Creative and calculated
Soo GM won’t deviate from plan as trade deadline approaches
The 3-on-2 is nearly dead.
It had a great run.
“There are so many good coaches and so much back pressure these days,” Kyle Raftis said. “You hardly see that kind of rush anymore.”
So, the past few years, the GM of the Soo Greyhounds has searched for players who can think and act fast, finding open targets where, on first glance, there appears to be none.
He has assembled a small army of decision-making quarterbacks on skates.
“When you have guys who can think the game that way, you want the puck on their sticks,” the 31-year-old said. “When we’re successful, we control the game and we want our guys to make plays. It’s a conscious effort — play with a lot of structure, but activate d-men into offensive schemes and off the transition, too.
“It’s adding layers to how you attack.”
It’s been working.
No team in major junior hockey is as good as the Hounds right now. The Sarnia Sting set the standard early on, then their OHL West division rivals from the north rolled right by them with their own franchise-record winning streak.
They have won some by a big score and others in overtime. At the start of the season, they were among a group of contenders.
Now, they are the team to beat — and it all started when Owen Sound knocked them out of the second round of the playoffs last spring.
“The way we ended last year, we made some adjustments in how we play and it allowed us to get off to a better start than some other teams,” Raftis said. “We knew we had a good core but we were wondering how everyone else would gel together. When you have veteran guys buy in early, it galvanizes the younger players to catch up — or pushes them forward.”
From the first moment of learnto-play, kids are taught basic skills, told how to play and then how to fit into the team.
By the time they get to the Greyhounds, there is a degree of self-control over the development cycle.
“When the kids are part of the process in how you play, they will work that much harder for you,” Raftis said, “and I think you can see it in how they play.”
The biggest concern, from the scouts who watch them closely, is the Hounds need a couple of tooth-and-nail competitors to end a 25-year Memorial Cup drought. That’s the old things-get-tougher-in-the-play-offs mindset.
“Everyone has their own opinion on how everybody else plays,” Raftis said. “The games get harder as you go along, but for us — and I’ll use the term ‘grit’ — some of our better players (Boris Katchouk and Conor Timmins) are our grittiest ones. If you can get guys who strip pucks, play hard, it’s a benefit but I don’t think there’s much of that one-dimensional sand paper role anymore.”
Instead, you want players who score big goals when it matters most and can find the open space when the defence tightens up.
The Hounds think they already have a lot of those people. They also don’t feel like they’re going away any time soon.
“I’m not a big believer in predicting two years down the road what your team will be like,” Raftis said. “When you look at when kids graduate to pro, it’s hard to predict. There are a lot of good young players in our nucleus (Morgan Frost, Barrett Hayton) and the majority of our back and our goaltending (eligible to return in 201819). There were no (must-win) statements in training camp. The Western Conference is good every year and you want to make sure you stay at the top of it.
“And if you make a trade, you want to make sure you’re improving your team and not getting into arms races and reacting to what other teams are doing.”
The Hounds plan on being creative and calculated — just like they expect on the ice.