Tim Hunter brings his Moose Jaw Warriors into Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre tonight bearing almost uncanny parallels to Dave Lowry.
Head coach Lowry returned to the Victoria Royals from the 2016 world junior championship partially pilloried in the press for leading Canada to only sixth place after a quarter-final loss to host and eventual-champion Finland’s generational team that included Patrik Laine, Jesse Puljujarvi, Olli Juolevi and Sebastian Aho.
It’s been an equally rough ride for Hunter after Canada’s loss, again in the quarter-finals to the eventual-champion Finns, in this year’s world juniors held in Vancouver and Victoria.
The head coaches, on both occasions perhaps unfairly singled out, had with them one of their own offensive-minded blue-liners — Lowry with the Royals’ Joe Hicketts and Hunter with the Warriors’ Josh Brook.
Hunter and Brook return to the Island, the site of Canada’s training camp and exhibition games ahead of the world juniors, with a Moose Jaw team that is 23-11-7 after last year’s blockbuster squad, which also includes Vancouver Canucks prospect Jett Woo, that won the franchise’s first Scotty Munro Trophy as Western Hockey League regular-season champion. In another coincidence, Lowry led Hicketts and the Royals to the Scotty Munro Trophy title in 2016. Both those Warriors and Royals teams fell in the playoffs and did not reach the Memorial Cup.
The similarities, however, end between Brook and Hicketts — at least physically — with the Warriors’ talented blue-liner measuring in at six-foot-one to the undersized Hicketts, who is now in the Red Wings’ system with Grand Rapids of the AHL.
Brook has nine goals and 44 points in 32 games for Moose Jaw this season and will have to be contained tonight by the Royals (22-17-1) as they look to reverse a two-game losing skid that followed a four-game winning streak.
A Royals player who knows him well is Victoria defenceman Scott Walford, who was the Montreal Canadiens’ third-round draft pick in 2017, while Brook was taken by the Habs in the second round that year.
“We’ve become good buddies at Canadiens training camps and on Team WHL,” said Walford.
“But we are different kinds of players, with Josh being a more offensive defenceman. He’s a great all-rounder.”
Walford played under Hunter in November with Team WHL against the Russian juniors and found, that much like Lowry, he displays a deceptive sense of humour beneath the tough old-school exterior.
“[Hunter] is really a funny guy,” said Walford.
“He told me about the time he played in the NHL with Bodg [Royals defensive assistant coach Doug Bodger from Chemainus]. Tim Hunter has so much knowledge about the game and you can see why he was so well respected during his NHL playing career.”
That, and the fact nobody messed with Tim Hunter on the ice. As a coach, however, you need a thicker hide of a different kind. Criticism comes naturally when you inhabit that thin strip of walkway behind the players’ bench.
Coaches belong to a special club and can relate to each other. Despite the recent social media slings and arrows, Hunter knows he has support within that closed fraternity.
“When things are going well, it makes coaching through the tough times worth it,” said Royals head coach Dan Price, in his second season since replacing Lowry, who is assistant coach of the Los Angeles Kings.
And there will be tough times. That is about the only thing guaranteed in coaching.
“To quote Bill Belichick, it beats working,” quipped Price.
His office, in the form of the bench, is where Price will be tonight matching coaching wits with Hunter.
“There are no easy shifts against this Warriors team because they are so deep,” said Price.
“But we always concentrate on playing our own, Royals, game.”
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