It was a warm March evening in Kamloops earlier this year when the Kelowna Rockets faced off against the Blazers.
The game wasn’t a regular-season match. Rather, it was a season-ending tiebreaker to see what team would advance to the first round of the WHL playoffs, with the winner facing the Victoria Royals.
Six minutes and ten seconds into the third period, 19-year-old Blazer left-winger Kobe Mohr broke a 1-1 tie.
Mohr beat Rockets goaltender Roman Basran high glove side, and the Sandman Centre, packed to standing-room only capacity, erupted like a blazing volcano.
It was a bad break for the Rockets. Mohr’s marker turned out to be the winning goal, as the Blazers ended the Rockets’ season that night, winning 5-1.
Fast forward eight months, to Oct. 30, Kelowna veteran forward Kyle Topping slides into the boards in Victoria, breaking his ankle in several places.
It was an another bad break for the Rockets, but this one turned out to be a big break for Kobe Mohr.
A victim of the 20-year-old numbers game in Kamloops, Mohr was playing in the Alberta Junior Hockey League for the Drumheller Dragons.
With Topping on Kelowna’s injured reserve list and about to undergo surgery on his broken ankle, Mohr was added to the Rockets’ roster as the team’s third over-age player.
“He’s a guy that if he was 19 years-old, every team in the league would want him,” Rockets general manager Bruce Hamilton said of his team’s newest acquisition.
Mohr had just finished a game-day skate when he noticed a text on his phone that said “Hello, Bruce Hamilton here from the Kelowna Rockets. Give me call when you can.”
The next morning, Mohr and all his gear were on a plane to Kelowna, set to make his Rockets debut against the Prince George Cougars.
Mohr’s first thought upon reading the text?
“There’s no chance this is real, but it was,” Mohr said.
As for returning to the WHL with a team that will host the 2020 Memorial Cup, Mohr is pretty stoked about it.
“I was like ‘Yeah this is pretty much impossible to turn down,’” Mohr said.
But walking into the Rockets’ dressing room was another thing all together.
“It was like walking on eggshells,” Mohr said about stepping foot inside the Rockets’ room. “I wish I could have seen the looks on the guys faces when the news was broke to them.”
But his past indiscretions while wearing Blazer blue is water under bridge now that he’s wearing Rocket red.
“It’s good now all the air has been cleared,” Mohr said.
“He plays hard, he plays gritty and that’s what we need,” said Rockets captain Nolan Foote.
Foote, who was often the target of Mohr’s incessant chirping, is now his linemate.
“It’s pretty funny being on a line with him after two years of chirping each other and going at it pretty hard,” said Foote, adding “but that’s hockey.”
Now wearing the Ogopogo logo, Mohr will continue to be a burr under the saddle of opposing teams.
“I’ll be a thorn in everyone’s side, every single night,” Mohr said.
But on a team that’s headed to the Memorial Cup, Mohr is going to have to offer more than that in order to stick around until May.
“We’ll have a good look at him and see what he can do for us,” Hamilton said.
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