Season of promise leaves Chiefs hoping for best

Spokane’s home hockey opener was pushed back this year because the Promise Keepers had the building last weekend – and, no, that wasn’t an unintended irony born of the club owner’s infamous money-back guarantee.

You know – Promise Keepers last weekend, Promise Makers this weekend.

The brief delay has no doubt ratcheted up the eagerness of the Spokane Chiefs to get the Western Hockey League season going in earnest, which they will Saturday at the Spokane Arena – and no Chief is more eager than general manager Tim Speltz, for whom the term “off-season” was all too close to the bone.

It wasn’t just that he took some hard checks both here and elsewhere for the Chiefs’ failure to make the playoffs for the second straight year. But when he did try to make a couple of moves to improve the state of the franchise, he was confronted with a disturbing new twist in junior hockey:

Teenagers asserting their prerogatives.

As a result, the instant-impact player the Chiefs so desperately coveted is playing in Ontario and the prodigy the club selected with the first pick of the bantam draft still hasn’t said “I do” – though Speltz feels confident that’ll get done with a little more courtship.

“There have been a lot of things happen in the off-season,” Speltz allowed. “Some of them good.”

Well, yes. Speltz noted that his selection in the import draft, Czech winger Ondrej Roman, has the look of a productive player (“and that’s always hold-your-breath time,” Speltz said). He thinks the Chiefs have solidified their goaltending, that they’re making more demands of their players and that a lingering “satisfaction with being mediocre” has been fumigated from the dressing room.

Still, the summer’s bigger headlines came at a bad time for a team trying to take a U-turn, and it hardly seems fair that the Chiefs wound up being on the defensive in not one but two cases of what might be called trickle-down emancipation.

Time was in sports that players were all but without leverage in the assignment of their services, the notable exception being choosing a college. Draft rights, reserve clauses, protected lists – all were rather one-way gizmos for the herding of talent, and some necessarily so.

But now teenagers change high schools if the football coach looks at them funny, and so this sort of thing was bound to turn up in junior hockey. The Chiefs got it with both barrels, first when defenseman Jared Cowen, 15, and his parents asked the club not to select him in WHL’s bantam draft, it being inconvenient to their Saskatoon home.

Speltz did anyway – and has since been engaged in a dance of persuasion in which the Cowens have, at least, met him halfway.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Jared’s going to play here,” Speltz said. “His parents coming to camp and being here for the duration, him sending back his forms and all the information we’ve asked for, his parents taking the time to go to the school and meeting the billets when they were here – those are all positive signs.

“I don’t want to take anything for granted, but I think we’re doing a good job in letting him know that the next step in his progression is to play in the WHL and I think we can have this happen this year.”

What’s not going to happen is Trevor Lewis putting on a Chiefs sweater. Last year’s leading scorer and MVP of the United States Hockey League, Lewis signed a contract with the Owen Sound Attack of the Ontario Hockey League even though, having grown up in Utah, he was territorially obligated to the WHL – and the Chiefs, when they listed him in June. This bit of poaching was approved by OHL president David Branch – who is also president of the Canadian Hockey League which encompasses the Quebec, Ontario and Western leagues.

And who, amazingly, didn’t recuse himself from the appeal process, which upheld the Owen Sound contract and which Speltz characterized as “a total cover-your-butt deal.

“And I still haven’t received a phone call from him. I don’t know if that’s because he’s embarrassed or what.”

If he’s not, he should be and so should the CHL, which is still diddling around with the issue of sanctions or compensation. An obvious first step would be to have an independent arbitrator decide such a dispute, though apparently that’s too innovative for the hockey hidebound.

But it’s obviously necessary as the parameters for player acquisition morph and the pressure increases to feed the junior beast. By next year, the WHL will have 22 teams; the CHL will have added 10 new franchises just since Spokane hosted the Memorial Cup in 1998. And then there’s this business of kids actually wanting a say in where they might play.

Not that any changes will help Spokane this season.

“We lost a player who could be a dominant front-line guy in our league,” said Speltz, “and that’s exactly what came up when we talked about what we could do in the off-season – if there was any way to get a quick fix. But even beyond how it affected us, it was just wrong.”

It was, in fact, something of a broken promise. Better luck to the Chiefs keeping theirs this season.