WHL’s top team to test revamped Pats

The 2017-18 Regina Pats are preparing to face off against a team equivalent to the 2016-17 Regina Pats.

The Moose Jaw Warriors, ranked first in the WHL and second in the CHL, enter Friday’s game at the Brandt Centre with a 36-7-1-2 record and 75 points — two more points than Regina boasted at the 46-game mark last year, when it was 33-6-6-1.

Regina went on to register a franchise-record 52 victories and reach the Eastern Conference final for the first time since 1984.

This edition of the Warriors is a virtual lock to establish team records for victories and points. The increasingly fragile marks of 45 victories and 98 points were established by the 2011-12 team.

Moreover, Moose Jaw is looking to capture its first WHL championship — a feat that would grant the Warriors admission into the 2018 Memorial Cup tournament, to be held at the Brandt Centre.

With the Memorial Cup in mind, the East Division archrivals have done some roster-bolstering of late.

The Warriors’ most notable addition was defenceman Kale Clague, who helped Canada win the world junior hockey championship before being dealt to Moose Jaw by the Brandon Wheat Kings on Jan. 10.

Pats head coach and general manager John Paddock was even more active on the trade front. Saddled with a sub-.500 record at the Christmas break, he subsequently swung seven trades that brought nine players to Regina.

The objective, of course, is to ice a team worthy of competing as the host in the Memorial Cup.

Now, how will the Pats (24-19-40) stack up against the front-running Warriors? And how will the Warriors look with the supremely talented Clague in the lineup?

Some answers will become apparent Friday, when the Pats play host to the Warriors (7 p.m., Brandt Centre).

“It’s exciting,” Warriors general manager Alan Millar says.

“I think that the division is as competitive as it has ever been. It’s going to be intense. The hockey, I expect, is going to be excellent down the stretch and in the playoffs.

“With us and Regina, you can’t have anything better than them hosting the Memorial Cup, them having a good team and us having a good team. We play a number of times in January and February.

“I’m sure both teams will be pumped and it should be pretty exciting.”

Wait until February.

Moose Jaw and Regina are to meet Feb. 14, 16, 18 and 24, with the Feb. 18 game taking place at the Brandt Centre to punctuate the Pats’ Homecoming Weekend. Rogers Hometown Hockey will also showcase the Feb. 18 event. But first, as for Friday’s game ... “My expectations when we play Regina don’t usually change, regardless of what they’ve done or who they’ve added,” Millar says. “We know they’re a good team and they’re going to play hard. I think there’s going to be a lot of skill.

“I think the game’s going to be fast. We’ll have to be ready to go. I don’t think there’s going to be any feeling-out process. We know what they’ve done to their team. They know what we’ve done to our team.

“There’s lots of video. There’s lots of discussion in terms of the matchups. It’s the same if we’re playing Swift Current or Brandon and so on.

“Our expectation is that Regina is a very good team — a team that is as competitive as anybody else. Somewhere along the way, we’re all going to have to go through each other.”

As much as the immediate focus is on the league-leading Warriors and the 2018 Memorial Cup host Pats, consider the teams surrounding them in the division and across the league.

The Swift Current Broncos, ranked fourth in the CHL, are 32-10-3-0. Brandon, which dealt Clague and fellow 19-year-old star Tanner Kaspick (now of the Victoria Royals), still possesses abundant talent to go with a 28-12-2-1 record.

The Western Conference includes five teams — the Everett Silvertips, Kelowna Rockets, Portland Winterhawks, Vancouver Giants and Victoria Royals — with winning percentages of at least .609.

“I don’t know if I’ve been involved in a year where there’s so many good teams,” Millar says. “There’s probably seven, eight, maybe nine teams that could win a championship. You can’t get anything more exciting than that.”