Unless the Red Deer Rebels can find a way to sneak into a playoff berth with their depleted lineup, the team’s last big event of the season will be the presentation of the individual team awards.
And when those awards are doled out prior to the Rebels’ final regular-season home game March 17 versus the Edmonton Oil Kings, Alex Petrovic will likely be front and centre.
The Florida Panthers prospect has been hands-down the Rebels’ top defenceman during his final season at the major junior level. Petrovic often looks like he’s out of place in the WHL and more than one experienced and respected hockey mind wonders why he wasn’t with the most recent edition of the national junior team.
Not only is the Edmonton native the Rebels’ premier blueliner, you can toss his name into the ring when discussing candidates for the most valuable player award.
Actually, Petrovic — the Panthers’ second-round pick in the 2010 NHL entry draft and a signed player — should be at the front of that line.
As for rookie of the year, goaltender Patrik Bartosak is the deserving winner despite appearing in only 25 games before blowing out his shoulder Dec. 7 at Swift Current.
Forwards Cory Millette, Brooks Maxwell, Joel Hamilton and Mason Burr, rearguards Kayle Doetzel, Stephen Hak and Cody Thiel, and goaltender Bolton Pouliot are the club’s other first-year players who would be in consideration, but do any of them rate higher than Bartosak?
The most under-rated, humanitarian, scholastic and players’ awards are in-house honours and are not open to any outside conjecture. But in venturing a guess in regards to the under-rated award recipient . . . how about Colten Mayor, who quietly scored 14 goals and collected 38 points before finally being sidelined with a combination of wrist and thumb injuries after 52 games?
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The Everett Silvertips are hoping that Garry Davidson can help the franchise return to its winning ways in the same manner that he helped transform the Portland Winter Hawks from perennial loser into a WHL power each of the last three seasons.
Two weeks after firing Doug Soetart, Everett’s general manager for nearly a decade, the Silvertips on Wednesday announced the hiring of former Portland director of player personnel Davidson as their new GM. Davidson, 60, signed a multi-year contract.
Davidson, who was with the Winterhawks for four years and prior to that was the owner, GM and sometimes head coach of the junior A Salmon Arm Silverbacks, will focus solely on Everett’s hockey operations, while assistant general manager Zoran Rajcic will handle the business operations.
Rajcic was already largely responsible for the team’s business operations.
“I’ve know Garry for a number of years and there’s no question he’s one of the most successful junior operators,” Silvertips governor Gary Gelinas told Nick Patterson of the Everett Herald.
“When you look at his track record and what he’s done in Portland, he really was the key guy who found the talent, developed the talent and drafted the talent. That’s an area we really wanted to focus on.”
The Silvertips were big-time successful for their first four seasons after entering the WHL in 2003, but the club posted losing records the next four years and this season is in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.
Both Gelinas and Davidson expressed their support of first-year Tips head coach Mark Ferner.
“He (Davidson) gets along with Mark Ferner, and that was one of the key criteria,” Gelinas said.
“I think Mark’s an excellent coach, we just need to support him with a stronger hockey operations department, and I think we’ve done that today.”
Other points: Vancouver Giants defenceman Neil Manning established a franchise record for most games played when he took his regular shift in Tuesday’s 5-4 shootout victory over the host Tri-City Americans. It was the 20-year-old’s 296th regular-season outing with the Giants. After appearing in only 34 games in his rookie season of 2007-08, Manning has missed just 14 of 272 games since. “As a 17-year-old, I was just trying to staying healthy,” Manning, Vancouver’s second-round pick in the 2006 bantam draft, told Steve Ewen of the Vancouver Province. “I’ve been lucky enough to get into a lot of games since then.” Added Giants head coach Don Hay: “He had a tough 16-year-old year but ever since then he’s been a real dependable, real reliable player for us. He enjoys being here and he works hard and he does the right things. This is a hard place to play. We want guys to play a certain way.” . . . Kamloops Blazers veteran forward Brendan Ranford is the WHL player of the week after potting three goals and recording eight points and a plus-3 rating in three Kamloops victories. The 19-year-old from Edmonton is in his fourth full season with the Blazers. He was the 15th overall selection in the 2007 WHL draft and was a seventh-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers in the 2010 NHL entry draft.
gmeachem@www.reddeeradvocate.com