A great test for the Prince George Cougars tonight and this weekend as they look ahead to the start of the playoffs later this month.
The road to playoff success runs through Kelowna and Victoria. Wednesday in Kelowna, the Cougars plays the Rockets, the defending Western Hockey League champions and perennial powerhouse, before heading to Victoria for a Friday and Saturday night entanglement with the Royals. If the Cougars want to be playing hockey past the middle of April, they will have to beat one - and probably both - of those teams.
Wednesday could also be a special night for Chase Witala. The Prince George born-and-raised player has 235 points in his Cougar career, one point behind Troy Burke for the all-time team leader. Witala became the all-time leading Cougar goal scorer early last month.
Witala and his teammates have had an amazing season and are arguably one of the best Cougar squads Prince George has ever seen. Local hockey fans have responded both to the team's on-ice success as well as the off-ice moves by the new ownership group with more bums in seats than seen in years.
There's just one more thing the Cougars need to do: stop fighting.
As James Mirtle wrote in the Globe and Mail Tuesday, the Cougars have notched 70 fights so far this year, more than one per game. The next closest WHL team for number of fighting majors this season is the Lethbridge Hurricanes with 52, according to hockeyfights.com. The average in the entire Canadian Hockey League is just 0.5 fights per game or one fight every two games. Colby McAuley of the Cougars also leads the entire CHL in number of fights this year with 16.
Contrast that with the National Hockey League. The Cougars have twice as many fights so far this season as the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and the Columbus Blue Jackets, who are tied at 35 for the most fights in the league. Also contrast the Cougars with the Detroit Red Wings, at the bottom of the NHL list with just four total fights this season.
McAuley has dropped the gloves five times more than Cody McLeod of the Colorado Avalanche, who leads the NHL with the most fights so far this year by an individual player, with 11.
In his Globe column, Mirtle makes the latest powerful argument for why fighting has no place in junior hockey, citing his heartbreaking feature about Robert Frid, a career junior and minor-pro hockey enforcer now living on a $700 a month disability cheque at age 41.
At least Frid is still alive, something former Cougar Derek Boogaard is not, to the sorrow of his family and friends and to the shame of a hockey community that somehow still clings to the belief that young men pounding each other's faces and heads with their bare fists is just part of the game.
Fighting can't be banned outright but junior hockey needs to get serious about this cancer on its game.
Instead of a five-minute penalty for fighting and a game misconduct after the second fight in the same game, fighting deserves an automatic game misconduct. The second fight in the same season should warrant a game misconduct and an automatic one-game suspension. The third fight in one year would earn a two-game suspension and so on.
Speed, resilience, balanced team scoring, excellent penalty killing and solid goaltending, not fighting, is what has made the Cougars successful this season.
Meanwhile, a strong case could be made that their lack of discipline and the amount of time killing off those fighting penalties has cost them several close games.
McAuley doesn't need to fight, either. He has 13 goals so far this year, a dramatic improvement over the five he scored last year. He had two goals and two assists in a 9-4 drubbing the Cougars handed the Kamloops Blazers on CN Centre ice at the end of January.
The team is a playoff contender and the fans are returning to the rink for performances like that and for the accomplishments of players like Witala. Beating Kelowna and Victoria on the scoreboard, this week and again in the playoffs, are the only scraps worth winning.
It's long past time this team and this league put fighting in their rearview mirror.
