TALK ABOUT GOING WINLESS
Hockey club tries to keep its sanity
Spencer McHaffie was a pointper-game forward in his playing days. He could shoot and pass and agitate, and he made himself intimately familiar with the penalty box. Mostly, he knew how to win: he helped the Aldergrove Kodiaks to a Junior B championship in 2013-14, his last full season in lower British Columbia’s Pacific Junior Hockey League.
Now he was back in Surrey, B.C., his hometown, and home to a PJHL franchise since summer 2016. The team had been forced to relocate from nearby Langley; they now play at the North Surrey Recreation Centre, down the block from city hall and an expansive public library. McHaffie went to watch a few games with his twin brother, Scott, another former Kodiaks star.
The team did not win. Not once. “We were looking at the standings,” McHaffie said, “just being like, ‘Wow, how does a team lose that many games in a row?’ ”
By the numbers, the Surrey Knights are Canada’s most wretched junior hockey team. They have endured, consecutively, two of the most trying seasons a franchise could possibly play through. In 2015-16, as the Langley Knights, they won only four games out of 44 and finished at the bottom of the 10-team PJHL. The 2016-17 season was worse: 44 losses, three of them in overtime, and zero wins. They lost 21 games by five goals or more, and several margins were grimmer: 11-0, 15-3, 13-0, and on down the line.
The Knights were young this season, said general manager Amar Gill, and stocked with players who wouldn’t have got the opportunity to play elsewhere in the league. And they were struck by extraordinary misfortune, from injuries to bad bounces to the loss of their co-owner and onetime coach, a former Toronto Maple Leaf now serving a six-year suspension for his role in a September 2015 brawl.
“What could go wrong did go wrong,” said PJHL president Ray Stonehouse. “The kids that were there, you don’t like to see any young man have to suffer through game after game after game losing. If you couldn’t feel sorry for them, you don’t have blood in your veins.
“From one perspective, they can’t get any worse,” Stonehouse added. “You can’t go any worse than 0-44.”
The PJHL bills itself as a developmental league; its mandate is to train players for future stops in the Junior A B.C. Hockey League, the major junior Western Hockey League and the NCAA. Not everyone moves past Junior B, but over the years, scores of alumni have worked their way up to the NHL, including Ottawa Senators centre Kyle Turris, a former Grandview Steeler; Washington Capitals defenceman Karl Alzner, a Richmond Sockeye; and New York Islanders winger Andrew Ladd, a Port Coquitlam Buckeroo.
These days, the Buckeroos are known as the Port Moody Panthers, the team that has finished closest to the Knights in the standings for two straight seasons: 17 points higher in 2015-16 and 30 points better this year. The reigning champions, meanwhile, are the Mission City Outlaws, the Knights’ opponent on the night it all began to go wrong.
The Outlaws beat the Langley Knights 9-3 on Sept. 24, 2015, a game called about two minutes into the third period amid a benchclearing melee that injured several players. Knights co-owner and coach John Craighead, a longtime pro who played five games with the Maple Leafs early in the 1996-97 season, was suspended indefinitely by the PJHL after confronting Mission City’s coach on the opposing bench. B.C. Hockey set Craighead’s ban at six years last January.
Losing Craighead’s insight and experience “was difficult,” said Gill, who also owns a stake in the team. “He can’t be part of any hockey operations, any practices, any managing of players, any prospecting the players. That’s a key loss.”
The Knights, who were 1-2-1 before facing Mission City, won only three more games after the brawl, and none after Nov. 19, 2015 — the franchise’s most recent victory. The losing skid spans 66 regularseason games and the team’s relocation to Surrey, a move necessitated by the arrival in Langley of the Western Hockey League’s Vancouver Giants this fall.
The Surrey Knights opened play under the stewardship of Paul Whintors, a former defenceman at Cornell University who succeeded Craighead as head coach after the brawl. This November, as the loss total crept into double digits, Whintors was replaced behind the bench by a pair of 22-year-olds: the McHaffie twins, Spencer as head coach and Scott as the assistant.
Gill and Whintors tell different stories about the coach’s time with the team. Gill said the locker-room was “all over the place” under Whintors, whose hockey philosophy, he said, was at odds with that of several key players.
“I gave him the green light to run the team and systems and manage some of the players, and it just didn’t work out with him,” Gill said. “Players were allowed to run the room, and you can’t have that. You can’t have two, three different groups in the dressing room going their different directions. The coach has got to be involved. It’s his dressing room.”
Whintors said his relationship with the players was good, and that he struggled to recruit new players to Surrey because the Knights have a reputation for persistently selling off “high-end” talent to other teams for little or no return.
“You learned to cope with what you had once you realized you would not be getting any players back in trades,” Whintors said. “It would be nice to see some consideration for the kids and what they go through to be in that environment. As much as I loved it and everything else, at the end of the day, they’re still some young kids wanting to get to the next level. Stuff like that can lead them down a different path.”
At any rate, the McHaffie brothers inherited a team in flux. The Knights were outscored 47-3 over one six-game stretch in November. They allowed eight or more goals four times in the first half of the year; that number rose to 13 by season’s end. The most “demoralizing” losses, Spencer McHaffie said, were also their closest: a pair of double-overtime defeats in January, 4-3 to the North Vancouver Wolf Pack and 3-2 to Port Moody.
“When we had got there, guys weren’t close with each other, guys weren’t buying in. The professionalism wasn’t there. We had guys showing up late to practice,” McHaffie said. “We tried to instil a professional atmosphere when we got there and show them what it takes to win, show them what it takes to battle with one another. It was just one of those things where (winning) didn’t happen.”
Some players quit; others got hurt. The team iced a 12-man lineup in one game, McHaffie said, well below the 20 allowed. They dressed 44 skaters and five goalies in total, including 15 “affiliates” called up from minor hockey. In mid-November, leading scorer Blake McCulloch moved to the Delta Ice Hawks and captain Nicolas Bizzutto was traded to Mission City.
Only one thing stayed consistent.
“We always told them, ‘It’s one game. You’ve just got to win one game, and then people stop talking, people stop making articles on you, all that kind of stuff,’ ” McHaffie said. “It was a tough go.”
The question, now, is where the Knights go from here? Their season ended in early February with a 7-2 loss to Aldergrove, the McHaffies’ alma mater. The PJHL off-season will begin when the playoffs conclude later this month; Aldergrove and Delta are set to face off in the final.
There are some positives to take from a lost season. Young players who may have been buried on other PJHL rosters earned significant ice time in Surrey, and Gill said many made great strides.
One was 18-year-old forward Jin Woo Lee, who was cut from a few other junior squads before scoring nine goals and 22 points for the Knights, the most on the team. Defenceman Shaun Simpson missed only two games all year and shouldered 30-plus minutes on many nights.
“I made a lot of good friends on the team, and that’s part of the reason why I was still going when a lot of guys decided to call it quits halfway through,” Simpson, 18, said. “I felt that might come back to haunt them later on. Teams look at that and they see a player who didn’t want to stick around with a team, and then they look at guys who stuck through something like that. It says a lot about them.”
The players who saw out the season learned to battle through adversity, Gill said. They showed heart, McHaffie said, and “worked really hard for each other.” More tangibly, they will take the ice in 2017-18 with an additional year of seasoning, no small matter for a team that had nine rookies, aged 16 to 18.
To Stonehouse, the league president, the Knights’ return to respectability will hinge on recruiting. Every player eligible to join the PJHL is a free agent; there is no draft or assignments based on geography. As members of a payto-play league, teams must convince potential signees to spend thousands of dollars for the chance to don their jersey.
Ultimately, the task of winning the Knights’ first game since uprooting to Surrey will fall to the players. They would have needed 38 more points this season to surpass Mission City, the fourthplace team in their conference, and make the playoffs. But the playoffs are not so distant a memory: the Knights won 23 games and finished second in the conference in 2014-15, their penultimate season in Langley.
Above all, Gill is hoping to return to that form for their sake.
“It’s all about the players,” he said. “The guys I’ve kept — the core guys, the guys that were injured and the guys that never quit, the 12-15 of them — I’d be very excited for them.”
One of the general manager’s early plans for the off-season was to sit down with his coaches, to appraise the season and assess their expectations for next year. The McHaffie brothers have a couple things going for them, Gill said: “They were motivated, and they don’t quit. I love that attitude about them.”
They also have memories from their time as players, of a PJHL title and everything it took to get there.
“We want to be able to take the team as far as possible — wherever that may be, if that’s winning 10 games or if it’s winning championships,” Spencer McHaffie said. “It’s about the guys in the room. We want to be able to make this a winning foundation.
“As a coach, I mean, you always want to win,” he continued, allowing himself a laugh. “It’s not fun losing.”
Teams look at that and they see a player who didn’t want to stick around with a team, and then they look at guys who stuck through something like that. It says a lot about them.