For Seattle hockey fans, things haven’t gone their way recently. The Seattle Thunderbirds are now down 3-1 in the WHL Championship Series after losing two straight at home this week to the Edmonton Oil Kings, and Kraken goalie Chris Driedger tore his ACL playing in the IIHF World Championship.
On this episode, the Sound Of Hockey Podcast breaks down those WHL games and discusses what options the Kraken have to backfill Driedger’s position.
KENT – The Seattle Thunderbirds were three and a half seconds away from a chance of tying their best-of-seven WHL Championship Series against the Edmonton Oil Kings Wednesday night at the accesso ShoWare Center at two games apiece. The game was tied at 2-2 and one clear of the puck would have sent Game 4 into overtime, but Seattle couldn’t get it out of their zone.
Instead, Edmonton kept the puck in and Oil Kings defenseman Logan Dowhaniuk flung the puck towards the Seattle net. It somehow found its way through bodies to send Edmonton to a stunning 3-2 Game 4 win over Seattle, disappointing the 4,468 in attendance.
The Oil Kings now lead the series three games to one.
The Thunderbirds may have played their best game of the series, scoring twice on the power play and outshooting Edmonton by a 38-25 margin, but couldn’t get another puck past Oil Kings goalie Sebastian Cossa.
“That’s playoff hockey sometimes, you don’t always get what you deserve,” Thunderbirds coach Matt O’Dette said. “There’s obviously things that we could have done better in the game to come out on top. But we worked, we came to play. Disappointing ending, but we did a lot of good things tonight.”
Edmonton was paced by a pair of scores from Josh Williams, 32 saves from Cossa, and is one win away from its third WHL Championship and a trip to the Memorial Cup.
Jared Davidson and Lucas Ciona scored for Seattle while goalie Thomas Milic kicked away 20 Oil Kings shots.
“I thought we played a good hockey game,” O’Dette said. “We needed to respond after last night to play a better game. We did clean up a lot of areas that we needed to clean up. It’s a heartbreaker, there’s no other way to say it. I mean, it’s a heartbreaking ending and we have no time to dwell on it. We have to be able to regroup and get ready for the next game.”
Game 5 will be played back in Edmonton on Saturday.
Wednesday’s game got off to a rocky start. Seattle defenseman Tyrel Bauer was given a five-minute major after a hit on Edmonton’s Brendan Kuny, who was carried off on a stretcher early in the contenst. Bauer’s penalty carried with it an automatic game misconduct.
In what was likely Bauer’s final game at the ShoWare Center – he is a signed prospect of the Winnipeg Jets and eligible to play in the American Hockey League next season – ended after five minutes of play.
“[The ref] said they had no choice because the player was injured,” O’Dette said of the call. “I thought it was incidental contact. Kind of two guys colliding that maybe didn’t see each other. I thought Bauer was heading back to the front of the net to defend. Obviously, you never want to see a player hurt like that. I hope he’s okay.”
After the game, Oil Kings coach Brad Lauer said that Kuny had been released from a local hospital and would recover.
Seattle survived the five minutes, but Reid Schaefer was called for boarding just before the major penalty ended, giving Edmonton two more minutes of a power play, but the Thunderbirds were able to kill that off as well.
Seattle’s penalty kill was quick on pucks and got clears while the Oil Kings could not get set up.
“Seven minutes straight on the kill is never ideal,” Seattle’s Jared Davidson said. “They found a way to get ‘er going and shut them down. It was awesome, awesome to see.”
The Thunderbirds then went on a power play of their own and cashed in when Calgary Flames prospect Ciona scored his eighth of the postseason to make it 1-0 at 16:08 of the first period.
Edmonton squared the game at 3:37 of the second period on a goal by Josh Williams who slid a rebound past Milic.
Williams would score again to make it 2-1 at 5:50 when he circled and fired a wrist shot.
Seattle tied the game at 12:58 on a perfect wrister from Davidson who scored his 13th goal of the postseason. The Thunderbirds ended the night 2-for-5 on the power play. The one power play on which they didn’t convert but needed to the most came with 2:40 left in the game when Justin Sourdif was called for a trip. The Thunderbirds couldn’t find one more goal, setting up the late-game heroics for Edmonton.
“I think we were getting to the net a little bit better,” Davidson said. “We were getting those second and third chances when they were sitting there, and we were taking away Cossa’s eyes a little bit better today.”
Seattle has been down 3-1 in the postseason once before, against Portland in the second round. They were able to find a way and fight back, winning twice on the road. They’re going to need to find that motivation one final time.
“We’ve been here before, so we just got to take it one step at a time, one game.” Lucas Ciona said.
Notes
> Seattle played without overager Henrik Rybinski who was hurt during Game 1 of the series.
> Likewise, the Oil Kings were without star Dylan Guenther who apparently was injured during Tuesday’s Game 3.
> It was the last game at the accesso ShoWare Center for Rybinski, Lucas Svejkovsky, and Ryan Gottfried, who are too old to return to the WHL next season.
Heading into the July, 2022 NHL Entry Draft, the Seattle Kraken have twelve draft picks, including a high first-round pick (No. 4 overall) and four second-round picks. This stockpile of picks, and the trades that acquired them, prompted me to revisit a longstanding curiosity: What is a draft pick “worth”?
A trade-data-driven approach
Over the years, there have been many studies quantifying the value of NHL Draft picks. Most of these studies have looked at the performance or longevity of the players taken at the various draft positions in order to reverse engineer a composite “expected value” for each pick.
For example, Michael Shucker created a model in 2011 that calculated pick value based on the odds of playing 200 NHL games. Dom Luszczyszyn at The Athletic created a draft pick model in 2020 based on a draft player’s Game Score Value Added (GSVA), a hockey analytic he pioneered. (Read more about GSVA here.)
This is not what I did. My approach says nothing about the projected quality of players selected in a particular draft position–at least not directly.
Instead I tried to get to how teams have–by their actions–actually valued draft picks. To do this, I looked at the pick-for-pick trades made by NHL teams in recent drafts with the goal of understanding how teams have actually stacked up the value of one pick versus another.
Say the Kraken trade the No. 35 pick in 2022 for the Nos. 44 and 76 picks in 2022. Is that a fair deal or not? Setting aside the actual players drafted, the historical trade data should help us understand whether or not the swapped picks balance out.
The trade value chart
Without further ado, here is my trade value chart:
To read this chart, find the value associated with the pick(s) targeted for a trade up or down (or involved in a known trade). If a trade returns more “points” to a team than it is giving up in exchange, then the team has obtained a good deal and vice versa.
Returning to our example, if the Seattle Kraken traded the No. 35 pick (116.07 points) for the No. 44 pick (78.37 points) and No. 76 pick (24.79 points), you could conclude that, while the trade is certainly in the neighborhood of “fair,” the Kraken lost a bit of value in the deal because they gave up 116.07 points of draft value but only received 103.16 points in return. Of course, this does not mean the deal is bad, necessarily, if the Kraken draft the better players. It just means that NHL teams value what they gave up more than what they received.
My first impression of the chart? Moving up in the NHL Draft is expensive. Graphically, the trade value chart looks like this:
How does this trade value chart compare with player-value-based approaches?
After building a model based on trades teams have actually made, it is natural to consider how it compares with the value-driven draft models already out there. Is there any market inefficiency between how teams actually behave and how they should behave?
I have not yet truly dug into this question since I think it would be a rewarding topic for its own separate article, but, preliminarily, I did compare the trade value chart against Luszczyszyn’s GSVA model. I normalized the values on our chart so that the total draft pick value as implied by trade data and the total draft pick value as indicated by drafted player GSVA would match.
While the curves are similar, there are notable divergences. Near the top of the draft, the trade value of a pick has exceeded the projected GSVA of the players actually selected. The gap is most significant at the first overall pick and steadily decreases until the values converge at approximately the 35th pick. In other words, the data suggests that a team is likely to produce surplus player value if it trades down out of the first round–even if it makes just an “average” trade as indicated by the market.
This dynamic flips thereafter. Particularly in the second and third rounds, the trade market apparently undervalues these draft picks, at least as indicated by drafted player GSVA.
Which pick is most undervalued by the market? The 64th overall. In this range–the late second round and into the third round–a team may be able to generate surplus value even by making just a “fair” trade moving up.
Eric Tulsky engaged in a similar project for Broad Street Hockey on the NHL Draft back in 2013, looking at trades from 2006-12. While the trade data and approach I employed were different–and I could not exactly replicate his results–the end draft pick values were actually not so far off, which suggests to me that there has not been a paradigm shift in team trade behavior over the last decade.
Methodology
If you’re interested in digging in more on the methodology behind developing this trade value chart, some limitations of my approach, and the performance of the model, click here to view an appendix to this article.
Are you a fan of lottery balls whipping around a plastic receptacle? Do you like watching the NHL’s Deputy Commissioner awkwardly hold up placards with team logos on them? Then the NHL Draft Lottery is for you.
The 2022 version of the NHL Draft Lottery takes place Tuesday night at 3:30 Pacific and will be televised on ESPN. Admittedly, it’s not the most enthralling television, but it will let us all know what pick the Seattle Kraken will end up with for July’s NHL Draft. Thanks to Seattle’s third-period collapse in Winnipeg in the season’s last game, the Kraken ended up with the third worst record meaning they have a 11.5 percent chance of landing the top pick and will select no later than fifth.
With the regulation loss to the Jets, the #SeaKraken lock in the 3rd spot in the NHL Draft Lottery. Here are the odds of the Kraken's first round draft pick. pic.twitter.com/dy5M2btzoP
No matter where Seattle ends up, general manager Ron Francis has a shot at landing a quality player and maybe even a guy who will report straight to Kraken Community Iceplex and play in year one.
But who are these guys and who should the Kraken pick at each possible spot?
Here is a look at five potential new Kraken prospects.
With the first overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, the Kraken select…
Shane Wright, F, Kingston Frontenacs – OHL
6-foot-1, 185 pounds
This is a no-brainer. Wright will be the first pick taken overall. Every now and then an article pops up asking if Logan Cooley or some other prospect is ‘closing the gap,’ but those articles are trying to make the race seem interesting. The race is over, and if Seattle wins Tuesday’s lotto, Wright will be playing for the Kraken this fall.
Wright applied for and was granted exceptional status to play in the Ontario Hockey League as a 15-year-old due to his advanced skill. He scored 39 goals as a rookie in 2019-20 while turning 16 in January of that season. He proved worthy of the exceptional status and this past season scored 32 goals but added 28 more assists than that rookie campaign, as he’s now a more complete player.
Last spring, at 16 years old, he was with Team Canada at the IIHF U18 World Championship. With COVID canceling seasons, the tournament was loaded with older draft prospects, and Wright scored nine times and had 14 points in five games. He is NHL ready.
With the second overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, the Kraken select…
Logan Cooley, F, USNTDP
5-foot-10, 174 pounds
Speed and skill are the highlights of Cooley’s game, and the Kraken will jump at the Pittsburgh product if they land the second overall pick. Committed to play at the University of Minnesota next season, Cooley is a dynamic offensive player who can be a game changer.
Is Logan Cooley ready for the NHL in his first year after being drafted? (Rena Laverty / USA Hockey’s NTDP.)
Playing with the U.S. National Team Development Program, he’s scored 40 goals and 71 assists in 75 games. He played for the U.S. at the recently completed U18’s and rang up 10 points in six games. Cooley has the speed and skill to draw defenders in, allowing him to find wide-open teammates.
Can he play in the NHL right away? He’s not the biggest player in the world so it may depend on how much strength he adds this summer and how he performs at a prospect camp in July. By comparison, Montreal’s Cole Caufield is listed at 5-foot-7 and 166 pounds which is shorter and lighter than Cooley. Caufield just completed his first full NHL season and scored 23 goals.
With the third overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, the Kraken select…
Juraj Slafkovsky, F, TPS (Finland)
6-foot-4, 218 pounds
Slafkovsky raised eyebrows when he scored seven goals for the Slovakian team at the Bejing Winter Olympics. That performance has skyrocketed him up the draft ranks, and he is generally considered a top-five prospect.
He has size and a diverse set of skills that makes him a threat on nearly every shift. He can shoot and has a nose for the goal but also has shown that he can distribute the puck. His big frame could allow him to play right away, and he has spent most of this season playing in the pro Liiga in Finland for TPS. He has five goals and ten points with TPS which doesn’t jump off the page, but this is a contending team with older, veteran players. Will his abilities translate to the NHL?
With the fourth overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, the Kraken select…
Matthew Savoie, F, Winnipeg ICE – WHL
5-foot-9, 178 pounds
Savoie had a spectacular season for the ICE who are currently tearing their way into the Eastern Conference finals in the WHL playoffs. Savoie’s arrival has been much anticipated and while COVID forced him to play in the USHL last year, he has not disappointed this year. He piled up 90 points on 35 goals and 55 assists in 65 games during the regular season.
Top prospect for the #2022NHLDraft Matthew Savoie scored a pair of goals for Winnipeg last night, bringing him to 11 goals and 21 assists in just 20 games. Kid can shoot it. pic.twitter.com/Hn1hE3fLwT
He can do a little bit of everything and do it well. He can skate, pass, and shoot which keeps opposing defenses on their heels. Savoie is on the smaller side, making it unclear if he’s ready for the NHL in year one. Skill-wise he’s there, and he has shown that he can play a bigger game with some high-end savvy, so he could have a shot.
With the fifth overall pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, the Kraken select…
Simon Nemec, D, Nitra – Slovakia
6-foot-1, 192 pounds
Widely considered the top defenseman in this year’s draft, if he’s there at five, Seattle should take him. He has 16 assists this season with Nitra in the Slovakian league and passing the puck is considered his strongest asset.
Scouts don’t consider him a guy who will dazzle with end-to-end rushes up the ice, but he sees the ice well and can distribute the puck. He’s most likely not NHL ready in year one and would either play another year overseas or would need some development time playing the North American game.
The Seattle Kraken were back at the Kraken Community Iceplex this week. After they wrapped up their first season Sunday in Winnipeg, it was time Monday and Tuesday to pack up their belongings from their lockers before heading back to their summer homes. Clean out day had a “last day of school” feel, although instead of making sure everyone got their yearbooks signed, the players met with the media and had exit interviews with general manager Ron Francis and coach Dave Hakstol.
“There are some underlying themes that we want to take advantage of over the summer and that we want to have the right mindset for coming back in training camp,” Hakstol said about the exit interviews. “But the majority of this time of year, two days after the end of the regular season, it’s a couple of key points for each individual that will likely lead to further conversation over the summer.”
While Hakstol wasn’t keen to share the details he discussed with certain players, there were noticeable themes from the players that met with the media.
To a man, there was a disappointment in how the season played out.
“It’s always mixed feelings,” defenseman Adam Larsson said. “We’ve had a long year emotionally and we didn’t get the result we wanted, so that was tough. But with that said, I think everybody has really enjoyed the time here and just seeing everything with the fans, how they pushed us for the whole year, even on tough stretches.”
Adam Larsson was impressed with Seattle Kraken fans in year one. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
Larsson’s last point about the fans was another theme that ran through the two days.
Despite the record and place in the standings, Kraken fans showed up all season. No matter what the score was, the building was packed and the fans were loud. It’s a remarkable connection between a city and a sports franchise.
It’s an easy pop for an athlete to praise the local fans, but it was so persuasive this week that you couldn’t help but feel the Kraken players were genuine in their appreciation they had for their fanbase.
“The biggest highlight for me is just, obviously, the fans,” Jordan Eberle said. “They were unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve played in front of a fanbase that just really got behind the team through wins and losses. That was the biggest thing. I mean, I’ve been at teams where fans have been amazing, but you lose and it goes the other way, and they didn’t do that here. I think they’re so excited to have a team, we want to try and win for them.”
Feelings of optimism for coming season
The team found some consistency over the second half of the season. There were still struggles, but the second-half improvement has the team feeling positive about what’s to come.
“First season is behind us,” Yanni Gourde said. “It’s not something we can just forget about it, we’re going to learn from it and we’re going to move forward and we’re gonna get better from past experience, and that’s what we’re gonna do next year. We’re gonna come in, we know each other, we know what works, we know what doesn’t work, we’re gonna move forward and get better every single day.”
It’s easy to be optimistic days after the season ended. Seattle’s record is back to 0-0-0 and nobody is going to predict more losing.
Kraken forward Yanni Gourde is optimistic about season two. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
But the Seattle players had some reason for that optimism.
Part of it was the way the team played over the later part of the season and that when they reconvene for training camp in September, they won’t have to spend as much time learning each other. There’s also the promise and expectation of roster improvements this summer from either trades or free agent acquisitions.
“I think every year you want to make the playoffs and that’s our goal.” Francis said. “Our goal is to get better each and every year. [From] starting the year to the end of the year we got better and we’ll continue that next year. It’s not an easy league but we certainly want to add the pieces we think will give us a chance to contend for the playoffs next year for sure.”
The arrival of rookie Matty Beniers also helps with the optimism.
Seattle’s first ever draft pick, taken second overall during the 2020 NHL Draft, arrived after the University of Michigan was eliminated at the NCAA Frozen Four. He played just ten games, but his impact was noticeable, and in a short time he scored nine points (3 goals, 6 assists) to start his career.
Veteran players were impressed, Hakstol and Francis were impressed, and now the challenge for the 19-year-old will be to handle the rigors of a full 82-game season.
“I’m expecting a little bit more intensity next season going against guys,” Beniers said. “I think it was good to get my toes wet and see what kind of game it is, see how fast it is and the physicality of it and get a little confidence that I can play here and contribute to the team.”
Kraken goalies looking for more consistency
Part of the second-half turnaround was the play of goalies Philipp Grubauer and Chris Driedger. The tandem struggled early to mesh with the system, and that led to some ugly goals against.
The consistency started to come together as the season went on, however, and if that trend can continue, the Kraken will have more confidence in the guys in net.
“I think after Christmas, that’s where we started to feel comfortable with each other,” Grubauer said. “It’s not just the defense. It’s the goalies too, it’s the forwards as well. It’s a whole team effort usually and we played some incredible games and obviously some games we need to improve, but I think next year the goal is to find that consistency.”
Grubauer and Driedger will have to find that consistency with a new goalie coach. Francis began his press conference by stating that Andrew Allen’s contract with the club would not be renewed beyond this season. The timing of the announcement was interesting because Allen had been spotted on the ice working with Grubauer earlier in the day. It also wasn’t entirely surprising, though, after the mixed results for the netminders that Allen oversaw this season.
Both goalies still have hockey to play this year, which is why Grubauer was on the ice with Allen and Larsson Tuesday. Grubauer will be heading to Finland to play for Germany in the IIHF World Championship, while Driedger will represent Team Canada. Both praised the other and got along but may have to face each other in international play this summer.
Kraken goalie Philipp Grubauer will be playing for Team Germany this spring. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
Kraken will add a top prospect
By finishing with the third worst record in the NHL, Seattle can do no worse than the fifth overall pick at the NHL Draft Lottery on May 10. That should yield another top prospect into the system.
“We acquired some draft capital,” Francis said of the team’s many moves at the NHL Trade Deadline. “So that gives us the opportunity to look at different things. Whether it’s moving picks for potential players and trades with teams that are up against the cap and it allows us maybe to parlay those picks and move up higher in the draft. Based on where we finished, we’re going to pick one through five and we might be able to get a guy in the draft that can step in and play in our lineup next year.”
Firebirds are a go
After splitting their AHL affiliate Charlotte Checkers with the Florida Panthers, Seattle will have its own affiliate next season with the Coachella Valley Firebirds. That means that Francis and the Kraken will have to fill all the coaching and support staff for that team to play next season.
Francis also indicated that because the Firebirds arena won’t be ready at the beginning of the AHL season, the team could start in Seattle. That could mean practices at the Kraken Community Iceplex and also some early games being played locally.
The Kraken are still working out the details on where those games would be played but they’re hoping it would be at Climate Pledge Arena.
Longtime Seattle resident Vaughan Rody will ref his final game on Wednesday at Climate Pledge Arena
For Vaughan Rody, Hockey is “religion” in his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Even when life led Rody to other places, he felt like hockey should be a part of his life.
His route to practicing his religion was through refereeing. It’s a journey that involved a giant leap of faith, a few lucky breaks, and some cherished memories for the longtime Lake Stevens, Washington resident.
Rody will officiate his final game in the National Hockey League on Wednesday when the Seattle Kraken take on the Colorado Avalanche at Climate Pledge Arena, concluding a 22-year career as a linesman.
“I started refereeing like most kids do for extra money, and really just to stay in the game.” Rody said. “Then I realized I was a good enough skater and had a knowledge of the rules and some ability. You quickly work through the ranks and get some people that really believe in you.”
Rody began officiating when he was 14, picking up youth hockey games while working a “fantastic job” as a site supervisor for the Forks Renewal Corporation as a City of Winnipeg employee. Life was good and stable, but it didn’t involve hockey.
Rody left that job when he was 24 to become a referee in the Western Hockey League, based in Seattle.
That didn’t quite sit well with his father.
“I know for a fact that my dad worked at the railroad for probably 30 years, and I was making more money than he was at the time,” Rody said. “His young kid gets this fantastic job and all of a sudden I’m deciding that I’m going to take a leave of absence to go try to find a job there’s only 35 in the world of, it didn’t really sit that well with him.”
The gamble to move not only to a different city, but to a different country, paid off.
To make ends meet with a meager WHL referee salary, Rody worked at Boeing in Everett as an inspector on the 777 program in the mornings and officiated WHL games at night. A common night involved Rody returning home from a game in Spokane at 1 a.m. only to wake up at 4 a.m. to clock into his shift at Boeing.
Rody made his NHL debut, and walked away from his job at Boeing, when he was hired as a full-time NHL linesman. He skipped a common step of officiating in the American Hockey League after graduating from junior hockey.
Now that his NHL officiating chapter has closed, Rody has an Amazon delivery franchise to tend to — one he became the owner of about a year ago — and still runs his Pro Edge Power Skating program that was founded in 2007.
Retirement won’t be too sleepy for the effervescent “kid” from Manitoba who walked away from certainty to make his dream a reality.
But Rody will still take some time to reflect on his gamble that paid off and the journey it sent him on in front of friends and family.
“I think with this game when you’re in this business for such a long time, you realize that this is all about your family,” Rody said. “And it’s all about the people that have had a hand in making me or allowing me to have this dream. … Those people [that support you], when they get a chance to share in your accomplishments and they get a chance to kind of share in your success and see what you do for work, those are the most meaningful moments.”
What’s it like seeing players and coaches show you so much respect in your final season?
VR: I think what happens is people see that in hockey we have a pretty amazing tradition at the handshakes, and when you’ve been in this league as long as I have, I don’t really know the what the whole thing is, but the bottom line remains that there’s a lot of respect from the players to you as an official. They do a tremendous job of kind of showing their respect through the handshakes and the little shows and gestures like that.
For them to take the time, to take a moment to reflect on your career and wish you all the best [feels great]. At he end of the day, you don’t make it 20 20 some years by accident. I think when they come over and shake your hand, they take time out of their schedule and in their day to do that, I think it’s just such a show of respect and I think it just legitimizes what they think of you in your career.
Is your route a traditional path to becoming an NHL official? How has that changed over the years?
VR: That’s really changed. You know, when I first started, the skillset was that you became a referee, and that’s changed over the last few years. Because now a lot of our young guys, they’re drafted, they’re playing in the American Hockey League, they’re not quite good enough to make it to the NHL, so their careers kind of fizzle out. But they’re great skaters, they’re great athletes, and then the NHL takes shine to them with the NHL training program.
That’s the big change over the last six-to-eight years. Previously you would play and then you would start refereeing at 15-16 years old. And then you would learn and hone the skill to become an official through time and that’s kind of how it was back then.
What’s the biggest difference between officiating a junior game and an NHL game?
VR: Oh, it’s huge. There’s a difference between dealing with kids and dealing with men. You’re dealing with adults in the National Hockey League and there’s a different way to communicate with them. There’s a different way to get along. There are a lot of people in hockey that think you can bully people around, but nobody’s intimidated anymore, yelling and screaming at each other doesn’t really work. I think the biggest difference between junior and pro hockey is simply communication.
When you say communication, that’s just a matter of being able to communicate like adults?
VR: When you’re dealing with pros, no one has to tell them to go and train or tell them to go to bed early. No one has to tell them to shut the TV off, shut their phones off. They’re pros at what they do for a reason. You don’t get to the NHL by accident, as a player, as an official, or as a coach. You don’t get there by accident.
I think you have to learn to become a pro. You have to learn the basic skills. What separates somebody from being good to being great? And no matter what those tangibles are, you’ve got to figure them out for yourself. It has to be something that you find within yourself.
The most important thing I think, in officiating between junior hockey and the pros is making sure you understand the difference between abuse and emotion. You’ve got to be able to sift through that and you’ve got to be able to work through that. You have to be to able to bark back at them and calm them down a little bit and then they have to trust that you’re going to do the right thing for the game. Because as officials, that’s our job. We serve the game.
What were the WHL games like back then to ref?
VR: They were a lot rougher. I can tell you. Even back in the day, they were probably a little bit more difficult to do than the pro style of hockey. I think that’s what gave us all of our experience. You would have line brawls, you would have fights, and you weren’t sure if guys were going to go in the stands and fight. You didn’t know. It was like a free-for-all back in the day. It was a different game. There was a lot more violence in the game back then.
And the game has changed. So the Western Hockey League, the way it was played, prepared you for anything. It prepared you for the NHL. People can’t really behave like that, you know, they’re called on the carpet. There’s an image that the NHL wants to portray. And the Western Hockey League, not that they didn’t have an image, but anybody could fight anybody at that opportunity or that moment. It wasn’t just heavyweight vs. heavyweight, there were 20-year-olds fighting 16-year-olds and that’s a huge age difference, size difference, and mentality difference between those two. You have to be aware because the game expected you to make everybody safe.
What’s the most meaningful game you’ve officiated?
VR: My most meaningful game is probably the All-Star Game in Nashville [in 2016]. I had a chance to bring probably 14-16 family members and friends to the game. The NHL is first class. They took care of everything. You get an opportunity to kind of showcase what we do for a business night in and night out to your friends. They really look upon the NHL as a really exciting place to be and then they come to work with you and they witness how cool your job is. They witness how first-class the organization is and how you’re treated and you get a chance to see their excitement through their eyes.
Those are my most meaningful games, that one and probably my 1000th game, but again, you don’t get to 1000 and you don’t get to game No. 1 without a group of people helping. You get a chance to share those moments with your family and friends. It makes it really, really memorable.
What’s it like raising a family as an NHL official?
VR: Well, it’s tough. I went through a divorce. It was a tough situation for my kids and a tough situation for my wife and a tough situation for me. You’re not home a lot and it’s tough on a family. I’m happily remarried and in retirement, part of my speech I’m going to thank my ex-wife, she’s the mother of my kids and she played a huge role in this and this doesn’t happen without her. There still needs to be an acknowledgement of her effort.
What’s next for you, Vaughan?
VR: When you’re from Canada and you’re in athletics, having the opportunity to work in the National Hockey League is and has been a tremendous honor. And I’m excited about it. I’m excited about my career. I’m proud of it. But now I’m owning a business, having $180,000 payroll every two weeks and having 80-some employees and running a business that’s doing $6 million a year annually. This isn’t my expertise.
That’s what’s next. I’m proud of the NHL, but I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished at Amazon and this new chapter of my life. I’m really proud to be a little kid from Winnipeg, Manitoba making it to the NHL, but I think I might be more proud of running this business because me being a pretty good athlete was kind of expected. This is a real new venture and it’s something I’m extremely excited about.
