The 2015-16 Western Hockey League season will be a watershed in one way for the Victoria Royals organization. The end of this fifth season on the Island will mark the point at which the franchise has spent as many years in the capital as it spent in Chilliwack as the Bruins.
That’s no small point, considering the Victoria Cougars spent 23 years in the WHL from 1971-72 to 1993-94 with a few highlight seasons before spiralling fortunes on the ice led to indifference in the stands of the old Memorial Arena and the team was wrenched off the Island and moved to northern B.C., where it continues to operate as the Prince George Cougars.
While not an open wound anymore, it’s one that still causes pain for some in Victoria and is something the Royals organization has had to overcome. It led to the notion that while Victoria might be known as a great sports town in other regards — churning out Summer Olympians by the ferry-load in pursuits such as rowing, triathlon, swimming, sailing, track and cycling — it wasn’t much of a hockey town.
The Royals’ GM, Edmonton-raised Cam Hope, admits to coming to Victoria with the same pre-conceived notions.
“On the prairies, you’re always playing hockey outdoors on frozen ponds and rivers, and I was not expecting the sport of hockey to run as deep here,” said Hope, the former assistant GM of the NHL’s New York Rangers.
His four years at the helm of the Royals have provided a lesson.
“I found that people underestimate Victoria and hockey. The CRD really has deep roots in the game. Hockey is as strong here as anywhere else in Canada,” Hope said.
Everybody knows about Lester Patrick and the 1925 Stanley Cup champion Victoria Cougars, of course, but it’s more than that, said Hope, citing the excellent coaching and youth programs he has come to know on the Island.
That is no small thing, since it forms a base of people who come out to junior games.
And come out they have. The Royals have never been out of the top 10 in average attendance since entering the 22-team WHL. Last season, the club ranked No. 9 with an announced per-game average of 4,840 at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. That’s down from the league seventh-best 5,660 and eighth-ranked 5,189 fans the Royals averaged over their first two WHL seasons in Victoria.
The team levelled off to a league ninth-ranked 4,800 in 2013-14, despite the fact that it had its two best on-ice seasons in the nine years of franchise history dating back to Chilliwack.
But the Royals’ attendance dip was part of a league-wide drop in patrons the past two seasons, so the trend does not appear to be market-specific.
“The WHL is always going to be a struggle on the Island because of the travel costs, so we are grateful for the fans who support us,” Hope said.
Royals owner Graham Lee, a Vancouver developer, said he is satisfied heading into Year No. 5.
“We’re exactly where we’d like to be,” Lee said. “It’s the right hockey for the market.”
That was not always a given, considering Lee started his Victoria hockey ownership in the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre with seven seasons in the minor-pro ECHL featuring the Salmon Kings. With that equity invested in minor-pro hockey, there was a hard-core group of Victoria fans who advocated going for the AHL rather than the major-junior WHL.
(Interestingly, average attendance over seven seasons of Salmon Kings ECHL hockey and the first four seasons of the Royals in the WHL has been comparable at Memorial Centre, with the Royals/WHL only slightly ahead.)
Major-junior, however, is the more traditional and safer choice in Canadian markets. If there is a trouble spot, and it might be the cause of the slight but trending attendance drop across the WHL, it is that junior now perhaps requires a hipper marketing approach.
“Junior hockey needs to appeal more to a younger crowd,” said Lee. “If you look at the crowds in junior hockey, they are made up of mostly older people.”
Meanwhile, there are three aspects of major-junior that every team among the 60 in the Canadian Hockey League — made up of the WHL, Ontario Hockey League and Quebec Major Junior League — dreams of being part of.
The first is taking part in the Memorial Cup, emblematic of CHL supremacy. The second is having the first overall pick, or at least a heralded and much-discussed top-five selection, in the NHL draft. The third is having a connection to the world junior hockey championships, which are avidly followed in Canada each Christmas.
The Royals have ticked the last box in a consequential fashion. Undersized Victoria defenceman Joe Hicketts, off the radar before the selection process, was a revelation on the blueline as Canada ended a five-year drought by winning the 2015 world junior championships in Toronto and Montreal. Royals head coach Dave Lowry was the Canadian team assistant coach.
The long queue that snaked around the corridors of Memorial Centre last January — as fans waited patiently to get their pictures taken with Lowry, Hicketts and their gold medals — was the kind of moment every major-junior team dreams of having. It’s one that Lee no doubt envisioned when he purchased the Chilliwack Bruins for a reported $5.5 million in 2011 and brought them to the Island as the anchor tenant for the City of Victoria-owned Memorial Centre, which his company RG Properties operates with a long-term agreement.
The international hockey connection continues, as Lowry will be the Canadian head coach for the 2016 world junior championship tournament this winter in Helsinki, Finland, with Detroit Red Wings-prospect Hicketts again expected to skate on defence for Canada.
The Memorial Cup part of the major-junior wish list is being addressed by the likely Victoria bid to host the 2019 tournament at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. After the 2016 Memorial Cup in Red Deer, that’s the next time the WHL will host in the three-year rotation with the OHL and QMJHL.
Most of the 60 CHL teams operate in obscurity outside of their home markets. Hosting the Memorial Cup not only throws some sunlight your way in terms of the national hockey media that descend on your city, but the host team also gets an automatic berth. That means you bring your fans to within a few wins of taking the big prize itself, and all without having to win your own league’s playoffs.
“We are targeting 2019 to host the Memorial Cup, and we’ll see how that evolves,” Lee said.
That would make having a strong team for 2018-19 imperative. The Royals would get the automatic host berth, and they would want to be competitive in the glare of the national tournament.
“I believe we have the best guys in the league [Hope and Lowry] running our program, with a tremendous talent-scouting system. Being competitive will not be an issue,” Lee said.
“I was at the world championships this spring in Prague, and all the hockey people there [in the Canadian camp] knew about our program and what we are doing in Victoria. That was good to hear.”
GM Hope described his approach: “We are always trying to prepare to have a strong on-ice product by providing the right kind of coaching and the right kind of culture, and by drafting [bantams] well.”
The several 16- and 17-year-olds on what will be a young Royals team this season will provide the veteran core of that potential Memorial Cup-hosting 2018-19 squad.
That is the cyclical nature of junior hockey.
“You prepare a group and then all the preparation goes for naught when they age-out of junior,” Hope said.
Then the process begins anew.
“It’s like a treadmill that never stops,” he said.
After a season of heavy graduation with only 13 returnees, the Royals are putting new, young bodies onto that treadmill this season.
“We are in the beginning of a cycle where we want to be challenging for a championship in the next few years,” Hope said.
If his Royals do, it will be largely by committee. There doesn’t appear to be anybody among this Royals youth movement capable of ticking that third magical box of major-junior and making a high first-round impact in upcoming NHL drafts.
There is nothing like the electric buzz that engulfs a building when a truly special player is in the lineup and all the scouts are there almost every night. Think Connor McDavid the past few seasons with the Erie Otters of the OHL.
But that will come in its time in Victoria, with proper bantam drafting, Hope said.
“If everything else organizationally is done right, and all the details are taken care of, the rest takes care of itself,” he said.
“That includes any accolades and recognition that may come from producing a high NHL draft pick.”
Will one come in the next five years of Royals history? There doesn’t seem to be that one transcendent player on the Royals current roster or 50-man protected list. But, as Hope noted, that list is a rolling treadmill. You never know who will eventually hop on or off.
Meanwhile, Lowry and Hicketts are readying again to be a part of the Canadian team for the 2016 world junior championships; and a 2019 Memorial Cup bid is likely in the offing.
Meat Loaf wasn’t singing about the Victoria Royals, but the words seem appropriate enough: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
cdheensaw@timescolonist.com.
