On this week’s Sound of Hockey, Darren is quite frustrated by his experience buying his first car through a car dealership, and he gives his two cents via a show-opening “Get Off My Lawn” segment.
John, Andy, and Darren also break down a recent NHLtoSeattle.com story about potential goalies that NHL Seattle may select in the 2021 Expansion Draft.
It’s a short but sweet episode, that’s worth a listen!
Other segments this week include Weekly One-Timers and Tweets of the Week.
While it’s been over twenty years since it happened, Jamie Butt remembers the first goal the Tacoma Sabercats scored at their home rink in the Tacoma Dome.
He’s the one that scored it.
“It was kind of a greasy goal,” Butt recalls of the goal. “I just went hard to the net. I was getting dumped and just kind of threw it on net and it went in.”
The goal delighted the nearly 7,000 fans who came to the Tacoma Dome on an early November night in 1997 to witness something they had not seen before: professional hockey. Tacoma was previously home to major junior hockey and Seattle has a pro hockey history but it’s the Sabercats who are the region’s last pro team.
Butt’s goal sparked Tacoma to a 5-3 win over the Idaho Steelheads and the victory would be the first of 11 straight wins that the expansion team ripped off in its first West Coast Hockey League season.
“We had a really good team,” Butt says. “It was a good season for us.”
Lasting only five seasons it would be easy to write off the Sabercats as a failure but on the ice, the team was a success.
In the their first three seasons the Sabercats went 137-49-20 and reached the league finals every year, culminating in a Taylor Cup championship by beating the San Diego Gulls in season two. They scored a lot of goals as well, averaging over four-and-a-half per game that first year.
It’s hard to find a better start to a pro franchise in any sport but the league they played in had issues and was not set up for long term success.
The West Coast Hockey League began play in 1995 during a time where the minor league pro hockey landscape was much different than it is today. The International Hockey League and American Hockey League were the top level with teams in each league having NHL affiliations. Below those leagues the East Coast Hockey League and the Central Hockey League covered the East and Midwest.
The Tacoma Sabercats joined the WCHL in 1997 (James Miller photo)
A British Columbia businessman named Bruce Taylor saw a void out west and worked to berth the WCHL in 1995 with teams ranging from as far north as Alaska down to Arizona in the south. Taylor owned several franchises early on and the league’s championship trophy would be named after him.
He saw an opportunity in Tacoma and divested his interest in the Fresno Falcons, Reno Renegades, and the Bakersfield Fog to concentrate fully on the Sabercats for the 1997-1998 season.
“I loved Bruce,” Frank Colarusso, who served as the Sabercats Vice President of Marketing and Sales, says. “Bruce was good to me and my family. There was a mutual respect there and I liked working for him. Owners can drive you crazy but at the end of the day he was a good man.”
With no NHL affiliation, finding players to make up the roster was somewhat of a free for all. There was no draft so head coach and general manager John Oliver had to scour the free agent pool to find guys to contribute. They weren’t going to sign high end NHL prospects, but Oliver was able to put together competitive teams.
“These were guys who just wanted to play pro hockey as long as they could,” Sabercats radio play-by-play man Thom Buening says. “Some of the older guys came back from playing overseas in Europe…a lot of them came out of NCAA, Major Junior, Junior A, and some of our import guys were playing minor pro in Europe as well.”
Players from Europe came over as did several guys who had played junior in the area. Butt had played his junior hockey with the Tacoma Rockets and former Seattle Thunderbirds Danny Lorenz and Brett Duncan were among the names who came back to the Northwest to play hockey.
Tacoma’s best player may have been Dampy Brar, who played all five seasons with the Sabercats and is their all-time leading scorer with 330 points in 297 games. He represented Tacoma in all star games and was voted the most popular player by Tacoma’s fans. Brar topped the 20-goal mark in every season with Tacoma, twice eclipsing 30 goals.
His journey to Tacoma started in Alberta where he was playing with Concordia University College of Alberta. Current Seattle Thunderbirds general manager Bil La Forge was a teammate with Brar and thought that he had too much skill to be playing at that low a level.
“He said ‘what the hell are you doing here,” Brar says with a laugh.
La Forge would put Brar in touch with his father, who was an agent at the time. That led to Brar to getting looks in the Central Hockey League before landing in Tacoma in time for the Sabercats first season. Brar would play every year the club existed.
Dampy Brar is the Tacoma Sabercats all tine leading scorer (James Miller photo)
“You always heard of Seattle but Tacoma, I didn’t know how south it was,” he recalls. “Back then there was no online presence. We had to get out a map to find where it was.”
Brar was one of the first players of East Indian decent to play professional hockey and with his playing days behind him now, he is giving back to that community by co-running the APNA Hockey school in Canada to further develop players of diverse backgrounds.
The WCHL was very much a minor league and the Sabercats story certainly has a Bull Durham or Slapshot feel to it.
The league set up in cities that are not, and were not, traditional hockey hotbeds and featured some creative team names. There was the Gila Monsters in Tucson and the Ice Dogs in Long Beach that allowed for fun logos and mascots.
Perhaps the quirkiest name was the Bakersfield Fog.
“Their mascot looked like a moldy raisin.” Buening says of Bakersfield. “It was supposed to be fog. I think the last year I was there they changed (the name) to the Condors.”
Makeshift hockey arenas also littered the league. The Tacoma Dome was one of those but the league also saw a theater converted into an ice arena along with a handful of buildings who’s better days were behind them.
Buening, who currently calls the Seattle Thunderbirds games on the radio, had to make do with what he was given night in and night out. That included broadcasting from the stands and in one case, an office.
“Reno, they played in a convention center,” he says. “That’s where their ice was, like where you’d see a trade show. I broadcast from an office up on the wall. I slid the window open to broadcast. I had to duck my head out of this window in the corner to broadcast from this office. The phone’s ringing and I’m trying to call a game.”
While most of the travel for Tacoma was by plane, a nice upgrade for players who toiled on buses in junior hockey, there were still time for hi jinks.
After boarding one flight, Duncan and teammate Scott Drevitch broke out the cards while the rest of the passengers were boarding. As things often do between teammates, a friendly disagreement broke out that resulted in one of them giving the other a healthy punch.
A flight attendant witnessed the punch and thought the two players were going to be trouble. Despite assurances that it was all in good fun, they got kicked off the flight. Oliver, sensing a chance to bond his team together urged the rest of the players to get off the plane in solidarity with the ousted pair and followed them back to the terminal.
“He got up but nobody else got off, they walked off,” Beuning recalls. “We stayed there and flew without them. He said ‘lets go’ and everyone whispered ‘don’t get up’.”
The two players and coach had to hop on a different flight and met up with the team at their final destination.
“I was in the back with my Walkman headphones on,” Brar says of the incident. “I was a younger guy and thought ‘if they all get up, I’ll get up’.”
Despite the early success on the ice, the Sabercats struggled to draw fans.
They were virtually ignored by Seattle media and had a hard time marketing the sport to an area that at the time, was not chock full of hockey fans. The WHL’s Rockets moved out of Tacoma in 1995 but those fans weren’t enough to sustain a minor league franchise.
Over the five years the team existed they averaged under 5,000 fans per game. Their best season, attendance wise, was in 1998-1999 when the team averaged 4,878 per game during the season they would go on to win the league title.
“There was a fairly decent base of hockey fans that were left over from the Rockets,” Colarusso says. “Without disparaging the Tacoma Dome, they did everything they could to help us, but the building just wasn’t suited to being a great hockey facility. It was too big, and the sight lines weren’t good. We didn’t have a great building to play in over time.”
The Tacoma Sabercats had to deal with a home building not conducive to hockey. (James Miller photo)
The Dome didn’t help the Sabercats cause.
Like the Rockets before them, it became clear that the multi-purpose dome built in 1980 was not conducive for hockey. The stands pulled away from the rink, leaving fans far away from the ice, making it hard to follow the action closely.
The building was big as well. Too big for junior or minor league hockey and a crowd of 5,000 fans, which would be a nice number for comparable minor leagues, left the building without any kind of intimate atmosphere.
“You walked in and it was a rink inside of a big dome.” Brar says. “The lighting wasn’t good and it wasn’t great for the fans who could of been a little bit closer…Tacoma had those challenges but as a player, the first three years, the way they ran their events, I can’t say it was a negative thing. I enjoyed playing there.”
There would be ticket promotions and at times the team would draw big crowds for a single game, only to see attendance drop off the next night. With 18,000 seats in the building there was no real incentive to buy season tickets as you could easily walk up and buy one hours before the game.
“We probably had a two to three thousand base who were die hard hockey fans, but we needed probably six to seven,” Colarusso says.
Prior to the 2000-2001 season, Oliver had moved on and was replaced behind the bench by Robert Dirk and the club struggled to two losing seasons in a row. Attendance dropped off significantly, dipping as low as 2,854 per game for the 2001-2002 final season.
Around the league, franchises were folding as the league dealt with financial instability. Taylor sold the club and when the new owners could not agree on a Tacoma Dome lease, the decision was made to fold the Sabercats.
“The end of Tacoma was sad,” Brar says. “I was voted most popular player, it was great to be recognized by the fans. It was appreciative to play for those fans, it was touching.”
Brar would play one more season in the league, finishing his career in Boise with the Steelheads.
Several of the WCHL teams merged into the ECHL and some are still operating. The Idaho Steelheads are the ECHL affiliate of the Dallas Stars and after changing from the Fog to the Condors, Bakersfield jumped into the AHL and are now the affiliate for the Edmonton Oilers. After folding from the ECHL in 2006, the Gulls were hatched again in 2015 when the Anaheim Ducks moved their AHL franchise to San Diego, giving new life to one of the top WCHL franchises.
The Sabercats were short lived but provided entertainment and good hockey for fans in the south end. They won early, won a title, and for the next year, until NHL Seattle begins play, will be known as the last pro hockey in the Puget Sound area.
The base of fans that Colarusso mentioned are still around and from time to time at a game in Kent’s ShoWare Center, you will spot a Sabercats sweater in the crowd.
For the first time since USA Hockey started publishing their numbers, player membership is down more than 1%, a decline of over 6000 player memberships compared to the 2018-19 season.
Part of this is certainly due to COVID-19 hitting at the end of the season and shutting down recreational and competitive hockey across the US. This could also be part of the broader story of the decline of youth sports participation across the US and finally reaching hockey.
There were some bright spots. Missouri (+2,087), Florida (+1,061), and Washington State (+876) added the most player memberships since last season. Nevada also added 661 players which is up an incredible 26% season over season. On the opposite side, New York (-3,159), Michigan (-1,807), and Pennsylvania (-1,594) saw the biggest reduction in player memberships.
Growth of Female Hockey Continues
Another bright spot is female hockey continues to grow, adding ~1,300 player memberships compared to last year. The 1,300-player increase was not quite the same pace as the previous three years of the addition of 3,000 players per season, but it was still good for a 1.6% increase. Any increase in sports should be considered significant these days.
Washington State
As noted above, Washington State added 876 player memberships, which is up 8.7% compared to 2018-19 and is the second biggest increase this state has seen since the numbers have been reported.
Much of this growth came from 20+ age group. As more ice comes online in Snoqualmie and Northgate, not to mention of the arrival of the NHL team, we should expect the youth numbers to increase significantly.
If you would like to drill into any state dashboard, you can do so here:
Things are a little lighter on this week’s episode of Sound of Hockey. This week, the guys welcome John Goodwin, one of NHL Seattle’s first Pro Scouts. It’s a great conversation, as John (Goodwin, not Barr) exudes passion for the game. You will definitely appreciate hearing from him.
Also this week, John (Barr, not Goodwin) gives an update on what we can expect when the NHL returns to play, and Andy makes a strong play for stuffed animals in the stands.
Segments this week include Weekly One-Timers and Tweets of the Week.
If there’s one position at which we should be able to predict NHL Seattle’s direction heading into the franchise’s 2021 Expansion Draft, it would be netminder. After all, Vegas’s impending acquisition of Marc-Andre Fleury, then 32 years old, in the lead-up to the Golden Knights’ inaugural season was perhaps the worst-kept secret in all of hockey.
Fleury was coming off a 2016-2017 season in which his Penguins had won the Stanley Cup, but he had lost his job to a man ten years his junior, and one who was making $5 million less per year in Matt Murray. Fleury’s illustrious career in Pittsburgh was quite obviously over, and there simply was no other outcome that could have transpired that offseason, other than him joining the NHL’s 31st team.
Marc-Andre Fleury’s career in Pittsburgh was obviously over prior to his selection by Vegas in the 2017 Expansion Draft. Photo credit Gene J. Puskar, AP.
Alas, at this point in time, things aren’t quite as crystal clear as to who will don the first beautiful set of custom-designed Bauer, CCM, or perhaps even Brian’s goalie gear in Seattle’s TBD colors, and lead the NHL’s 32nd team onto the New Arena at Seattle Center’s ice for puck drop in fall of 2021. In fact, with a year left to go before Seattle’s Expansion Draft, the only thing that makes the goaltender position any more predictable than, say, third-pairing left defense is the fact that the pool of options is simply smaller for backstops.
We can certainly whittle things down a bit by examining the contract situations of teams and goalies across the league. But even then, there’s just a lot of uncertainty, due to a number of outstanding scenarios that will alter the goaltending landscape a bit when the 2019-2020 season officially concludes. Nonetheless, let’s do some digging, and see if we can uncover who will be the first goalie for NHL Seattle.
For your perusal, here are all of the goaltending contract statuses, broken down by division (click each to expand):
OBVIOUS TARGETS
For the sake of whittling, it’s easiest to focus on which teams will likely have a logjam in net when 2021 rolls around.
Perhaps the best example of such a logjam is the New York Rangers. The Rangers are especially interesting, because when the 2019-2020 season concludes, they will have three NHL-quality goalies in Henrik Lundqvist, Igor Shesterkin, and Alexander Georgiev. Georgiev will be a restricted free agent after this season, and Shesterkin will become an RFA after next season. Lundqvist is currently 38 years old, so he obviously doesn’t fit the mold for landing in Seattle, but his contract runs through next season as well. The challenge for New York is how do they keep three NHL goalies through next season? Well, they don’t, so something will have to give there, and even if Lundqvist comes off the roster somehow, either via trade (he has a no movement clause) or retirement, that still leaves Shesterkin and Georgiev. New York cannot protect both, and both are good.Correction: Reader Jason Katinas accurately pointed out that Igor Shesterkin is actually exempt from the Expansion Draft, because like Elvis Merzlikins in Columbus, Shesterkin has only been a North American pro for one year. So, maybe New York isn’t quite as interesting of a scenario as I initially thought.
Pittsburgh has two great young goalies in the aforementioned Murray and Tristan Jarry, who burst onto the scene this season to essentially do to his counterpart what his counterpart did to Fleury in 2016-2017. Jarry had an impressive .921 save percentage and 2.43 GAA, and sometimes looked unbeatable en route to a 20-12-1 record. It would be a little ironic for Pittsburgh to give up a goalie in the Expansion Draft for the second time in a row, but with both Murray and Jarry becoming RFA’s after next season, one will have to either be traded or exposed. My guess is that Pittsburgh will find a way to avoid Fleury 2.0, but we shall see.
Vancouver and Washington are a little different from the others in this lot. Both have bona fide starters in Jacob Markstrom and Braden Holtby respectively, and solid up-and-coming back-ups in Thatcher Demko and Ilya Samsonov. Holtby’s name almost always comes up as the next goalie to experience Fleury’s Expansion Draft fate, and that makes sense. He’s 30 years old, has Samsonov waiting in the wings, and doesn’t have a contract
Braden Holtby’s name always seems to get linked to Seattle, but his contract status makes his availability unlikely. Photo credit NHL.com.
beyond this season. Markstrom—who played in his first All-Star Game this season —has the exact same scenario playing out in Vancouver, except his re-signing there has generally felt like less of a foregone conclusion than Holtby returning to Washington. Frankly, though, I think Holtby or Markstrom ending up in Seattle is unlikely. It just seems farfetched that any team would sign either of these guys to extensions after this season and not figure out a way to protect the asset. If they do both re-sign with their current teams, then look for Seattle to scoop up either Demko or Samsonov.
Also worth lumping in as a potential goalie target is Arizona. Looking at the contract statuses, it’s obvious that Darcy Kuemper will be protected, but Antti Raanta’s deal is up heading into the 2021 offseason, and young Adin Hill will still be in the mix there. Raanta has had a ton of injury issues in his career, but one could see either him or Hill (or both) being available, should Seattle wish to go in one of those directions.
Meanwhile, Columbus seems like a very obvious candidate to cede a goaltender to Seattle, because after signing both of its 26-year-old backstops to extensions this season, Joonas Korpisalo and Elvis Merzlikins are under contract through 2021-2022. However, there’s a wrinkle. Because Merzlikins just started playing pro hockey in North America
Matiss Kivlenieks played six games with the Columbus Blue Jackets and could be available. Photo credit Dan Hickling.
this season, he’s actually exempt from the Expansion Draft. Thus, the likeliest scenario here is that Korpisalo will be protected, and instead, Latvian youngster Matiss Kivlenieks would be exposed. Kivlenieks is still intriguing, as he was thrust into action with Columbus for six games this season with both Korpisalo and Merzlikins simultaneously on the shelf. Kivlenieks performed admirably, with a 1-1-2 record, and 2.95 GAA.
THE UFA CONUNDRUM
Aside from the teams that have multiple contracts to juggle, there are also several goaltenders scattered about the league who will see their contracts expire in the next year. This adds to the murkiness of the expansion pool, because where these goalies land with their next contracts will certainly impact whether or not they will be ripe for Seattle’s picking.
Some names that stick out are Anton Khudobin and Robin Lehner, both of whom will need contracts after this season, and Tuukka Rask, Petr Mrazek, David Rittich, Philipp Grubauer, and Jordan Binnington, who are all expected to be unrestricted free agents after next season. Obviously some of those guys will re-sign with their current teams prior to the end of their contracts, and being a free agent in 2021 doesn’t make them any more likely to land in Seattle than anywhere else. Still, these are players worth tracking over the course of the next two offseasons. By the way, on Lehner, Vegas is exempt from expansion, so if he goes back to the Golden Knights, he’s off the table.
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
There are a couple more angles to consider. There are plenty of goalies out there with whom we aren’t currently super familiar that may be available in the Expansion Draft, and that may be worth a look come the conclusion of the 2020-2021 season. Maybe a stud AHL goalie like a Kaapo Kahkonen out of Minnesota is left exposed, and finally finds his way onto an NHL roster, but in Seattle. There’s also a chance that Seattle manages to snag a goalie or two when teams place players on waivers after their 2021 training camps. Vegas went this route, as Malcolm Subban backed up Fleury for most of that franchise’s first season, and Subban had been claimed off waivers from Boston after camp.
So, with all this in mind, we still can’t really predict with any accuracy who will be Seattle’s first goalie. But once the dust settles on this coming offseason, we should have a very good understanding of which direction the teams with netminding logjams are heading, and at that point, we may be able to whittle this pool down to just a few potential Marc-Andre Fleury’s.
Wait, I wonder if Seattle can get the actual Marc-Andre Fleury…
Earlier this week, a white friend that I grew up with in suburban Minneapolis started an email dialogue with me and a few other white friends with similar upbringings about the events that have transpired in our hometown. I wrote the below response, which I’ve adjusted a bit for context. Although it isn’t exactly what we normally discuss here at NHLtoSeattle.com, I hope that it will encourage you to have similar dialogues with those in your own respective communities.
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Although I’ve been away for the better part of fifteen years now, I still feel like I am a Minnesotan at heart. I still love Minnesota sports, and I still knowingly speak with a slight Minnesota accent. I also still brag about all the great things I remember from growing up in a place where you could spend every winter day skating for free in practically any suburban park, and every summer day floating in one of the state’s beautiful lakes.
Since moving from Minnesota, I’ve lived on both coasts. When I lived in New York, I felt like there was always something to keep you on edge. I was there through Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. I remember riding the subway the morning after news broke that a Brooklynite had been diagnosed with ebola, and feeling fearful for my life when the man next to me coughed. I also remember locking down the hotel I worked in – which was conveniently located across the street from the site of the worst terrorist attack in history – due to a suspicious package found just outside, as the world was on alert following the attack on the Bataclan Theatre in Paris. When my wife and I left New York, I felt a temporary sense of relief to get out of that bubble, but now living here in Seattle, we have the fear of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, none of which even have the courtesy to give you notice of their arrival the way that a simple little northeastern hurricane does.
And yet, looking back on my youth in Minnesota, I don’t recall many days of feeling genuinely fearful, save for the weeks that immediately followed 9/11, and that didn’t even happen anywhere near Minnesota. Even today, I imagine that if something bad happens wherever we happen to be living, we can just go back to good old MN, because nothing truly bad ever happens there.
But what happened to George Floyd was truly bad. What happened in the Twin Cities this past week was truly bad. I now believe that there have been truly bad things happening there and here and frankly everywhere in our country since its inception. I was just blind to it, surrounded almost exclusively by other privileged white kids like myself, who never had to deal with truly bad things.
Seeing my hometown burn from afar, while my family ignored the risks associated with a pandemic to huddle together in fear that looters may make their way out to the suburbs is not something I anticipated seeing in my lifetime. Meanwhile, chaos erupted here in Seattle on Saturday, when protests turned violent, innocent people were hurt, and hundreds of downtown businesses were destroyed, with the closest being about ten minutes on foot from where my wife and I live. Since then, protests have moved even closer, and although they are mostly peaceful, we are within earshot of the flash-bang grenades that SPD has deployed on a number of occasions. Knowing that proceedings remained peaceful on Wednesday is a huge relief and gives me hope that real change is happening in Seattle. It gives me hope that we can be an example for the rest of the nation.
I’ve cried a lot this week. I want it all to stop. I want everyone in the world to look at each other and say, “I respect you, and I’m happy to share this Earth with you,” and I want the constant feelings of uneasiness to go away.
But I think that uneasiness may be exactly the point for people like us. We are so incredibly lucky. There are things in the world that are scary, and those things that we fear are the things that scare everyone living in the same region, regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexuality. But if you were to change the way we look, then we would also have to layer on the fear that we could be stopped, arrested, beaten, or even suffocated just because we’re physically different and no longer have the same privileges that we all take for granted.
I look back at my youth and my college days, and I’m so disappointed that I participated in activities and used language that would be so hurtful to so many people that I now love. This is what happens when you surround yourself with people like yourself, though. You never understand those who are different than you, until you get to know them, and you truly listen when they let down their guard and try to express to you what it’s like to walk in their shoes.
I believe that the feeling of uneasiness this week has been a very small taste of the way that people of color feel every single day living in our society, and that devastates me. I hate feeling uneasy like this, but I believe in humanity, and I believe that this uneasiness will pass, and that change will finally come for those who so desperately need it.
When that happens, I will be glad to have felt the uneasiness.
Featured image taken by David Joles, photo journalist for the Star Tribune/Associated Press.
Much of this growth came from 20+ age group. As more ice comes online in Snoqualmie and Northgate, not to mention of the arrival of the NHL team, we should expect the youth numbers to increase significantly.
