The start of the Western Hockey League’s regular season is rapidly approaching and the Kelowna Rockets are eager to hit the ice.
On Saturday, Kelowna will open its campaign with a home game against the Portland Winterhawks.
It will be the Rockets’ only game of the week, unlike several other teams who will play twice, like Portland. The Winterhawks will start their season on Friday on the road against the Wenatchee Wild.
This season’s crop of Rockets will resemble most of last season’s squad, including top-scoring forward and NHL draft pick Andrew Cristall, who tallied 39 goals and 95 points in 54 games.
However, the 5-foot-10 winger from Burnaby won’t be suiting up for Kelowna this weekend. Instead, he’ll be in Maryland, at the Washington Capitals’ training camp.
The team selected the 18-year-old in the second round, 40th overall, of the 2023 draft. Washington’s training camp started Wednesday.
“Once we get everybody back here, we’re going to be an exciting team,” said Rockets president and general manager Bruce Hamilton.
“We’ll start without Cristall and we anticipate him being back sometime next week. But the rest of the guys should be all hands on deck.”
Last season, the Rockets stumbled to an eighth-place finish (27-37-4-0, 58 points) out of 10 in Western Conference standings. In the first round of the playoffs, they were swept by the eventual WHL champion Seattle Thunderbirds (54-11-1-2, 111 points).
Hampering the team: Penalties.
The Rockets were the most penalized squad in the league at 1,006 total penalty. The Moose Jaw Warriors were the least penalized at 602 minutes.
“We’re going to be a better team, no doubt about it,” said Hamilton. “It’s a matter of our guys needing to understand that they have to play hard every night.
“And discipline is going to be key for us. (The penalty minutes), I can’t figure that out because we weren’t a tough team. If you’re penalized and tough to play against, that’s one thing. We weren’t very tough to play against.”
The following weekend, on Sept. 30, the Rockets will host the Western Conference’s newest team, the Wenatchee Wild.
However, the Wild are anything but new, having relocated from Winnipeg, and the Rockets will have their hands full next Saturday.
Last season, the Winnipeg Ice had the league’s best record (57-10-1-0, 115 points) en route to winning the Eastern Conference championship.
They also finished atop the East in 2021-22 with 53 wins and 11 points, but arena troubles plagued the franchise, with the owners deciding to sell and the new owners relocating the team to central Washington state.
Notably, the Wild’s new head coach is Kevin Constantine, whom the team hired in August. Constantine guided the expansion Everett Silvertips to a stunning, seven-game playoff win over the Rockets in 2004 – arguably the biggest upset in WHL history, as Kelowna was hosting the Memorial Cup that year.
“They’re going to be real good,” Hamilton said of the Wild. “It’s going to be a pretty exciting time for the people in Wenatchee. They have a nice building and, from our perspective, it’s a four-hour ride, so it’s a day trip for our team, which is real nice.”
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