of our talent." (ESPN.com, Dec. 8, 2008.) It might also illustrate how Rychel/Boughner are smarter than most of their competition.

As Gladwell explains, there is a huge blind spot with identifying good hockey players. The major junior teams which can negotiate around this might be the ones who put themselves in position to pull off something like Windsor did:

"It's a beautiful example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey programs is Jan. 1 ... Coaches start streaming the best hockey players into elite programs, where they practice more and play more games and get better coaching, as early as 8 or 9. But who tends to be the 'best' player at age 8 or 9? The oldest, of course — the kids born nearest the cut-off date, who can be as much as almost a year older than kids born at the other end of the cut-off date. When you are 8 years old, 10 or 11 extra months of maturity means a lot."

The Windsor brain trust's wisdom might be borne out when you group the Spitfires' and Rockets' Memorial Cup rosters by which quarter of the year the players were born in (January-February-March; April-May-June; and so on.)

Kelowna: 10-4-6-3
Windsor: 7-10-4-5

Kelowna's 10 players born between Jan. 1-March 31 include star defenceman Tyler Myers (Feb. 1, 1990) and starting goalie Mark Guggenberger (Jan. 10, 1989). The Rockets were considered an improbable WHL champion, but the team they upset in the championship series, the Calgary Hitmen, had a somewhat similar birthday distribution: 10-6-4-2. The main reason to cite Kelowna and Calgary is to show what the age distribution often tends to be with major junior teams: Lots of players born early in the year, very few born in the summer and fall. It doesn't explain why Windsor won, it's just background for how they rebuilt in two years.

At age 16, when players are drafted in the OHL, the advantage early-birthday kids have can wreak havoc with teams' evaluations. It evens out somewhat by the time those players are 18, 19 and 20. The Windsor team which Warren Rychel assembled has several contributors born in the second quarter of the year, between April 1 and June 30 (hence second-quarter team):

• Greg Nemisz (June 5, 1990) — Nemisz, who had seven points in six games at the Memorial Cup, was thought of as a bit of reach when he was taken with the No. 7 overall pick in the 2006 OHL draft. Two years later, the 6-foot-4, 200-lb. winger became a first-round pick in the NHL (25th overall to Calgary).
  


• Dale Mitchell (April 9, 1989) — Like Nemisz, Mitchell went in the same round of the NHL draft that he did in the OHL draft (third round to the Leafs in 2007 and third round by Oshawa in '05). Mitchell, a trade deadline pickup, scored a natural hat trick in the tie-breaker game vs. Rimouski and some thought he, not Hall, could have been the MVP.
  


• Andrei Loktionov (May 30, 1990) — Also notched seven points during the tournament. Kind of a wild card since he's Russian.


• Mark Cundari (April 23, 1990)— One of Windsor's top defencemen; was able to take a regular shift in the OHL as a 16-year-old rookie in 2006-07, when Boughner and Rychel went with a youth movement.


• Ben Shutron (June 14, 1988) — A feel-good story, since he played for Kitchener in the '08 Memorial Cup and was a whipping boy while he was with the human comedy which is the Kingston Frontenacs. Gare Joyce wrote a nice piece about Shutron for sportsnet.ca ahead of Sunday's final.

Windsor was the only team at the tourney with more April-May-June birthdates than Jan.-Feb.-March (Drummondville, the Quebec league champ, had eight of each).

Meantime, three of Windsor's veteran role players were all "wrong birthdays" who were acquired in trades:

• Rob Kwiet (Aug. 2, 1988) — An overage defenceman who started out with the Mississauga St. Michael's Majors. Scored the third Windsor goal.
  
  
• Lane MacDermid — A tough guy who was a valuable penalty killer during the playoff run. Originally taken 159th overall in the 2005 draft by the Owen Sound Attack.
  
  
• Scott Timmins (Sept. 11, 1989) — Centre who was with Kitchener last season. Originally a fifth-round pick.

Last but not least, there are the fourth-quarter players:

• Andrew Engelage (Oct. 28, 1988) — A kind of OHL version of the Red Wings' Chris Osgood (often criticized, but his teams win) who was originally a 13th-round draft choice. Ended up being in net for 64 wins this season after Windsor was criticized in some corners for not trading for a more ballyhood goalie, such as Red Wings prospect Thomas McCollum.
  
  
• Taylor Hall (Nov. 14, 1991) — One wonders what Hall's progress would have been if his family had not moved from Western Canada to Kingston before he was exposed to the draft. Hall's father was a pro athlete (CFL), which means he has the genes to counter his wrong birthday.
  
  
• Harry Young (Nov. 12, 1989) — The team captain and a Windsor native, Young was a fourth-round pick in 2005 by Guelph. Windsor got him via trade.

Of course, by this point, you might have figured out, "Hey, smartass, Windsor's best NHL draft prospect, Ryan Ellis, was born Jan. 3! Doesn't that blow the theory out of the water?"

Ellis, who just became the 20th player to win a world junior gold medal and a Memorial Cup in the same season, is an outlier. Concerns about his size (5-foot-10, 173 lbs.) led to the offensive defenceman slipping through the entire first round in the 2007 OHL draft before Windsor snapped him up in the second. If you read the feature story Sun Media's Ryan Pyette wrote about Ellis ahead of today's game, you see traces of that "ten thousand hours" theory:

" 'I was constantly shooting pucks,' Windsor Spitfires star defenceman Ryan Ellis said of growing up in Freelton, Ont., near Hamilton. 'We had a (white) garage door my dad tried to repair a million times. But it didn't work. There was really nothing left of it. It had brick in the middle but it just covered the net.

" 'I basically destroyed the door.'

"... Boughner remembers, a couple of years ago, pulling into the Ellis driveway to interview the Spitfires' potential draft pick. He saw the garage door with the terrible dents.

" 'Warren (GM Warren Rychel) said I have to see this kid play and after I did, I went to meet him,' Boughner said. 'You watch him knock down bouncing pucks at the blue line and he has the most unbelievable hand-eye co-ordination I've ever seen. It's innate talent, but he works harder than anyone at it. He shoots a ton of pucks. In the games, he doesn't shoot enough for my liking. I'm always on him to shoot more.' "

You know the rest of the story. Ellis scored the sealer today, the fourth goal in a 4-1 win, on a slapshot from the point after some nice work along the end boards by the November baby, Taylor Hall.

Obviously, junior teams should not draft or trade based on birthdates. Maybe they should use it a check when they try gauge the upside of a 15- or 16-year-old player. (Oddly enough, the Belleville Bulls are losing P.K. Subban, who went from sixth-round pick in the OHL to a top prospect for the Montreal Canadiens and a two-time world junior defenceman. Subban's birthday? May 13, making him another second-quarter player.)

All this might go to show is how well each team stickhandles around a built-in bias in hockey toward players born in January, February and March. It might show how well teams do with evaluating a player who is not a finished OHL-ready product at age 16, which is almost every player.

It is interesting if you look at the birthdates of players on an also-ran team. Selecting one at random ... the Kingston Frontenacs.

It turns out the Frontenacs are absolutely top-heavy with January, February and March birthdates, 12 in total. In the 2007 OHL priority selection, they didn't take a single player born between July 1-Dec. 31. Coincidentally or not, the only selections from that '07 draft who have panned out were the first two picks, forward Ethan Werek (June 7) and d-man Taylor Doherty (March 2). Doherty is coming off a disappointing second season, but will get drafted into the NHL because teams can't teach size (6-foot-8, 220 lbs. give or take).

Only two players on this past season's team, defenceman Brian Lashoff (July 16, 1990) and winger George Lovatsis (Nov. 30, 1989), were born in the second half of the year. Lashoff ended up being signed by the Detroit Red Wings after being passed over in the 2008 NHL draft, which makes him a late bloomer. Lovatsis proved to be a fan favourite last season. They were, on balance, decent additions.

As you might expect with a 19th-place hockey club, the Frontenacs make a lot of in-season trades. One of general mangler Larry Mavety's trademarks is to deal for a former high draft choice, telling anyone who will listen that he's bound to realize his potential with the Fronts.

This season the Frontenacs traded for three forwards who had each gone relatively high in the draft, Kelly Geoffrey, Colt Kennedy and Mitch Lebar. You know where this is going: Their birthdays fall within a five-day span in late January, the 25th, 28th and 29th. Perhaps it is true they haven't found the right fit. Based on the evidence, it might be that starting from an early age, they had a leg up on their peers. That made them seem better than they really were, and now their peer group has closed the gap.

Windsor has an abundance of players who didn't have the benefit of an early birthday and/or were not drafted early at age 16. They're the champs. Kingston, the Siberia of major junior hockey, has all these players with early birthdays who were taken high and are now perceived as not playing to potential. In the words of an old Twilight Zone episode, how many coincidences add up to a fact?

There are other factors in building a winner in the OHL. How players are treated, fan and community support, being able to bend the draft rules, each play a role. The best this analysis can do is be a gauge for who can find the hidden gem, and who doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

(In the recent draft, the Frontenacs used the 37th and 42nd overall picks on players not born in January, February and March. Winger Brett Morgan, a late second-rounder, was born Aug. 12. Clark Seymour, the defenceman taken early in the third, was born May 18. There might be hope yet for this franchise!)

Memorial Cup: There can't be that much sightseeing to do in Rimouski

Fish and the Memorial Cup begin to smell after four days.

The Memorial Cup's nightmare scenario kicked in last night. The Kelowna Rockets beat Drummondville 6-4 and secured a spot in Sunday's final. Kelowna's last round-robin contest tonight vs. the Taylor Hall-led Windsor Spitfires will essentially be an exhibition game, coast-to-coast on Rogers Sportsnet (while their baseball-playing corporate brethren are on TSN2). Meantime, the other three teams will play up to three more games to decide whom the Rockets meet in the final. Don't worry, CHL president Dave Branch, your national championship's format makes sense.

It is reasonable to wonder if any of the journalists who are out there for a long, pretty much pointless in Rimouski, Que., are going to sack up and ask Branch when he plans to adopt a more compact format. The only reason for the current model is greed.

This is not an original thought. David Naylor and Bob McCown, in their 100 Greatest Hockey Arguments book, made a very strong case for switching to a Frozen Four format for the Mem Cup. The gist of it was, find a way to have four teams qualify (no "host teams") and do it over a single weekend.

It is understood that there are financial considerations for a 10-day tournament. It is a cash cow for the host team. This being Canada, there's a feeling that it's a waste to have teams travel cross-country to play only one or two games. Since the all-news-is-local phenomena applies in junior hockey (once the local team goes out, most people tune out), the belief is that there has to be a team with a rooting interest, hence the host berth. Reverting to a three-team double round-robin will never happen, since everyone remembers 1980, when Mike Keenan's Peterborough Petes dumped their final game to ensure an all-eastern final vs. Cornwall (which backfired, since the Royals won).

However, a badly designed format will inevitably yield bad results.

It's not like this happens every year at the Mem Cup. The way the 2007 tourney in Vancouver unfolded was close to a perfect scenario. Two teams went 2-1 and two went 1-2 in the round-robin, which led to a tie-breaker game. The Medicine Hat Tigers, who earned the bye straight through to Sunday, ended up being defeated in the final, albeit by the host team, the Vancouver Giants, who didn't earn their way there on the ice but through their ownership being willing to sign some cheques.

The CHL cannot count on that happening. Branch and the boys might have good little moneymaker on their hands, but it shortchanges players and fans watching across Canada (and the U.S.).

First of all, the drawn-out format, one could argue, can sap teams of momentum, which is important in playoff hockey. Imagine how Kelowna is going to feel if they lose Sunday after sitting and stewing and sightseeing for four days. The players have also put in a full season, 68-72 games plus four playoff rounds, while getting paid a token sum.

By mid-May, 17- to 21-year-old juniors only have so much good hockey left in them. The second and third games of the tournament, Windsor's two one-goal losses to the QMJHL teams, were very entertaining, but can they be expected to keep that up as the week drags along? Probably not.

The way to do it, as others have noted, is to confine it to one weekend. Find a way to have four teams qualify and do it all over a single weekend. Or have two league champions play off for the right to meet the champion of the league which produced the previous champion. In that scenario, Drummondville could have gone to Windsor for the semi-final and the winner could have proceeded right on to Kelowna. Perhaps that would not work or be deemed too cost-prohibitive.

Any and all ideas for fixing the tournament are welcome. The current model is as broken as the Cup itself was after Spokane got it last season.

Battalion has no interest in a Spitty party

The Battalion and the Spitfires: hmmm, let’s see if we can get through a preview of the OHL final, which starts tonight in Windsor without resorting to dozens of dirty war-infused hyperbolic clichés sports writers live off this time of year.

Or we could go with the most obvious question lede: Can Battalion general Cody Hodgson shoot down the Spitfires and earn yet another medal?Hodgson is the most decorated player in junior hockey right now and probably the best hockey player outside the NHL. And if the Battalion is to knock off Windsor, ranked as Canadian junior's No.1 team for the bulk of '08-'09, he'll be the catalyst.

While Hodgson's hockey acumen is nothing new at this point - he did, after all, lead the WJC in scoring as an alternate captain and was named the OHL's most outstanding player this week - In reality, the 2009 OHL final is a sweet breeze of fuzzy-faced freshness full of players, coaches and fans who haven't been here before.

There's no doubting backroom deals at OHL draft time systematically keep the same clubs on the top of the heap. Still, the right to play in the OHL championship series still remains a socialist ideal. Brampton and Windsor will become the 12th and 13th clubs to reach a league final in the past eight seasons. During that time, neither the Spits nor the Battalion caught a whiff of the league finals. It's taken the Battalion 11 seasons since expansion to get out of the first round. Windsor's last league final was 21 years ago. Between 2001 and 2008 these two counted just six playoff series wins between them.

So Spits coach-GM team of Bob Boughner and Warren Rychel, and Brampton’s one-man coach-GM Stan Butler will probably remind their charges that this chance doesn’t come around too often. Perhaps they’ll remind themselves. Although Butler knows this lesson well – he's been with Brampton for all 11 seasons and is finally here. While Boughner and Rychel have taken their team from worst to first in just three seasons since jumping in the Spits' cockpit, the city of Windsor hasn’t gone this deep into spring hockey in two decades.

Rating the regular season: Windsor (57-10-1, 115 pts) was ranked the top team in Canada for most of the season, which instantly slots the Spits as favourites here. Brampton (47-19-2, 96 pts) racked up the same amount of points as Windsor (46) after the trade deadline.

Playoff payoff (2009 playoff numbers): Windsor’s (12-3, 79gf-49ga, PP 26.2%, PK 78.2%) Western Conference final victory over London must be the hardest fought five-game series on record in that every game went to overtime. Brampton (12-4, 59gf-44ga, PP 19.5%, PK 83.1%), and Butler, proved something by beating the favoured Bulls in six games on the Eastern front.

Youthful exuberance: Adding to the haven’t-been-here, haven’t-done-this vibe is the youth of some of this series’ biggest stars. The most purely gifted offensive forward in this series, Windsor’s Taylor Hall (late ’91 birthdate), isn’t even eligible for the NHL draft until 2010 – and he’s been dynamic in the playoffs for Windsor with 27 points (11g, 16a) in 15 games. Who doesn’t know and love the puck skills of Ryan Ellis (’91) after he became a media fave during the World Juniors? He’s tied with Hall for the team lead in points through victories over Owen Sound in 4 games, Plymouth in 6, and London in 5. Ellis’ll go in the top half of this summer’s NHL draft.

Brampton’s Matt Duchene is ranked even higher than Ellis for the ’09 Entry Draft. Scouting service Red Line Report even suggested recently that he’s a better prospect than John Tavares after one sizzled and the other fizzled this post-season. Duchene’s speed, two-way play and hockey smarts has been on display in the playoffs as Brampton knocked off Peterborough in 4, Mississauga St. Mike’s in 6 and Belleville in 6.

Game-changers: far as NHL-ready talent is concerned, Brampton has the three best in this series: Hodgson (Vancouver ’08, 10th), Evgeny Grachev (NY Rangers ’08, 3rd) and goalie Thomas McCollum (Detroit ’08, 1st).

Even before Hodgson played a leadership role for Canada’s world gold-winning juniors, he proved his value in Brampton following a late return to the OHL when the NHL Canucks kept him around out of training camp. He strolled back into the Bunker and his presence ignited Brampton’s blazing 16-game winning streak of October-November. The team had started 2-6 start without him. Hodgson is one of the most dangerous players in the OHL, but he’s obviously also the guy the team rallies around. He makes everyone better.

McCollum, a NHL first-rounder, rates better than Windsor’s starter Andrew Engelage, an undrafted overager. His numbers suggest he's the best goalie Butler's ever had. But, as has been the case all season, maybe that gives Engelage a little more incentive.

Windsor’s depth outclasses Brampton’s by a long shot. The club boasts gritty sniper Dale Mitchell (Toronto ’07, 3rd rounder), role player-turned-playoff clutch Eric Wellwood (undrafted ’90 and a Windsor boy, to boot) who scored two of the Spits’ OT winners versus London, and skilled Greg Nemisz (Calgary '08, 1st) as well as experienced blueliners Harry Young (New Jersey ’08, 7th), Ben Shutron (Chicago ’06, 4th) and Rob Kwiet.

Breakdown: Part of me thinks the leadership value of Hodgson-McCollum might be enough to finally put the Battalion over the top after a stretch of three regular season division titles in three years yielded so little post-season success.

But the fact remains, despite what people say about the pansification of hockey, big and tough still matters in the OHL playoffs. The Spitfires, the OHL’s most penalized team in the regular season by a long shot, have that in spades. They’ve got the artillery and are battle-ready (shit, almost made it).

Windsor moves on to the Memorial Cup with a tough six-game series victory.

Jobs? No. A new hockey rink? You betcha.

Although they are paying far from pro level prices, a sports fan can take something positive away from the success the Windsor Spitfires are having in selling season tickets for their new building.

According to the team, there are almost 3,500 season ticket holders now, up from 2,000 last year. Those are some nice numbers, especially considering that Windsor is one of the hardest hit areas of the country in this economic downturn. Maybe there is some truth to the adage that sports is recession proof (or maybe some people are seeing the value in junior hockey versus the Wings...).

The new rink, which was a looooong time coming, opens this Thursday with about as good a game as you could have hoped for - a possible OHL final preview between Belleville and Windsor. It's a bit early to read too much into head-to-head games in the O (both teams will have added talent by the time the playoffs roll around), but that doesn't mean it won't be a hell of a game for the neutral fan to watch.

I'm not neutral. Go Bulls. Crash that party!

O Doctor: The art of truly bottoming out

by Trevor Stewart, O Doctor

When Warren Rychel and Bob Boughner (pictured) seized control of Windsor Spitfires as part of the new ownership group little more than two years ago, a certain amount of skepticism was fair.

Boughner went straight from playing in the NHL to coaching in the OHL, which is almost unheard of since the age of career coaches began a generation ago. Rychel, as GM, wasn’t far from his playing days. Did the pair have the foresight and experience to right the ship, or were they looking for a toy?

You are your record in hockey and it's looking more like the Windsor guys have a handle on new OHL realties as much as anyone else. The Spitfires are 12-1-0, ranked No. 1 in the Canadian Hockey League. Almost everyone else was slower getting to the same point.

“We went young two years ago ... we made those young kids play,” Rychel says of his current leaders.

Rychel didn’t wait until the 2006-07 trade deadline to start making deals, so the young players started getting ice early on. It may have led to a 43-loss, 43-point plod through the 68-game season, but it was like jumping the green light on a rebuild. Last season was a case of a still young Spitfires team being labelled as "surprising" as it climbed to No. 4 in Canada at one point.

The Spits began the season as league favourites. They’ve responded by rolling through the OHL despite the league’s most brutal early-season schedule -– 10-of-13 games on the road, including the team’s longest road trip of the season -– Windsor to Ottawa, Kingston and Belleville.

Two things that the Windsor architects have figured out, making a rapid-fire turnaround from the limping team, wounded by the airing of Akim Aliu-Steve Downie, hazing ritual incident before Boughner and Rychel took over:

The old stardard still stands – shrewd talent evaluation.

Rychel, who was a scout for the Phoenix Coyotes and knew the OHL well before he bought into the Spitfires, has proven to be an adept evaluator of talent. He traded for Josh Bailey and drafted Greg Nemisz, who were first-round 2008 NHL draft picks in his first year. He drafted Kingston's Taylor Hall, who had only moved into Ontario from Western Canada with his family a couple years earlier. Hall might end up being the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 NHL draft. In the same draft year, he nabbed potential 2009 NHL first-rounder Ryan Ellis after 19 of the 20 other OHL teams bypassed the smallish defenceman.

The new reality is that building an OHL powerhouse has to happen fast in today’s league. It can mean playing more young players more often in their rookie and sophomore seasons. It means biting the bullet for a truly woeful season in order to have a top-flight season within the next two. Point being, there's an art to bottoming out.

Middle-of-the-pack seasons only beget more middle-of-the-pack seasons.

"We cleaned out a lot that first year and we’re starting to develop pros," Rychel says, inadvertently pointing out a brutal reality for today’s OHL teams. In the what the hockey media has been calling "the NHL's new salary-cap era" for the past few years, the better junior clubs evaluate and develop the right talent, the more likely the NHL is to snap them up prematurely.

There are currently six of the OHL’s brightest lights from the 2008 NHL draft class with their National League teams, including Windsor’s Bailey (who is currently being held out of the N.Y. Islanders lineup with an undisclosed injury). That’s six major building blocks OHL teams would love have to work with. (Seven if you include the fact the Sudbury Wolves could have Nikita Filatov on their midst.) And that’s just the 2008 draft class.

To think Windsor is this good now after reeling off three weekend wins in three days on their longest road trip of the season –- which included a return to Ottawa where Rychel once captained the 67’s –- and the Spits could be even better with Bailey back in the lineup.

"It's a catch-22 for us," Rychel told a Newsday reporter a couple of weeks ago. "We want to see guys graduate to the NHL. That means we're doing our jobs. But selfishly, on the other hand … he would be huge for us, especially as our No. 1 center and captain, on and off the ice.”

The league-leading Spitfires begin another three-game weekend Thursday with a good matchup against the Western Conference’s third-place team, the Guelph Storm – speaking of teams that have lost their leader to the NHL. How much would Guelph fans love having Drew Doughty anchoring that team, instead of being in Los Angeles? Those days are disappearing fast, though, and the Windsor guys are riding the wave instead of getting crushed by it.