‘WE NEED TO PLAY’
SJHL to resume playoffs
Play on.
The Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League will play the remainder of this season.
That decision came Wednesday afternoon, five days after a bus crash involving the SJHL’s Humboldt Broncos, which has left 16 people dead and three more in critical condition among 29 passengers on the team’s bus.
The Nipawin Hawks, who led the Humboldt Broncos three games to one in their best-of-seven SJHL semifinal playoff series before Friday’s bus crash, will play the Estevan Bruins in a best-of-seven Canalta Cup league championship final series.
League governors from the SJHL’s teams held a teleconference Wednesday to discuss the league’s immediate future and what to do about this season.
“It was unanimous,” SJHL league president Bill Chow said Wednesday, “to carry on.”
Game 1 will be played Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Nipawin. Game 2 will go Sunday night in Nipawin before the series shifts to Estevan for Game 3 and 4 next Tuesday and Wednesday.
“We had everybody on board,” Chow said. “We made sure we talked to a lot of people in Humboldt and that Humboldt had their say. Everybody had their say as to what they thought and think, and everything they had to express. It was absolutely 100 per cent endorsed to carry on.”
Nipawin head coach and general manager Doug Johnson said simply, “We need to play.”
The Hawks practised Wednesday for only the second time since Friday’s tragedy.
“It’s the only decision,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have a choice, in my mind.”
Johnson said his players were hit hard by the tragedy.
“Some are good, some are bad. When they went home (for the weekend), the travel to get home and the stress, a lot of them are dealing with colds and stuff like that now but, mentally, they get better every day.”
The Broncos’ bus crash took place Friday around 5 p.m. on Highway 35, in the middle of a 60-kilometre stretch between Tisdale and Nipawin.
Three Broncos players have been released from hospital, including Nick Shumlanski and Matthieu Gomercic, who both attended Sunday ’s vigil at the Elgar Petersen Arena in Humboldt. The other is Saskatoon’s Brayden Camrud.
The Bruins resumed practising Monday in anticipation that the league final would still go ahead.
“I agree with it 100 per cent — I don’t think there was any other (decision),” Bruins head coach and GM Chris Lewgood said Wednesday.
Lewgood added that practising Monday was “the best thing ” his team could have done following the weekend tragedy.
Scott Thomas — whose son, Broncos forward Evan Thomas, died in the crash — said Wednesday he wants the SJHL playoffs to continue and that Evan would have wanted the games to go on.
“So I hope that they proceed as normal,” Thomas said. “And it won’t be normal. But I hope Estevan and Nipawin have a sevengame series and it comes down to overtime in Game 7, and it’s some of the best hockey that people have ever seen. So that’s my hope for how that plays out.”
The winner of the SJHL championship advances to the Anavet Cup series against the Manitoba Junior Hockey League champion in a bestof-seven series. The winner of that series earns a spot at the Royal Bank Cup national championship.
“In my mind, the longer a team from the SJHL plays,” said Johnson, “the longer, in some ways, the Broncos of 2017-18 stay alive.”