Author: Jess Briggs

The Cat

Jess Briggs1 Comment

Throughout Alex Debrincat’s three years in the OHL, I grew rather fond of this small right winger.  Whether the connection formed due to only his offensive firepower, or the sharing of a number (his number, 12, was also my water polo number), he captured my attention.  And as he has moved from the OHL to the NHL, I can guarantee I am no longer one of only a few Erie-ites who make up his fan club.

Alex came to the Erie Otters as a free agent.  Growing up in Michigan, he had originally planned on playing hockey in the NCAA.  Because of NCAA regulations, young elite players must choose between the OHL and NCAA.  While OHL players are not technically paid, they do receive a small stipend and an education package they can use if they don’t go pro, causing them to loose their eligibility.  Because OHL teams knew of this decision, DeBrincat went undrafted into the league.  However, Otter’ recruiters were able to lure Alex to Erie, helped by the star studded roster including Connor McDavid and Dylan Strome that was being developed.

In Erie, DeBrincat went on to become a scoring leaders.  He accumulated over fifty goals in each of his three seasons with the Otters, becoming one of only two OHL players to ever accomplish this feat.  That being said, you would think he would be a highly ought after piece in his NHL draft year, right? Not quite.

While Alex was being looked at, teams questioned him.  Not because of anything he had over, though.  Because of his size.  Standing at only five feet seven inches and 160 pounds (at the time of the draft), Alex is tiny in the hockey world.  Teams were concerned that he would be demolished in the NHL, cracking under the pressure of playing against guys almost an entire foot taller than and much more muscular than him.

This is my personal favorite video of him proving them wrong:

As you have surely guessed by now, Alex was drafted in his draft year.  But not until the second round, selected 39th overall by the Chicago Blackhawks.  With their first pick in the 2016 draft, Chicago finally picked up Brinksy, seeing him as similar to one of their star player Patrick Kane, who was also considered too small at five foot ten. DeBrincat was passed over by 26 teams and slipped from the first round, where he his skills should have rightfully placed him.  And today, all of these teams are surely kicking themselves for loosing out on the biggest slip of the 2016 draft.

This past week, Alex DeBrincat scored his first NHL hat trick, with three goals in Chicago’s win against the Anaheim Ducks.  He is in the running for both most goals scored and points earned by rookies in the NHL.  He is making everyone turn their heads and take a good hard look, proving that with good players, skill can overcome size.

(Jonathan Toews is Chicago’s current captain… Yeah)

I could not end a post about DeBrincat without sending a sincere thank you to whoever it is that runs the Chicago Blackhawks’ Twitter page.  Obviously their social media manager has also taken a liking to DeBrincat, who is now mostly referred to as simply “The Cat.”  Here is one final example of my favorite DeBrincat tweets, for your viewing pleasure.  Enjoy! #purr #thecat #brinsky #meow #ipromisethisisthechicagotwittersdoingnotmine

(As I was writing this post, he scored again, making him tied for first place in NHL rookie scoring. I love and miss this boy so much.)

How It Feels to Win It All

Jess Briggs1 Comment

Earlier this week, I came across this tweet:

To most, this just seems like a list of random words and names.  To me, it is a vivid memory.  As I read along, I could see the play being described in my head like a movie clip.  I could see the puck slide off of Anthony Cirelli’s stick and into the back of the goal, ending the game in sudden death overtime.  I heard the goal horn and the screams of the fans.  I could see the entire team jumping from the bench, sticks and gloves flying in the air as they piled into the boards to celebrate together.  The insanity that followed for the next hour and a half is permanently etched in my brain.  And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Though I had never actually heard the radio broadcast from this night, I could hear our announcer’s voice in my head as I read those words.  I had a visceral emotional response when I saw it, with goosebumps running up my arms and a smile breaking across my face.  In those documented seconds from May, we finally accomplished the goal that was four years coming.  We had finally done it.  The Erie Otters had finally won the OHL Championship.

After four seasons of being so close always conference champions or runner ups, it was amazing to finally be the big winners.  Every year, my dad told the stories of our first championship win in 2002.  He said that the noise and the atmosphere was like nothing else he had ever experienced.  The stories always ended with him looking back at me with a special sparkle in his eye and saying “I hope you get to experience it, Jess. It’s amazing.”

And this year I finally did.  In the minutes after, there was screaming, crying (yes, I will admit that I cried), and hugging.  I wanted to describe exactly what happened after and how I felt, but the words are impossible to find.  There is no way to describe the immense pride and happiness I felt on this day.  I still get a weird, tingling feeling in my stomach when I think about it.  Especially with a local team, there is this intense passion that OHL die-hard fans have, and the arena exploded with it that night.  And I realize that to outsiders, we must seem ridiculous.  But on the inside, there is no better feeling.  We watched as our boys celebrated with their friends and family.  And we got to celebrate with them.  It was an amazing shared experience, especially near the end of the night when most had left.  The was nothing like celebrating with your team and the other fans who had been with them since the beginning.

The timing of our win as perfect.  I was getting ready to leave for college, an last season is quite possibly the last full season I will ever have in Erie.  The team I had watched since I was in the 5th grade finally won the championship as I got ready to graduate high school.  It was the perfect end of an era.

 

“Our Little Baby McDavid”

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Every sports fan knows that every team, no matter the sport, place, or level, has what is known as a franchise player.  It can progress over time, and more than one can exist, but this player will forever be etched into franchise history as the best of the best.  Penn State Football has Saquon Barkley.  The Cleveland Cavaliers have Lebron James.  The Washington Capitals have Alex Ovechkin. The Pittsburgh Penguins had Mario Lemuiex, and more recently have Sidney Crosby.  And the Edmonton Oilers had Wayne Gretsky, “The Great One”, and now have Connor McDavid, the twenty year old phenom who is widely considered to be the best player in the NHL right now.

But before Connor McDavid could become the star NHL player he is now, at the young age of twenty, I might add, he had to develop.  Before he was the face of the Edmonton Oilers, Connor McDavid was the franchise player of my hometown hockey team.  He was, and in some ways still is, the face of the Erie Otters.

https://twitter.com/JayMcKee74/status/915926762407768064

How is this possible, you ask?  How did a small city in Pennsylvania, of all places, get to be the three year home of the best amateur hockey player in the world?  Of all of the possible pathways to greatness, how did this fifteen year old kid end up plopped in one of only three OHL cities outside of Canada?  Well, many believe the Canadian Hockey League, and the OHL in particular, are the best developmental leagues in the world.  Better than the NCAA, even.  So, as a young Canadian kid, that was his dream.  So that explains why he was in our league, but why specifically the Erie Otters?

Because we were terrible.  The season prior to his draft, the Otters won a grand total of eleven games.  Now I know what you are thinking.  That can’t be that bad.  How many games do they play? Twenty? Thirty? Sixty eight.  We play sixty eight games a season.  And we won only eleven.  Of the fifteen or so home games I attended that season, I saw a single win.  It was the lowest point in our teams history.

But, even in the darkest of times, there is light.  Connor McDavid was our light.  Being selected with the first overall pick in the 2012 OHL draft, this fifteen year old kid with “exceptional status”, the right to enter the league a year earlier than he was supposed to, was now an Erie Otter.  He was amazing, speed and skill we had never seen a player have before on our team.  And he was only fifteen!  But he couldn’t single-handedly support an entire hockey team.  So the following year, we finished second to last.  But upon his base we built, and the following season we had our first of four consecutive fifty-win seasons, a feat never before accomplished in the OHL.

However, Connor was not with us for the final two.  While having deep playoff runs in his final two years, he never won an OHL championship.  Instead, in 2015, he was drafted, again first overall, by the Edmonton Oilers.

The buildup to this draft was unlike anything I had ever seen.  Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel would square off for the first overall pick. (By the end of the cycle, the competition was imagined.  Nothing could cause Connor to lose this spot. He probably could have killed someone and gotten away with it.) NHL scouts could be found at every home game, all in town to watch the phenom being deemed the next Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby.  Some of our games were televised on ESPN.  During Sports Center, along side all professional highlights, was a reel of McDavid’s as well.  National attention, at least in the hockey world, was being rained on Erie, PA.  All for a, at this point, seventeen year old kid.

I remember my mom walking into the living room one day, where the sportscaster on our television was reading his script about Connor’s performance and his more than likely position of first overall draft pick.

“Is that our little baby McDavid they are talking about!?!” she exclaimed.

Yes, Mom.  He might be kind of good.

Image result for connor mcdavid erie otters

Why Saying “You Suck” Really Sucks

Jess Briggs3 Comments

Flashback to September 13th, 2017.  It is 10 o’clock at night, and I am sitting at my desk, putting off doing schoolwork, as I would any Wednesday night.  But that night’s procrastination venue was special.  The online time wasting choice of the day: The Roar Zone’s, or Penn State hockey’s student section’s, website.

The next day, at the bright and early time of seven am, was a day I had been waiting for since I committed to attend Penn State.  It was the day I would finally buy my season tickets and join the student section for college hockey games.  To be honest, I had never attended an NCAA men’s hockey game before, and still have yet to go to one of these games.  But from my knowledge base of OHL hockey, the league of my hometown team, I knew college games had to be exciting.

At home, my major junior hockey team was just as skilled as any NCAA team is, if not more so.  So why did OHL crowds tend to fall flat sometimes, while NCAA crowds kept roaring all game long?  Much of this excitement, I rationalized, had to come from the presence of a student section.  At home, much of the crowd was composed of families or adult hockey fans, who would cheer after goals and sometimes when prompted by music from the loudspeakers.  In college, there was a designated section for leading cheers and making noise.  So obviously this experience was going to be nothing but positive, right?

Not quite.  Cut back to that night of procrastination via the Roar Zone website.  One tab was dedicated descriptions of the cheers the student section yell’s out during the game.

Oh perfect, I thought as I delved into the webpage.

Again, not quite.  As I searched through the cheers, I found that many of the cheers had a negative focus.  Some were positive and focused on cheering on our own team, but this was a minority.  Most were focused on telling the other team, in varying ways, how much they “suck.”

This really bothered me.  One of the things I love about being a sports fan is cheering on my own team.  It is super exciting and very fun to cheer on your team surrounded by other people who share your love for both the team and the sport.  I doubt degrading the visiting team has this same community building and fun effect.

When reflecting on my finding with my parents, my mother responded with another tidbit that I think is significant:  Part of the reason Penn State football’s student section is so great is because we are an incredibly loud force cheering on our team.  To hear us yell “WE ARE” brings pride into the heart of all Penn Staters.  I can’t imagine hearing us tell other schools how much they suck has the same effect.

I feel as though sportsmanship is something that should be carried on to the fans.  You attend a game to root for your own team, not bring the other one down.  I think we should focus on the

Otters Dream Team Alumni: Where Are They Now?

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With preseason action still underway in the NHL and the OHL season starting up tonight, hockey season is upon us!  As a result of this overlap, some OHL teams are still missing their star players, who are off trying to prove themselves at the next level.  Luckily for the Erie Otters, all of our expected returnees have made their way back for tonight’s season opener against Peterborough with the return of Taylor Raddysh from the Tampa Bay Lightning on Wednesday.

But perhaps a more interesting story at this point in the season is those Erie Otters who have not returned.  Thirteen Otters players from last year’s championship run were invited to NHL rookie camps, ten of whom were eligible to return to OHL ice.  Of those, only six have made their way back to Erie.  So who are those seven players from last year’s dream team who are off to new places, and how are they doing?  Lets find out!

Alex DeBrincat

This Chicago Blackhawks prospect has exploded onto the professional scene after making a splash at rookie camp.  Although not a lock to make the NHL season roster, the Otters standout has been seen in training camp playing on a line with Blackhawks star Patrick Kane. Debrincat did not play in team’s first preseason game earlier this week, but he will make his debut tonight.  He will be looking to prove himself to earn a coveted spot on that team.  In order to do so, he will need to show that his game sense and technique can make up for his small size, standing at only 5’7″, and that he has the speed to keep up with a faster NHL game.

Dylan Strome

It looks like this year will finally be the year 2015 3rd overall NHL Draft pick Dylan Strome finally gets to suit up for the Arizona Coyotes.  After his surprise return to the Otters last year due to an AHL age rule, Strome is looking to prove that he is ready for NHL action. He earned an assist in the first preseason game on Wednesday night, so we shall see if he can continue to perform.

https://twitter.com/coreypronman/status/910731547002703872

Erik Cernak

This former Otter is suiting up in preseason action for the Tampa Bay Lightning, after being traded from the LA Kings during the winter.  This young defenseman will look to show the same power at breaking up plays while still having a significant offensive presence while proving himself to this new team. Unless he really dazzles in these preseason games, he will likely play in the AHL this seaosn.

Anthony Cirelli

Cirelli is also representing Erie in Tampa Bay this preseason. After scoring the Championship winning goal this past year in Erie, Cirelli looked solid at the beginning of preseason play this past week, even earning a top star in the second game after an fight and assist.  He is a skilled player who comes alive and really shines when it counts, so keep an eye on him if things ever start to sway out of The Lightning’s favor.

Darren Raddysh

After finally signing a pro contract with the Chicago Blackhawks this summer, Raddysh will be getting looking to show that he is ready for the next level after being named OHL Defenceman of the Year this past season.  He is a workhorse with a strong two-sided game.  Raddysh was today released from Chicago’s preseason roster, but I see him thriving in the AHL this season with the goal of NHL action in a year or two.

Warren Foegele

One would expect great things to come from last year’s Wayne Gretzky 99 Trophy winner, and award bestowed on the OHL playoff MVP.  But news from the Carolina Hurricanes about this former Otter has been scarce.  He is still on the pre-season roster, and has been playing in the preseason games thus far.  Although he as not put up any points yet, perhaps no news is good news? We shall see in the next month or so.  Worst case scenario, Foegele will end up on the Hurricane’s AHL team.

Kyle Pettit

While invited to the New York Ranger’s rookie camp, Pettit was not able to secure a spot at NHL training camp.  He will continue his hockey career at the University of Western Ontario this season.

That’s all for this week! How do you think these former junior players will fair in the big leagues?