Three-peat for Junior Canucks

St. James-ASSINIBOIA

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This article was published 24/04/2024 (720 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a dynasty in the making in sunny St. James.

On April 14, the St. James Junior Canucks defeated the Pembina Valley Twisters 5-1 in front of a home crowd at Ab McDonald Arena in the St. James Civic Centre to win a third-straight Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League championship.

“It’s awesome,” said Blair Mooney, head coach of the Canucks for the past nine years. “It’s what you do it for, to try to achieve the ultimate goal of winning.”

“It feels pretty special,” added team captain Kale Price. “It’s tough enough to win one championship, never mind a back-to-back, and then a third one.”

The Canucks beat the Twisters 4-1 in the best-of-seven series. A 3-2 loss to Pembina Valley on April 5 was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect playoff run that saw the Canucks sweep the Charleswood Hawks in the semifinals and the Transcona Railer Express in the opening quarter-final round, after going a league-best 37-7-1 in the regular season.

“The biggest thing for us was we had a lot of returning players, with some new players, from those two championship teams prior to this year,” Mooney said. “The strength of the team is our depth, with a lot of skill in a lot of different places. We’ve also had strong goaltending and a pretty close-knit team. The guys all want to play for each other.”

“We’re a skilled team. Probably the most skilled in the league,” Price said. “But we also work very hard. We’re a fast skating team, so when teams turn the puck over on us, we tend to turn around and pounce on it.”

The Canucks have gone 114-15-6, over the past three regular seasons, scoring an average of 5.33 goals per game while allowing 2.6 goals against. Mooney credits the team’s success to the players being dedicated all year round.

“Going into the rink in the middle of January can get pretty tiresome, the dedication the players showed is what got us there,” he said. “If you have talent, but you’re not showing up, it doesn’t get you far. They all showed up.”

“The biggest thing is the atmosphere we’ve created with the guys in that dressing room,” Price said. “We do a lot of stuff together outside of the rink, which really helps us come together when the puck drops.”

While the Canucks will be graduating seven players this season, Mooney feels the team is still well set up for the future.

“When you’re building a program, as important as it is to win, you want to be building for the years to come as well,” he said.

Three of the team’s graduating players — Price, assistant captain Brady Whitely, and goaltender Noah Gilbert — started with the Junior Canucks as underage 17-year-old rookies five years ago. While they missed out on the playoffs their first season and the entirety of their would-be sophomore season, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, they certainly made up for lost time.

“That kind of shaped the way the past three years were going to go,” Mooney said. “After we got those three guys we started to see a lot of talent follow them.”

Price scored seven goals and added nine assists during this year’s playoffs, on top of 19 goals and 36 assists in 44 regular season games. Whitely, a defenceman, had 19 goals and 52 assists in 45 regular season games, along with three goals and 11 assists in the playoffs. In net, Gilbert backstopped the Canucks through all 13 playoff games this season, earning a 2.09 goals against average after suiting up for 27 regular season games and going 22-4-0 with a 2.33 GAA.

“It’s pretty special to cap off my hockey career with something like that,” Price said. “With the big core group we’ve had returning over the past couple years. We kind of knew what we wanted to do from the start. We know how special it is to go three championships in a row.”