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Countless Professional Players Partake In Wainwright Charity Hockey Game
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- Countless Professional Players Partake In Wainwright Charity Hockey Game
Wainwright doesn't get an NHL player through its doors very often, so when three of them walk in for a Charity Celebrity Hockey game on a random Wednesday night, the town takes notice.
In attendance were three NHLers, plus half a dozen AHL players, a stack of major junior and college guys, and a score of 11-8 for Team Soucy after Team McMann carried a 2-0 lead out of the first period. It's a summer charity hockey game, what do you expect?
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The Rotary Celebrity Hockey Game is one of the better summer highlights in east-central Alberta. This is a town, packing the rink to watch guys who could have been anywhere else in the world choose to spend a July night here instead, all for the Wainwright Rotary Club.
And if you're a real hockey fan, know this: Bobby McMann is NHL-ready. He was the best player on the ice in the first period by a wide margin, then did what everyone else did once the point had been made: backed off and let the game breathe.
Jared Davidson didn't get that same memo. The Montreal Canadiens prospect scored three times and perhaps put in the level of effort that seems a little out of place at a charity game but makes the event more enjoyable.
Another point: AHL players are the real deal. Scott Ratzlaff, Cameron Hughes , Jordan Gustafson, Lukas Ciona, Davidson and Jagger Firkus weren't players to glance over just because they're not in the NHL yet.
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The University of Calgary goaltender allowed 11 goals but was excellent early and looked understandably gassed by the third period. Nobody's holding that against him in July.
All the skill aside, which there was plenty of, there was clearly an agreement everybody seemed to show up with, spoken or not. No slap shots. Contact stayed friendly. There's more shoving and punching in the Walmart parking lot after church on a Sunday than there was at the PMM on July 29. Guys got bigger reactions for blowing a play than for scoring; a whiffed one-timer or an errant pass drew more noise from the bench than some of the actual goals did. There were extra passes on wide-open nets because the tape-to-tape feed looked better. There were dangles that had zero purpose beyond making a teammate look silly for a second. All the stuff that gets a player buried in a real game got the biggest ovations here.
Credit: Mark St-Pierre. Bobby McMann and Carson Soucy between periods.
Watching that game, you'd have a hard time sorting out who plays major juniors, who plays U Sports, and who's already made the NHL, outside of the handful of guys clearly holding back the most. It's a nice reminder that scouting for a living is harder than people assume, and it's even harder when half the room is deliberately playing within themselves so nobody's night gets ruined by a hip check from a guy who trains for a living.
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Guys who play for the same club lined up on opposite benches and spent the whole night chirping each other. Players who battle for real all season were laughing on shifts together like nothing was serious, because for one night, nothing was. The only penalties handed out were the accidental kind, a trip here, a stick that lingered a half-second too long. No edge to any of it.
That's the whole night in a sentence, really. A game with 19 combined goals, 98 SOG, a town that turns out every summer to watch it happen, and a group of players who could have been doing a hundred other things with their July and chose Wainwright instead, mostly because somebody they know asked them to, and because it's for a good cause, and because, once in a while, that's reason enough.
