Petes carrying banner for OHL East
They’re not your LONDON, ONT. traditional conference leader in major junior hockey.
The Peterborough Petes haven’t scored a ton more goals than they’ve allowed. Neither of their special teams are in the top halfdozen in the league.
An 18-year-old defenceman — Matthew Timms — has led them in points for much of the season.
And though they have won 40 games for the first time in 11 years, they are well aware that total would put them in sixth place if they happened to operate out of the super-powerful Western Conference this year. But you know what? It doesn’t bother the Petes. Plus, they’ve beaten a lot of those clubs recently.
“There’s a lot of talk about how the West is superior to the East,” Petes GM Mike Oke said. “The divisions are determined by geography and we can’t control that. We battle hard to finish as high as we can.
“But when you play some of those teams that may get a little more notoriety and have some success, it’s nice for the players to say we can compete with any team in the league on any given night and the fans sit up and take notice.”
Last year, Niagara played the role of sleeping IceDogs, finishing fourth and then rolling to the league final. After the Petes’ traditional rival, Oshawa, decided to sell off its top players, despite leading the Eastern Conference, most are banking on a Peterborough-Mississauga third-round matchup.
That might not sound so jazzy, given that the Steelheads rolled the Petes 10-1 three weeks ago, but they picked themselves up, crushed the Generals and put some more distance between them and their pursuers in this final week of regular play.
The biggest victory, of course, came at the board level, where the team convinced the city to restructure its facility agreement, opening up over $300,000 per season to help keep the Petes from going broke. Back in the days when junior hockey was largely a mom-and-pop entity, they were a franchise force.
Now, you need to generate serious revenue to keep up with some of the OHL’s juggernauts. That, or surround yourself with quality people.
“We brought in Brandon Prophet” — an overage defenceman from Barrie, promptly named captain — “and he’s been terrific,” Oke said. “You have Tyler Rollo, Kyle Jenkins, Steve Lorentz, Matt Spencer and Logan DeNoble as the leadership group, they’ve really embraced all the players, first-year or fifth.
“It’s a good atmosphere here.”
And it may be sustained beyond this spring.
The most important part of this Petes resurgence will be staying competitive and not lapsing back into scraping for that eighth seed.
Their moves at the deadline reflected it. They acquired centre Chris Paquette, who is still 18, from Niagara for a goaltending prospect and a package that included five high draft picks.