Penticton Vees start season battling key injuries
Things have gone well for the Penticton Vees the past few seasons, but it has been far from picture perfect.
The perennial B.C. Hockey League powers have had their fair share of injury problems in recent campaigns, including getting just 22 regular-season games out of high-end defenceman Gabe Bast over the past two seasons combined.
Penticton starts 2017-18 with key players on the sideline as well, as injured forwards Grant Cruikshank (undisclosed) and Massimo Rizzo (undisclosed) will both begin the campaign in the infirmary. The Junior A regular season begins tonight on seven fronts, including the reigning league champion Penticton visiting the Merritt Centennials.
Cruikshank, 19, scored 32 times last season for Penticton in the regular season. Rizzo, 16, oddly enough got in five games in last year’s Royal Bank Cup national tournament as an underage call-up because of injuries with the Vees.
“Every team deals with it,” Fred Harbinson, Penticton’s general manager and coach, said of having guys on the disabled list. “The players are bigger, stronger, faster and in better shape. At the same time, the game is so fast now and played so hard, there are injuries. You feel like you always have somebody out.
“That’s where depth is so crucial. We had guys sitting out with us who had to come into the lineup and found ways to help us win.”
Harbinson said that Rizzo, a Burnaby Winter Club product who was the 15th overall pick by the Kamloops Blazers in the 2016 WHL bantam draft, should be out a couple of weeks. He expects Cruikshank, the son of American speedskaters Bonnie Blair and Dave Cruikshank, to be out until the end of the month at least.
Cruikshank, a native of Delafield, Wis., is committed to the University of Wisconsin.
The Vees beat the Chilliwack Chiefs in seven games in the league final last spring. Penticton ended up losing to lost Ontario’s Cobourg Cougars in the Royal Bank Cup semifinals. Cobourg, the tournament hosts, won the event.
Penticton should be a major factor in the 17-team BCHL once again this season. Their blue-line includes two NHL drafted players in newcomers Nicky Leivermann, 18, a 2017 Colorado Avalanche seventh rounder out of Eden Prairie, Minn., and Ryan O’Connell, 18, a 2017 Toronto Maple Leafs seventh rounder from Gloucester, Ont.
The Chiefs, the Wenatchee Wild and Vernon Vipers are other teams of note to start.
Wenatchee, the Washington State squad that won the BCHL regular season crown last season (45-9-4-0) but were knocked out of the playoffs by Chilliwack in the second round, shifted from the Mainland Division to the Interior in the off-season. The last three league champions and eight of the past 10 have come from the Interior.