They’re young, they’re talented and they play the kind of hockey that's going to be fun to watch.
The Prince George Cougars are a team on the rise. Armed with an abundance of veterans who have yet to taste the Western Hockey League playoffs and a collection of high-profile draft picks acquired through a succession of shrewd trades and a series of last-place finishes, the Cougars appear ready to take that next step up the respectability ladder.
They start their 28th season in Prince George tonight at CN Centre when they host the Kamloops Blazers (7 p.m. start) and there’s no better opponent than their archrivals for the Cougars to gauge where they stand. The Blazers are two-time defending B.C. Division champions and appear poised for a lengthy playoff run, having been cheated out of that chance the past two seasons due to the pandemic.
This year’s Cougar squad will have much the same makeup as the team that finished fourth in the B.C. Division bubble (9-10-2-1) in the abbreviated 22-game 2021 season. Built around 20-year-old veterans Connor Bowie, Jonny Hooker, Majid Kaddoura, and Taylor Gauthier, who all begin the season fighting for just three overager spots on the roster, the Cougars are still one of the younger teams in the league and there will no doubt be growing pains.
“We’re young and we make young mistakes, which is normal, and we have to clean up a lot of things with how we play without the puck,” said Cougars head coach and general manager Mark Lamb. ‘But with the puck, we want to be creative, we want to let these guys use their skill and talent, so it will be a real balancing act.
“We can play with the puck, they’re all highly-touted players, but you have to be able to play any type of game and just as much of playing with the puck is playing without it and that’s what we’re going to have to learn on the go.”
Goaltending is a position of strength. Gauthier was the backbone of the Cougars in the 2019-20 season, proving himself worthy of inclusion on Canada’s world junior roster last Christmas, and he’s only gotten better with age, having gone through the Toronto Maple Leafs’ rookie camp. Tyler Brennan made the cut for Canada’s U-18 team and when he went off to Texas for the world championship last spring and that opened the door for rookie Ty Young to show his puckstopping capabilities against WHL shooters. But there’s only room for two goalies and the Cougars, thinking ahead a couple years to when they should be at their peak, might end up trading Gauthier to a team that’s going for a championship, which would solve the 20-year-old situation.
“We have four overagers here and three goalies; that will be figured out in time,” said Lamb. “We’ve got a couple of weeks. These re real hard decisions and they’re all good players. We love our overage situation, we just have one too many.”
Ethan Samson is back from the Philadelphia Flyers’ camp and was there long enough to rub shoulders with established NHL players. Samson was one of the most consistently-good Cougars in the spring season and was rewarded when the Flyers chose him in the sixth round of the 2021 draft and the word back from the Flyers was he lived up to the pressure of his first NHL tryout. Samson and Kaddoura, assuming he sticks around past the mid-October overager deadline, as well as homebrew Aiden Reeves, are the only defencemen with the Cougars when they last played a full season at CN Centre. The rest are new to Prince George, including Keaton Dowhaniuk, the third-overall bantam pick in 2019, Hudson Thornton, Jaren Brinson, Bauer Dumanski and 17-year-old Slovakian import Viliam Kmec, who earned top marks from Lamb among the blueliners in training camp.
Goalscoring has been the Achilles heel of the Cougars for several seasons and that shouldn’t be a problem in 2021-22 if the new guys continue to generate offence as they did last season. Koehn Zimmer, the fourth player picked in the 2019 draft, is a WHL star in the making, having led the Cats with nine goals in 22 games last season. Craig Armstrong, at just five-foot-seven, proved his lack of height is no detriment to producing points. The feisty winger, the Cougars’ ninth-overall pick in 2018, lived up to his promise and was among the team’s leading scorers with 13 points in 21 games. Bowie ranked as the most fit Cougar in training camp and his energy and ability to fill the net will set the bar for all the forwards to follow.
Hooker, Blake Eastman and Minnesota native Mitch Kohner (who was prevented by the pandemic from crossing the border for the 2021 season) will also be relied upon for their WHL experience. Another returning forward to watch is 18-year-old former Cariboo Cougar Fischer O’Brien, who proved his versatility in the B.C. Division bubble as a dependable penalty-killer and playmaker.
As a 15-year-old rookie, centre Riley Heidt played all 22 games and he’ll be better for it after contributing eight points and proving his face-off prowess. He was one of three first-rounders in 2020 and wingers Caden Brown (17th overall) and Ryker Singer (21st overall) will finally get their chance to play in the WHL as 16-year-olds
Carter MacAdams, 17, led the Cougars with five points in the four pre-season games and he’s ready for a breakout season, as is Kyren Gronick, who joined Ziemmer and Dowhaniuk at Hockey Canada’s under-17 development camp in July. Swiss-born Liekit Reichle, an 18-year-old winger (21st overall in the 2021 CHL import draft) was impressive in training camp with his quick release and scoring touch around the net. Michael Svenson, 18, is another new face for Cougar fans to watch on the wing.
“We like our depth, it’s most depth we’ve had on our hockey team in a long time, but it’s young depth also,” said Lamb. ”How quickly we get through some growing pains is yet to be seen. Usually it takes 10 or 15 games to really know exactly what you’ve got. You’ve got to do a lot of coaching and figure out what you’ve got with personalities and so on, so there’s lot of work to do.
“It’s going to be an exciting team to watch, I’ll tell you that.”
Lamb is entering his third full season as Cougars head coach and he will have a new associate coach, with Josh Dixon replacing Jason Smith, who has moved up to the AHL.
On Friday, the Cougars named their leadership group and Hooker was selected as the 27th captain in the team's Prince George history. Bowie, Kaddoura, Samson and Thornton will also wear letters as assistant captains.
The return to live audiences this fall in the WHL is much anticipated.
“It’s been so long, it was nice to get a few exhibition games in with fans, it makes such a difference,” said Lamb. “Even the game we had here, there was life and you could just see it in the guys. That’s the way all sports should be played. Fans bring the atmosphere to the game.”
The Cougars will play exclusively within the B.C. Division until the third week of November. The league has mandated all teams stay within their divisions to limit travel until, hopefully, the fourth wave of COVID dies down.
Kamloops and the Vancouver Giants are the early-season favourites. Cougar fans will likely see their team fighting with Kelowna for third place in a tough division by the end of the season in early April but they can also expect that for the first time since 2017 their Cats will be in the playoff mix.
