The Victoria Royals are not in the 2024 Western Hockey League final, but Royals fans can live vicariously through the Moose Jaw Warriors, who feature former Royals stalwarts Brayden Schuurman and NHL Minnesota Wild-drafted defenceman Kalem Parker. Both have represented Canada in the Under-18 World Championship.
The Warriors took a 1-0 lead into Saturday night’s second game of the WHL final series in Portland against the Winterhawks, the team that swept Victoria in the first round of the playoffs.
The Royals dealt Schuurman and Parker to the Warriors this season for the eighth and 18th picks in the first round of the 2024 WHL prospects draft, which Victoria used to select their centremen of the future Jacob Schwartz and Ludovic Perreault in Thursday’s draft.
The Royals also got Moose Jaw’s first-round pick in 2026, second-round selection in 2025, third-round pick in 2027 along with forward Ben Riche as part of the haul. The trade accomplished what the Warriors, looking for immediate impact and to win now, and the Royals, looking to the future, hoped it would for their own particular situations.
“In the future, we want to be in that position where we will be looking to win immediately, and we will be the team making the deals to acquire top-end veterans,” said Royals head scout Tanner McCall, who, in his former job with Moose Jaw, helped build the current Warriors team.
In his career, current Royals GM Jake Heisinger has not been averse to pulling the trigger in such situations. Last year, he made one of the biggest trades in WHL history as the vice-president of hockey operations and assistant GM of the Winnipeg Ice when the Ice sent two players and the Ice’s first-round WHL draft picks in 2024, 2025 and 2026 to Vancouver for the Giants’ captain and Canadian world junior gold medallist Zack Ostapchuk.
It didn’t work out as the Ice lost to the Seattle Thunderbirds in the 2023 WHL final. That deal had reverberations into this year’s final. The Ice (now the Wenatchee Wild) this season had to trade away NHL first-round draft picks Matthew Savoie and Conor Geekie in order to replenish the depleted draft cupboard, with Savoie a key part of the Warriors’ current run to the WHL final.
But there are no regrets and no apologies. “If you feel like you have the team to go for it, you are going to do everything you can to give your team the best chance to win,” Heisinger told the Times Colonist this year.
But Heisinger’s Royals, who continue to re-tool, are a long way from that scenario. It is the Warriors who are currently living in the moment as they pursue the first WHL championship in the franchise’s 40-year-history. A separate franchise, the Moose Jaw Canucks, won the city’s lone WHL championship in 1967. Victoria’s lone WHL crown was won in 1981 by the Grant Fuhr- and Barry Pederson-led Cougars.
This is the second time in recent seasons that a Royals-tinged team has been to the WHL championship final. The 2019 champion Prince Albert Raiders were loaded with former Royals. Veteran Royals forward Dante Hannoun was sent to Prince Albert as a 20-year-old. Victoria also sent the rights to its forward Noah Gregor to the Raiders for conditional compensation almost as an afterthought because nobody in the WHL, other than Prince Albert apparently, believed the San Jose Sharks were going to return Gregor from the NHL to junior hockey, as they eventually did.
Gregor was outstanding, and Hannoun scored the winning goal in overtime in Game 7 of the 2019 WHL final, as the Raiders won the championship. The Prince Albert captain was former Victoria defenceman Brayden Pachal, who the Royals gave up on after two seasons, but who now plays in the NHL for the Calgary Flames.
Now it’s happening again with the Warriors. But, as McCall noted, Victoria hopes to have the last laugh this time with the haul of draft picks it extracted from Moose Jaw for Schuurman and Parker.
Perhaps one day, when those picks mature, Heisinger will again be in a position to be a buyer and consider adding to them with another blockbuster deal to acquire a top-level talent, this time in the hopes of pushing the Royals over the top.
