St. Albert D-man plays for host team — again
The 2018 MasterCard Memorial Cup will not be Josh Mahura’s first rodeo.
The St. Albert product will be playing in his second national major junior hockey tournament as a member of the host team when the Regina Pats face the Hamilton Bulldogs in the opening game Friday.
Mahura, 20, has spent the last season and a half with Regina after being traded from the Red Deer Rebels, who hosted the event in 2016.
“Going through it the second time, it gets you a little more excited knowing what you are going to experience,” Mahura said.
“For me, it’s a little more exciting being a little bit of an older guy now and taking a bit more responsibility on the team. It’s very exciting for me having gone through it once already and knowing how it goes.”
A third-round pick — 85th overall — of the Anaheim Ducks in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft, the sixfoot-one, 185-pound defenceman was a stalwart for the Pats this season. Mahura finished the year with a career-high 22 goals and 69 points in 60 regular-season games. He then added five assists in seven post-season games as the Pats were knocked out in the opening round of the Western Hockey League playoffs by the eventual champion Swift Current Broncos.
“I felt like coming into the season I needed to upgrade my defensive ability a little bit to try and make it to the next level (NHL) and I felt l accomplished that,” Mahura said. “There is obviously still work to do in all aspects of my game but, for this year, I felt like I accomplished what I wanted to.”
Mahura played his minor hockey with the St. Albert Bantam AAA Sabres before heading to play at the Okanagan Hockey Academy. He was selected by the Rebels in the second round — 36 overall — of the 2013 WHL Bantam drafted and joined the team as a 16 year old in the 2014-15 season.
A knee injury early the following year cost Mahura the majority of the regular season before returning for the playoffs and the 2016 Memorial Cup.
He was traded to Regina midway through the 2016-17 season and made it to the WHL final with the Pats before losing to the Seattle Thunderbirds.
This season, Mahura took his game to another level both as a leader and point producer with the Pats.
“Some of it has to do, when you get older, you get more mature in this league,” he said. “When you come in as a 16-year-old, you still have a lot of maturing to do, and once you start to figure out the league a little bit more it gets a little easier on you.
“Coming into this year, I think a lot of it was coming in with confidence and trying to play my game. The coaching staff here set me up with some pretty good opportunities to succeed, so I just tried to run with it throughout the year.”
The Pats had high hopes going into this season as Memorial Cup hosts, but didn’t hit their stride until the second half of the year. They finished third in the extremely competitive WHL East Division behind the top two teams in the league in the Moose Jaw Warriors and Broncos.
Regina drew Swift Current in the first round and despite pushing the eventual champions to the limit, fell 3-2 in Game 7 and was eliminated.
“It was a good series,” Mahura said. “We definitely felt we could have won that series. So seeing them go all the way, we knew we could play with them. That first series was a good, hard-fought series and we lost to a team that made it all the way through and ended up winning the championship. I know when we play them here next week, it’s going to be a great game.”