With the trade deadline in the rear-view mirror and the North Bay Battalion announcing their positions as buyers the objective becomes very clear; Win.
It’s been the objective for the past two years now, but General Manager Adam Dennis and his staff have once again decided to supplement their roster with some big-name players to make this year's outcome different from the previous two, which ended in the Eastern Conference Finals in both 2022 and 2023.
For a great look at how the deadline deals were made and who the newcomers are, you can see this article by Chris Dawson.
What a lot of fans are now wondering is, ‘Was it enough?’ and ‘Was this the right direction?’
The short answers are ‘That remains to be seen’ and ‘Heck yes, buying is always more fun than selling!’
This article will look at giving some more in-depth analysis of those questions.
No matter the outcome of this season, I will always say with a team constructed this way, you have to be a buyer at the deadline and do what you can do to try and win a championship.
This team has invested so much time in developing a strong core of players that it would have been disheartening to see them get shipped off to compete for a championship with another team. There’s also the fact that nobody else was running away with the division or the conference at the time the trade deadline arrived, and both the Central Division and the Eastern Conference were within the Battalion’s grasp.
The Battalion also dealt with a few key injuries and some inconsistencies in the first half of the season, evidenced by the fact they haven’t won more than three games in a row, but they also haven’t lost more than two games in a row at any point this season. So, with health being on their side and the team adding really good depth to their roster, this is a team that should at least start to pull away from the log jam and separate themselves as true contenders for the number one seed.
It won’t be easy as the team they are currently chasing, the Sudbury Wolves, made some big moves of their own at the deadline, bringing in a pair of stud defensemen in former 1st round pick (#5 overall) Donovan McCoy from Peterborough (6-16-22 n 40 games played this season) and 6’3” 220lbs shutdown defender Noah Van Vliet (2-6-8 in 39 GP) in a trade with Brantford. They also acquired a big weapon up front, getting a productive hometown product, centerman Zacharie Giroux (17-23-40 in 39 games played) from the Flint Firebirds.
The Sudbury Wolves were already well stocked, and this trio makes them even more of a threat to claim the top spot in either the Conference or the Division. But outside of that, the Eastern Conference was relatively quiet on the addition side, with other contenders making a few minor moves here and there, but nothing outstanding that would put them ahead of either North Bay or Sudbury in my books at this point, meaning we could be gearing up for a Sudbury – North Bay fight to the end of the regular season.
But regardless of where they finish after 68 games – what will truly matter is the Battalion’s post-season performance.
In both 2022 and 2023, the Troops campaign ended in the Eastern Conference finals. In 2022 they could be looked at as the underdogs in that series against the eventual OHL champion Hamilton Bulldogs. The following year, it could be looked at as an upset when the Battalion didn’t beat the eventual OHL champion Peterborough Petes.
So, does the Battalion have what it takes to make sure that the road to the 2024 OHL championship doesn’t just go through North Bay, but that the Battalion is marching down it this spring, with the J. Ross Robertson Cup in tow?
If we compare the offense, this 2024 team is on a path that resembles the 2022 playoff roster.
That team was more top-heavy in scoring with five players scoring 30 goals or more led by Brandon Coe (34-67-101) Matvey Petrov (40-50-90) Mitchell Russell (41-47-88), Kyle Jackson (30-32-62) and Kyle McDonald (35-20-55). They also had impressive “rookie seasons” from Ty Nelson (9-42-51), Dalyn Wakely (20-14-34), and Owen Van Steensel (10-24-34), although you can have an asterisk next to their names since, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, those players were in their first season in the OHL but were drafted a year prior. Regardless – this team was really led by two lines that could seemingly score when needed, while on the back end, there was some inexperience as half of the players, (Nelson, Tinas Mathurin, Paul Christopoulos, Alexander Lukin, Cam Gauvreau) were getting their first taste of post-season OHL action, as too was Goaltender Dom DiVincentiis who got into six games in those playoffs and solidified himself as the goaltender of the future.
But as is the case in most playoff series, scoring tends to dry up, and the Battalion couldn’t keep up with a Bulldogs team that went undefeated on their side of the playoff bracket and outscored the Troops 22-6.
The 2022 team finished with 267 goals as a team and 689 points. This year's squad (stats through January 16th, 2024) is on a similar path, projected to net 270 goals and 690 points, mostly led by two top-scoring lines.
This year the projections show several players within reach of the 30-goal plateau with Owen Van Steensel (current 2023-24 season stats 19-25-44) and his linemate Dalyn Wakely (19-35-54) projected for 34 goals apiece and their right-wing weapon Anthony Romani (35-32-67) leading those projections at 59 goals and 113 points.
Newcomer Sandis Vilmanis (11-18-29) and overager, Justin Ertel (15-27-42), along with Nelson (13-21-34) are in that next tier around the 25-goal projection and between 65-80 points, while other deadline additions Jacob Leblanc (7-2-35) his twin brother Andrew LeBlanc (10-18-28) should get over 50 points and Jacob Therrien (13-14-27) is projected over 45 points while Ethan Procyszyn (9-11-20) should eclipse 35 points.
Even if those projections don’t come to fruition, what GM Dennis has done is built a team that Head Coach Ryan Oulahen can comfortably roll out three lines who can put significant pressure on the opponents, while also having hardworking grinders filtered in around those players such as Captain Liam Arnsby, Ihnat Pazii and Brice Cook. There's a lot of mixing and matching with the line combinations that Oulahen has been afforded now, and enough depth there to bring sustained offence for the remainder of the season, even if they fall well short of the powerhouse offense the Battalion became known for last season.
The 2022-23 season ended with five thirty-goal scorers, ten players had more than 40 points and four others had 24 or more. As a team, they piled on 740 points during the season, with 285 goals scored. They also had more experience on the back end with nobody younger than 18 years old on their blue line and DiVincentiis again carrying the team between the pipes, putting up a stellar 2.41 Goals Against Average and .926 save percentage in the 20 post-season games he played in.
The 2023-24 team has the makeup of these past two seasons combined. Where they don’t have the most explosive offence in the league, but enough firepower up front and good depth on their bottom six to put other teams on their heels no matter which line is out there, like they had in 2022. They’ve also now got a defence that resembles last year’s with size and experience being the identity of the blue line after adding Bronson Ride, an 18-year-old 6’6” 209lb defender, as well as LeBlanc, old who already racked up 34 points in Sarnia before the deal.
So, will this team go farther in the post-season than the previous two years?
Honestly, it could simply come down to health and the quality of the opponent. In 2022 Mitchell Russell was the team's leading scorer in the playoffs and suffered an upper-body injury in game one of the Eastern Conference Finals and he missed the rest of the series.
Last year, it was Pasquale Zito who got hurt during the ECF against Peterborough and without him in the lineup, the Battalion lost some of the grittiness of their depth that they had worked so hard to build up all season.
If the Battalion stays healthy, I like their chances against anyone in the Eastern Conference and that’s why I feel buying at the deadline was the smart move.
People will point at the trade deadline Peterborough had, where they sold off a bunch of their big-name players, and outside of recouping 11 draft picks, they added several young players who they are looking to build around over the next few seasons, and they now have four first-rounders from this past April’s Priority Selection. Hats off to Petes GM Mike Oke who got the city of Peterborough a championship team, and is now laying the groundwork for their next run. But here’s the thing with a complete teardown – that team and the team next year is probably going to have a lot of growing pains and may be tough to watch at times. Sure, Dennis could’ve done that in North Bay, but wouldn’t you rather see homegrown talent like Nelson, DiVincentiis, Arnsby and more go for a championship here than somewhere else?
And if you’re thinking, ‘Well our team is going to have to go through a rebuild anyways,’ you should recalibrate that thinking.
Thanks to some moves in the offseason of 2023, and with a couple of over-age players being moved at the deadline, the Battalion has restocked their own draft pick shelves, getting back some of the picks they originally traded due to certain conditions on those picks. Speaking with a team official, the Battalion is scheduled to get back a couple of second-round selections as well as a third and a fifth.
And after the moves at this year's deadline, the Battalion will be saddled with having more over-age players than they can carry going into next season. Some of those players will likely move on to professional league clubs, but as we saw just a few weeks ago with Josh Bloom going back to Saginaw, there’s a lot of time for guys to find out they may need some more seasoning in Major Junior before they are really ready to make that jump.
That means once again, Dennis will be working the phones, and trying to find homes for those players in the OHL just as he did this past summer with Brayden Hislop and Nikita Tarasevich. The over-age candidates next year are Vilmanis, Mathurin, DiVincentiis, Wakely, Cooke, Nelson, the LeBlanc twins, Van Steensel, and Trevor McDowell.
Those are going to be moves that will net either a prospect or some draft picks, just like the Hislop and Tarasevich deals did. So, for those worried that the Battalion wouldn’t be able to replenish the roster with young talent, those fears can be put to rest.
This is a team that is well-managed and has given the city a real reason to be optimistic about the present season and the seasons to come.
