Rebels

The Red Deer Rebels are riding a five-game winning streak, but a successful team’s work is never done.

Red Deer Rebel hockey players looked like they were falling down drunk on Monday morning.Blame the goggles they were wearing.

The old rope-a-dope worked again.And this time it was an extreme example.

For a short time, at least, Stephen Hak wondered if his Western Hockey League career was over before it started.The Lethbridge Hurricanes saw Hak as a candidate to crack their roster this season, that is until the club drafted Swedish defenceman Albin Blomqvist in June’s CHL import draft and dropped the 17-year-old rearguard from their 50-man protected list.

Harbouring a grudge is never healthy, unless you’re a Western Hockey League team that fell well short of expectations the previous season.

For the Red Deer Rebels, it was more Medicine Hat misery.The Rebels, for whatever reason, had managed just one Western Hockey League win over the Medicine Hat Tigers in five meetings heading into Friday’s final regular-season meeting of the clubs.

Tonight’s visit by the Kootenay Ice might be precisely what the physician ordered in an attempt to snap the Red Deer Rebels out of their late-winter Western Hockey League doldrums.

One day after being named the WHL player of the week, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins took it to the next level Tuesday.

Call him a late bloomer.Or, at least, a late arrival.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins continues to evolve.A master playmaker through the course of this, his second Western Hockey League season, the Red Deer Rebels phenom is now starting to find the back of the net.