Mark of distinction

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2012 (5235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By any measure, Mark Stone had a remarkable year in 2011.

And 2012 might be even better.

The Brandon Wheat Kings star had his breakout campaign in the Western Hockey League in 2010-11 and has built on that this season, leading the WHL in scoring at the time he left to join Canada’s pursuit of gold at the world junior hockey championship.

Today, the 19-year-old Winnipegger has been named the 54th winner of the Brandon Sun’s H.L. (Krug) Crawford Memorial Award, emblematic of sporting excellence in southwestern Manitoba.

Among Stone’s highlights in 2011:

• Tied for third in the WHL scoring race in 2010-11 with 106 points, earning first-team league all-star honours.

• Starred at the Canadian junior team’s summer development camp, producing four goals and four assists in two intra-squad games.

• Signed his first National Hockey League contract in September with the Ottawa Senators, who chose him in the sixth round of the 2010 draft.

•Recorded points in the first 18 games of the 2011-12 season for the Wheat Kings on his way to 27 goals and 65 points in only 33 games to take the league scoring lead before joining Team Canada.

•Notched a goal and an assist against the Russian Selects in the last game of the Canadian Hockey League’s Super Series.

• Scored a hat trick against Finland in Canada’s first game of the world junior championship and kept right on rolling, firing seven goals in four games and leading the team in scoring with nine points entering today’s world junior semifinals.

“It’s been an action-filled year,” the 6-foot-3, 206-pound right-winger said. “Getting the contract done in Ottawa, going to the summer camp for the world juniors, playing in the Super Series and now getting to represent my country at the world juniors. Things are really going up for me and I’m going to try and make a career out of hockey and this is just one of the first steps.”

The very first steps in the game for the son of Rob and Jackie Stone came as a youngster in Winnipeg, following in the wake of his older brother Michael, a third-round pick of the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes who now plays in the American Hockey League for the Portland Pirates. Mark got the bug to play for Canada a few years after that.

“My dad had got my brother into hockey and I obviously wanted to play,” said Mark, who is two years younger than Michael. “The world juniors was in Winnipeg in ’99 and the first glimpse of international hockey that I had gotten. Once you get older, you start realizing how important the tournament is for Canada. You really want to try and accomplish the goal and try and play in the tournament.”

History has shown that what Stone wants to accomplish, he usually does.

A standout in minor hockey, he helped the Winnipeg Thrashers make it to the final of the Telus Cup national Midget AAA championship in 2008. Mere months later, he was in the Wheat Kings’ lineup, refusing to be held back by an ungainly skating stride that caused him to fall to the fifth round of the 2007 WHL Bantam Draft before being selected by Brandon.

“I just was really impressed with how quickly he picked things up,” said Wheat Kings owner/general manager Kelly McCrimmon, who also coached Stone his first three seasons in the WHL. “I know when we kept him on our team at 16, that first month where you’re still evaluating players, he was a sponge. When you told him something once, he instantly put that into his game. He just understood things so well. So even when you watched him as a young player, you could tell his understanding of the game was real good.

“One of things that we talked about at our draft meetings — we drafted him the year that Anaheim won the Stanley Cup and we talked about (Ducks forward) Corey Perry and how no one ever thought he’d be able to play in the National Hockey League because he didn’t skate well enough, and yet there was just so many things that that player was able to do to make himself a great player. We thought that Mark Stone had a lot of those same characteristics.”

His remarkable production and exemplary leadership and work ethic made Stone an obvious choice to become the Wheat Kings’ captain this season.

“Both on and off the ice, he’s a huge part of our team,” Wheat Kings head coach Cory Clouston said. “He’s an elite player, high skill level, very competitive and he sets the tone for our team. You see what he’s capable of doing at the world stage and I just expect that as the competition gets tougher, he’s going to be better.”

Stone’s final chapters as a player have yet to be written and he’s hoping for storybook endings, both with Team Canada and as a Wheat King, before moving on to the pro ranks next season.

In another reality, it’s very possible that Stone might not have been a Wheat King for his greatest accomplishments. When Brandon hosted the 2010 Memorial Cup, the then 17-year-old Stone was a player all the other teams asked for as the Wheat Kings loaded up, but McCrimmon stood firm.

Stone is glad he did.

“The Wheat Kings used to come into Winnipeg and play some of their playoff games and we used to go watch, but once my brother had been drafted by Calgary and played as a 16-year-old, (playing in the WHL) really was something that I wanted to do,” he said. “I owe a lot to the Wheat Kings. They’ve been exceptional to me over the last three and a half years so far.”

» rhenders@brandonsun.com