The London Knights of 2017-18 are heading toward the playoffs with a roster that resembles one from 15 years ago.
There is youth, but there is excellent talent. There is inexperience, but there is all kinds of enthusiasm. And no matter who it is, they have a tough opponent awaiting them in round one.
It’s worth remembering just what that tough, young squad was able to accomplish 15 seasons ago.
In 2003, the Knights were led by veterans like Danny Bois, Ryan Hare and Mike Stathopoulos. There were second-year players like Corey Perry and Dylan Hunter and the list of rookies included Dave Bolland, Brandon Prust, Marc Methot and Danny Syvret. Chris Houle stood in the crease. Houle was a guy that Mark Hunter (then Knights General Manager) had found in Caslan, Alta., just under two hours northeast of Edmonton.
“We didn’t limp into the playoffs, but we weren’t a top seed,” Prust recalls.
If there was a common trait throughout the lineup, it was how determined every player was about the role each was given.
London had gone 31-27-3 in the regular season and entered the post-season as the fifth seed, up against the skill of 100-point man and Maple Leafs’ prospect Kyle Wellwood, the toughness of another future NHLer in Cam Janssen and maybe the biggest obstacle of all, the atmosphere inside Windsor Arena.
“I always remember how small Windsor Arena felt,” says Rick Steadman, who played all 14 games in London’s playoff run that year. “Walking out through the crowd, they were always yelling at you. Branks would get on the bench and he’d have his black glove on, giving the jinx to the other team’s goalie. Thinking back, all of it created a great place to be and it was a lot of fun to play in it.”
The Knights were able to survive everything the Spitfires and their fans threw at them in Game 1. They snuck out a 3-2 victory with an early third-period power play goal from Kyle Quincey and 35 saves from Houle.
The second-year goaltender faced fewer than 30 shots just once in the series.
“He made so many saves that he made some facing the wrong way,” chuckles Dylan Hunter. “He made 60 saves in a row a few times. We used to laugh. He would have his back iced down because he was actually spinning around, taking shots from anywhere. That was his style. He could face anywhere in the building and still find a way to get an arm or a leg on a shot.”
Through four games, the teams were tied 2-2 in the series. Both had won at home and on the road and Windsor had managed to pull off a wild 7-6 overtime victory in Game 3. Wellwood got the winner as part of a five-point game. That was the only game that truly saw Wellwood go off. He was a player who could not be shut down, but who could be limited. London held him to nine points in the other six games, which was a victory for the Knights and a reason the series went all the way to seven games.
After London went ahead three games to two, Windsor pulled out a 3-2 win in Game 6 in London on a goal by John Scott Dickson that was scored with 1:05 left in regulation time.
That set the stage for a one-game, winner-take-all at Windsor Arena on April Fool’s Day. Stathopoulos admits, there was no fooling around going into it.
“Game 7 was probably the most intense game that I was a part of during my time with the Knights. The old Windsor arena was particularly hostile that night. Going in there and playing the game that we did to knock them out was something.”
London jumped out to a 2-0 lead before the game was three and a half minutes old on goals by team captain Danny Bois and budding superstar Corey Perry. The Knights led 4-2 at the end of the second period.
In the first minute of the third period, Tim Gleason cut London’s lead to a goal, but Dylan Hunter responded 39 seconds later to put London ahead 5-3. Windsor would cut the lead again at 5:06, but Jimmy Ball scored less than two minutes after that to put the Knights back up by two. Rick Steadman finished the scoring in a 7-4 victory to send Windsor fans home unhappy and send London to the second round against the Plymouth Whalers.
“The way the rookies played was so great,” remembers Stathopoulos. “That young defence corps provided the foundation for the Memorial Cup win in 2005 and they played great.”
Dylan Hunter says the lessons the Knights players learned went even deeper than that.
“I think we learned how to beat a team that was more talented and higher in the standings. When it was reversed and we were the better team, we understood to keep our cool. We knew what teams were trying to do against us. Just play defence and hope for a lucky one.”
And they almost did it a second time that spring, pushing the Plymouth Whalers, the second best team in the Western Conference to seven games.
London got victories in Game 1 and Game 3 against the Whalers and had Plymouth chasing them early in the series, but it was the Knights who fell behind three games to two and had to win the sixth game of the series at home to stay alive. They did that with a convincing 5-1 stifling of the veteran Whalers team that featured James Wisniewski, Chris Thorburn, John Mitchell and Chad LaRose. LaRose scored 61 goals during the 2002-03 regular season.
The Knights fought right to the end in Game 7. The game sat tied 2-2 in the third period until John Vigilante scored the game winner at the 13:38 mark and Plymouth closed things out 4-2. They went on to meet the Kitchener Rangers, the eventual Memorial Cup Champions, and lost that series in seven games. Whalers players wonder to this day what might have happened had they not been played so tough by the Knights. The Rangers skated through the first two rounds of their championship run, losing just one game.
Still, those 14 games in March and April of 2003 taught the players who would remain on the London Knights roster for the two and three years that followed a whole lot about what it takes to play in pressure situations and more importantly, what it takes to win in those situations.
This year’s team has chance to ride a similar very similar path as the playoffs get going in 2018.
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