Wheat Kings stand pat at deadline

The Brandon Wheat Kings stood pat as the Western Hockey League trade deadline passed on Thursday evening.

Brandon head coach and general manager Marty Murray said nothing came together in the end.

“We looked at a variety of things, and some big ones too,” Murray said. “Obviously we want to make our team better, but there is something to keeping glue guys and the core together to grow together and hopefully have success together.

“Making trades just to make trades is not something we’re interested in.”

Trade talks began to pick up just before Christmas, and got busier as the deadline approached. Murray spoke to each of the other 22 teams.

“We kicked the tires,” Murray said. “We had a lot of irons in the fire but came up a little short. We had a few we had a lot of traction on, but sometimes they just don’t happen in the end. You have to look at the big picture too. Certainly we want to make our team better if we could, but at the same time, you also have to keep one eye on the future.

“With the new landscape with the NCAA, you have to be careful how you manage those assets and not give too many away because you never know if you can get them back.”

Murray is referring to teams loading up for playoff runs in the last few years and then unloading their returning veterans the next season to get picks and young players back. With the uncertainty of whether players will potentially head to college the next season, those returns are no longer guaranteed, and the length of the rebuild could potentially be extended.

“You can really put your organization back a number of years,” Murray said.

Overall, since Dec. 1, there were 39 deals around the league. On Thursday, there were seven. Around the league, just four of the 23 teams haven’t made a move since Dec. 1, Brandon, the Moose Jaw Warriors, Tri-City Americans and Victoria Royals.

EARLY MOVES

Brandon has made five deals since last spring, with the last coming in the summer.

In the biggest, they acquired overage forward Luke Mistelbacher of Steinbach and overage defenceman Grayson Burzynski of Winnipeg from the Swift Current Broncos on May 7 for the Wheat Kings’ own pick in the first round, 15th overall, plus 15-year-old prospect Alex Letourneau, a second-round pick in 2025 originally belonging to the Saskatoon Blades, third-round picks in 2027 and 2028 and a sixth-round pick in 2028.

“I think people need to remember that we made a very significant trade in the summer,” Murray said. “Just being in the league for a few years now, if you can do those trades in the summer, they might be cheaper and you get those players who are very impactful … If we did that today, I think we would have ended up paying a lot more.”

On the second day of the WHL draft, May 8, they sent overage Czech forward Dominik Petr and a ninth-round pick to the Saskatoon Blades for their fourth-round pick, 83rd overall, and then took goalie Joffrey Chan of Vancouver.

They also picked up the 146th pick overall in the seventh round in a deal with the Everett Silvertips for a pick they had acquired from the Seattle Thunderbirds, in return for the Wheat Kings’ seventh-round pick in 2027. They used the selection to take forward Mark Munday of Winnipeg.

On June 30, Brandon sent a sixth-round pick in 2029 to the Portland Winterhawks for their second-round pick in the import draft, and then used it to take Czech defenceman Adam Hlinsky, who played two games, was injured, went home and was eventually released in November.

Finally, on July 29, they swapped 19-year-old goalies, with Ethan Eskit heading to the Victoria Royals and Jayden Kraus coming to Brandon.

Kraus was happy the current team has the chance to finish the season together.

“I think it’s pretty special,” Kraus said. “In the past couple of years it’s been Jan. 10, and that’s the time for most teams you have to revamp your locker room. One guy can change the whole dynamics of a team and we’re super lucky. In the first half, we built a great bond and now we have another half to keep trending upwards with this group, and on the ice, just continue to progress as a group.”

The last year Brandon didn’t make a trade at the deadline was 2021, with their last deal that season coming when they picked up power forward Landon Roberts from Tri-City for a draft pick on Oct. 31, 2020.

“I think we have a really good group of guys and we all believe in each other,” defenceman Max Lavoie said. “You don’t want to see any friends go. We’re all really close, and there is a lot of belief in this room to have a really strong post-season.”

Murray let the team know in their group text.

Brandon has also been a seller at the deadline in recent years, most recently in 2018 with Tanner Kaspick and Kale Clague and in 2024 with Nate Danielson. The team never seriously explored that option.

“It’s hard,” Murray said. “We want to be competitive and we went into the trade deadline with an open mind that we were going to try to make our team better. Unfortunately, there’s a price for everything and unfortunately we were in on a few that would have helped, but we ended up being in second on a lot of those.

“It just depends on how much you’re willing to put out there and commit. When there are 23 teams vying for the same player, you run the risk of coming up short, and we did that on a few occasions. At the same time, we went to that limit we felt comfortable with and decided the picture was protecting the franchise and the future.

“We feel good about our team and we feel good about our prospects in the future. We didn’t want to ruffle too many feathers.”

DEALS ELSEWHERE

All three teams currently ahead of them in the standings in the Eastern Conference have made moves to get significantly better.

The Medicine Hat Tigers had overage forward Andrew Basha returned to them from pro hockey and acquired 19-year-old forward Luke Cozens.

The Prince Albert Raiders added 18-year-old forwards Braeden Cootes, Brandon Gorzynski and Maddix McCagherty, while the Edmonton Oil Kings brought in overager defencemen Carter Sotheran and Austin Zemlak, plus forwards Jaxon Fuder and Aaron Obobaifo.

In the Western Conference, the league-leading Everett Silvertips acquired 18-year-old defencemen Luke Vlooswyk and Kayd Ruedig.

“Obviously some teams really beefed up,” Murray said. “That’s part of it too. You can’t just dip your toe in. You can’t go halfway in. When you go in, you have to go in all the way. It’s not that we don’t believe in our players, I just think if you look at what of the teams did, it’s a lot.

“With our group we have, and the chemistry we have, and the character we have, we’re going into every game, regardless of whether it’s against P.A., Edmonton, or whoever, we’re going in to win.”

Another wildcard is the fact the Kelowna Rockets are hosting the Memorial Cup. That adds another buyer to the market, which historically drives up prices as well.

Murray said the prices being paid surprised him a bit, although he added world-class junior quality players are always going to earn a handsome return.

“It seemed like the D position this year was very expensive,” Murray said. “Guys were going for prices that were maybe a little high, and that’s just the nature of the beast. With the new landscape too, you maybe see the depth isn’t quite there, especially on the back end, we find, so it’s not surprising that the price for defencemen is high.”

The Wheat Kings are a club that weathered an 0-4-1-0 start to the season and are currently on a three-game slide, but also a team that went 11-1-0-0 in December. The truth of their actual competitive level almost certainly lies somewhere between those two extremes.

‘We’re real comfortable with our group,” Murray said. “We feel that we’re very competitive and can win on any given night.”

Murray was helped at the deadline by director of hockey operations, Chris Moulton, who sat in the board room as they took calls. While Moulton’s focus is more on draft picks and young prospects and Murray’s attention is more on the current team, they had a unified approach as they considered offers.

“We draft and develop these young players to have success at this level,” Moulton said. “If there is anything I can help with at this level, and if that means losing picks or prospects, I’m fully supportive. Of course when I go into the draft, I love an abundance of picks, but if the picks I don’t have, have benefited the group here in Brandon, then I’m perfectly fine with that. It’s one cohesive unit.”

At the same time, Moulton’s work is gaining importance with the fact any veteran could essentially leave at any time to go to school.

“The league is going to get younger,” Murray said. “That’s the way it is with the new landscape. Those are the guys who are key. In the past, it was so easy to manage your roster when you knew you were going to have guys for three or four years and you knew what it looked like from year to year.

“Now, there’s that uncertainty. So you probably are leaning on your younger guys, and if you move a couple of those and then some older guys leave, you’re getting a double whammy there. It’s something you have to be very careful with.

“Can we be more aggressive? Maybe, but there was things that didn’t make a lot of sense in the big picture for our organization.”

In Murray’s playing days, teams might add a player or two, but since 2018, when the Swift Current Broncos won a championship by spending wildly, the approach has changed. When Murray has spoken to some of the more experienced general managers around the league, there is the sense that the WHL has lost something.

“It’s different,” Murray said. “In the past you had to draft and develop your players and maybe make a couple of tweaks. Now it’s so cyclical, where teams go through some real rough times and accumulate all these draft picks and young players, and now they’re spending.

“It’s hard. I have a hard time being a competitor where you come into a mode where you’re winning two games out of 10. It’s miserable coming to the rink for our players and our staff and our fans.

“People will probably be disappointed we didn’t make a big splash, but at the same time, we want to make sure we’re real competitive year in and year out. We don’t want to have one of those years where it’s going to be very trying to get wins. I went through it as a player. In my first year we won, I think, 11 games and it wasn’t fun coming to the rink.

“We don’t want to go down that trail.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com