Finding a Foothold

It has been, to say the least, a sluggish start to the season for the Seattle Thunderbirds. As a result, they sit at 1-3-1-0 through their first five games. Too many repeated, but correctable mistakes are being made and it all begins in the defensive zone.

Puck management is the biggest issue. Seattle is losing too many board battles. They are not executing zone exiting passes.  Opponents are getting to the net front a little too easily. When the T-Birds play well, such as opening night on the road in Langley or the home opener against Wenatchee, and even to an extent, the home loss to Prince George, they keep these problems to a manageable amount. That gives them a chance to compete for sixty minutes. But when these errors pop up too often, the T-Birds make it hard on themselves to get in a positon to win.

Eleven players on the current roster weren't on the team a year ago.  Another seven are just beginning their second season and taking on bigger roles and more responsibility this season. That's essentially three fourths of your roster. So there is a lot of both inexperience and unfamiliarity. I think that leads to a lack of cohesion. The team is still trying to build its chemisty.

It's hard to say be patient because wins and points matter just as much now as they will in January and February, but the T-Birds have had to reload on the fly after their two year run that took them to the league championship series in both 2021-22 and 2022-23. 31 players who played a role, big or small, in the success of either one, or both of those seasons, have moved on.  That's a lot of roster churn in a short amount of time.

We almost forget that after Seattle captured the Chynoweth Cup in 2017, it took five years to get back to the top of the WHL mountain.  It seems like just yesterday that Mat Barzal was stepping off the team but in the ShoWare Center parking lot with that first ever Ed Chynoweth Cup, but in reality he's entering his 8th season in the NHL. Time flies. 

We also have to remember that to win the 2017 title, the T-Birds made very few roster moves that season.  They added just a couple of role players without spending any real draft capital or trading too many prospects. It was a different landscape in 2017. The WHL wasn't hosting the Memorial Cup that spring.

It was a completely different story in 2022-23.  There were a number of teams in contention besides Seattle.  Because Kamloops was hosting the Memorial Cup, the prices to add significant roster pieces were high.  As good as the T-Birds roster was, they had to pay a steep price to add guys like Nolan Allan, Colton Dach, Luke Prokop and Dylan Guenther to their team because that's what the Blazers and Winnipeg Ice were doing. They had to keep up with the Jones's. And it pretty much guarenteed Seattle was going to have a young team without much veteran presence for a season or two.

That's just the reality of Junior hockey.  If you want to win a title now, you have to develop talent but you also have to be bold.  General Manager Bil LaForge was bold and it paid off. Kamloops and Winnipeg/Wenatchee were bold and fell short.  

So Seattle is back to where they were after the 2017 run. They are reloading. They are looking for that group of players they can build around. In 2023 it was the 2003s. Is it the 2007s turn? Maybe. It could be the 2009s. They're still in their WHL infancy, so only time will tell. But Seattle has done it before, they can do it again.

The Thunderbirds scored the second fewest goals in the WHL last season with 190. Through their first six games this season they are averaging 2.6 goals per game, putting them on pace for even fewer goals (181) this season. They need to generate more offensive punch. It isn't necessarily a lack of shots.  It's a lack of high end scoring chances. The good news is that through six games those 16 goals have come from 10 different players. They will need scoring by committe to be successful so, to a certain extent, we are seeing that early on. They just need more of it.