Inside the CHL – Frontenacs eye OHL prize
Wednesday September 24, 2014
By Aaron Bell
It’s that time of year when coaches and managers around the Canadian Hockey League are waiting with bated breath to see what their counterparts in the National Hockey League are going to do.
You can count Kingston Frontenacs General Manager Doug Gilmour among that crowd.
Gilmour has been keeping an eye on eight of his players that could be returning to the Kingston lineup this season. Or, maybe not.
“I am just sitting by the phone waiting,” Gilmour told the Kingston Whig-Standard this week. “I totally understand that (the OHL) is a feeder league for them. GMs are saying, ‘I need to see a player in a game or two’. I totally understand that. We’re communicating with them. You would like to fast forward it but we can’t.”
The Ontario Hockey League schedule opens tonight with games in Owen Sound and Saginaw while the Frontenacs start their season tomorrow night in Peterborough. They are home to the Ottawa 67’s on Friday in one of nine games on the slate in a busy opening weekend to the new season.
Gilmour welcomed back overager Evan McEneny from the Vancouver Canucks as well as returning stars Roland McKeown and Spencer Watson from the Los Angeles Kings this week and is starting to get a clearer picture of what his lineup is going to look like.
But, Gilmour and the Frontenacs still have one massive question mark: Sam Bennett.
Bennett emerged as a bona-fide OHL star last season and was rewarded for his efforts when the Calgary Flames picked him fourth overall in the NHL Draft in June. He suffered a minor injury in Flames camp but is looking to make his exhibition debut this weekend.
Ottawa 67’s star Sean Monahan was the sixth overall pick of the Flames in 2013 and had a big impact in the NHL as an 18-year-old rookie last season. He scored 22 goals and 34 points in 75 games and the Flames must be wondering if Bennett can pull off a similar feat.
“That’s obviously the goal,” Bennett said. “I’ve worked really hard this summer. I’m just going to do whatever it takes in training camp. Just try my best to make the team.”
Coincidentally, it was Monahan that gave Bennett a glowing endorsement of the Flames and the city of Calgary in the weeks leading up to the draft.
“He talked about Calgary to me and told me what it was like there,” Bennett said. “It made me want to go to Calgary so badly. Fortunately I was able to get picked by them.”
Regardless of what happens with Bennett, the Frontenacs are anticipating a great season. They were ranked second overall in the CHL’s pre-season BMO Top-10 Rankings.
Gilmour is looking forward to the season but says he still isn’t completely sure what his lineup will look like.
“It is really hard to gauge what we have,” Gilmour said. “The biggest thing is seeing our whole team once we get players back.”
The Frontenacs had a terrific regular season last year, racking up 39 wins. It was their best regular season result in two decades but they dropped their opening round playoff series to the Peterborough Petes in a Game 7 overtime heartbreaker on home ice.
In the aftermath, the Frontenacs said good-bye to coach Todd Gill and hello to fresh face Paul McFarland, who was an assistant coach with the Oshawa Generals the past two seasons.
McFarland was already familiar with the Frontenacs’ roster but was happy to get the players into camp over the past two weeks to get a better feel for what he had in his lineup.
“You know them obviously as a player on the ice but a big part of our job is to understand how to get the best out of them,” said McFarland, who played four seasons in the OHL with the Kitchener Rangers and Windsor Spitfires before a four-year run with Acadia University while earning a degree in Business Administration. “That takes getting to know them. And them to get to know you. It is a two-way street.”
McFarland helped the Rangers win an OHL championship and the Memorial Cup in 2003 and plans to take steps towards making the Frontenacs a championship contender as well.
“Hopefully (we’ll be) a hard team to play against that is defensive-minded,” McFarland said. “At the same point the better you play defence the quicker you get the puck to go and try to score goals. With any team when you come in every year defence is something you teach right away. You kind of build out from there.
“That’s the way we’ll start.”