The path of champions: Looking back at Chiefs’ title-winning 2008 team as members of current group eye pro ranks
If someone is still playing hockey in late May, it’s probably been a good season.
This year’s Spokane Chiefs came up one series short of playing as far into late spring as a Western Hockey League team can, losing last week to Medicine Hat 4-1 in the WHL Championship series.
That Medicine Hat team is participating in the Memorial Cup this week in Rimouski, Quebec, a city on the shore of the St. Lawrence River just north of New Brunswick.
It’s been 17 years since the Chiefs last reached a Memorial Cup, and that year’s team won it by first defeating the Belleville Bulls and then the host Kitchener Rangers twice to claim the championship.
“To get that far, you have to have depth,” Curtis Kelner, a 19-year-old on that 2008 Chiefs team, said of the run. “It’s a long grind.”
That season was the end of Kelner’s competitive playing days. He now lives and works in Arizona.
But for many of Kelner’s teammates – specifically the younger ones – that run to the Memorial Cup was just the beginning of their hockey careers, some of which are still alive.
The names of a few of them – Tyler Johnson, Jared Spurgeon and Dustin Tokarski – are familiar. The list also includes players like Mitch Wahl, a former second-round NHL draft pick who just finished the 2024-25 season with the Dresden Ice Lions in Germany.
“I’ve been everywhere,” Wahl said a couple of weeks ago while back in California following Dresden’s championship victory in the finals of the Deutsche Eishockey Liga. “We’re going to see what the summer has. I may still try and play another year.”
That sentiment – close to the end but perhaps not ready to quit – captures well many of the careers of the players who, 17 years ago, claimed a cup that, because of just how much hockey it takes to win one, is one of the sport’s most coveted.
‘The right resilience’
Justin Falk was an 18-year-old during Spokane’s championship season, and already the NHL had taken notice of him. A year earlier, the Minnesota Wild selected him in the fourth round of the 2007 NHL draft.
That was a considerable improvement from his draft stock four years earlier, when, as a bantam player, he was the 189th selection in the 2003 WHL draft. Only 10 players from that 2003 draft went on to have longer NHL careers than Falk did.
Falk’s NHL career spanned 10 seasons from 2009 to 2019. He played for five teams and appeared in 279 regular-season games, though his deepest playoff runs came with the AHL’s Houston Aeros (in 2011) and the Lake Erie Monsters (in 2016), with whom Falk won a league championship.
Once his playing career was over, Falk became GM and head coach of the Winkler Flyers in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League. He is now a scout for the Buffalo Sabres based in the Winnipeg area.
He looks back on that Chiefs team as a team with endurance.
“You’ve got to have the right matchups, the right resilience, the right perseverance, and the right staff that knows how to push and challenge you in crucial moments,” Falk said.
Falk is one of six players from the 2008 Chiefs team to play in the NHL. The others are goaltender Dustin Tokarski (86 games), forward Drayson Bowman (179), defenseman Jared Cowen (249), forward Tyler Johnson (747) and defenseman Jared Spurgeon (933).
Of those six, Spurgeon’s career seems the furthest from its end. Captain of the Minnesota Wild, the 5-foot-9, 35-year-old Spurgeon still has two years left on his current contract, and this month he is playing for Team Canada at the World Championships in Sweden and Denmark.
Drafted in 2008 but later released by the team that picked him – the New York Islanders – Spurgeon has played his entire career with the Wild and has played the fourth-most NHL games among former Chiefs players, trailing only Travis Green (970), Bryan McCabe (1,175) and Ray Whitney (1,330).
“He was always the guy we knew had the potential, just not the size,” Wahl said of his former teammate and roommate. “He brings so much more than people see, too.”
Johnson, a Spokane native, was the eighth-leading scorer as a 17-year-old for the 2008 Chiefs, and though he became a much more prolific scorer later – he had 115 points in 2010-11 – Johnson wasn’t drafted.
“He was a great player for us,” Wahl said, “but at the time he was more of our lockdown shutdown center, third line. That line would play against their more talented players and just try to shut them down.”
After two years in the AHL, including a championship run with the Norfolk Admirals in 2012, Johnson caught on with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2013 and remained in the league thereafter. His career, though, may be nearing its end: He played nine games last season for the Boston Bruins and is a free agent.
Then there is Dustin Tokarski, a teammate of Johnson’s during that 2012 season in Norfolk who has played 444 AHL games during an 11-team, 15-year career in that league, someone Falk said “has proved everyone wrong.”
Every now and then Tokarski has popped up in the NHL, where he has played in 10 seasons for six franchises. His most recent six appearances came this season for the Carolina Hurricanes – who are still alive in the Eastern Conference Final and have Tokarski in reserve, still under contract as a third goalie should they need him.
The NHL careers of Cowen and Bowman ended almost a decade ago, though Bowman bounced around other professional leagues until 2018. Cowen stopped playing when his career with the Ottawa Senators ended in 2016.
Others, though, like Wahl, made the jump across the Atlantic to continue their playing careers.
Ondrej Roman, who had 15 goals and 46 assists for the 2008 Chiefs, played abroad from 2012 to 2024, mostly in the Czech Republic, his home country.
Like Roman, Judd Blackwater never reached the NHL, but he made hockey a nearly two-decade career, playing as recently as the 2022-23 season in Germany.
David Rutherford played for six ECHL teams, then spent four seasons in Ireland. Levko Koper attended the University of Alberta, and after playing five years there played in five leagues in four other countries, closing out his career with back-to-back ECHL titles with the Florida Everblades in 2022 and 2023.
For Wahl, playing in Europe still pays the bills, and he said it works well for his family. He and his wife have two kids .
“It’s a pretty cool lifestyle,” he said. “A lot of life experience. We’ve been all over Europe.”
Accountability is part of ‘genetic makeup’ now
Others, though, have continued their hockey careers by becoming coaches and teachers of the sport.
Dustin Donaghy, whose most notable year as a junior player came in the 2008-09 season when he had 24 points in 72 regular-season games for the Chiefs, returned to Spokane after a six-year career in the U.S.-based Central Hockey League. He coached in the Spokane Americans Youth Hockey Association, and then from 2019 to 2024 was an assistant coach for the Chiefs.
Chris Bruton, captain of the 2008 Chiefs, played in the AHL as recently as the 2014-15 season. But Bruton spent the past decade founding and growing the Columbia Valley Hockey School near Calgary.
In his role now, Bruton can’t help but lean on what he learned during his time in Spokane – specifically the way Chiefs head coach Bill Peters held everyone accountable, including the team captain.
“It’s kind of my genetic makeup,” Bruton said.
“The discipline of being bumped and bruised, maybe on a six- or seven-game pointless streak, trusting the process, knowing your strengths and working on your weaknesses, that has really made me the person I am.”
When Bruton and the other Chiefs players won the Memorial Cup, it had been 17 years since the franchise had last lifted it, in 1991.
That year’s team may have had more star power, with players like Whitney, Pat Falloon, Jon Klemm and Trevor Kidd, a quartet that played more than 3,000 NHL games combined.
This year’s Chiefs team might have its own lasting star power, too, led by NHL draft picks Berkly Catton, Andrew Cristall, Will McIsaac and Nathan Mayes. That remains to be seen.
As a group, the 2008 team’s playing days are definitely nearing their end. But they’re not all done yet.
“It’s been a long journey,” Wahl said. “Maybe another year or two. We’re going to see.”