PART ONE / PART TWO / PART THREE / PART FOUR / PART FIVE

In 1932, Doris Parkes was taking the Vancouver Amazons hockey team to the Banff Winter Carnival, where they would compete for the Alpine Cup, the championship of Western Canada, for the ninth time.

It was also to be the very last time.

Before going to Banff, however, Doris had another stop to make: Princeton.

Doris the celebrity at the Princeton Ice Festival

No, Doris wasn’t heading to Princeton University, though their ice hockey history dates all the way back to 1894. Instead, Doris and her fellow Vancouver speed skater George Hanson were special guests at the Ice Festival in Princeton, B.C. in 1932.

Doris was literally front page news in Princeton, as news of her visit was above the fold in the Princeton Star, complete with a full-length photo of Doris in her speed-skating garb, which appeared to be emblazoned with a lightning bolt.

“When you see Miss Parkes you will realize that she lives for outdoor sport,” reported the Princeton Star on January 15, 1932, “and she will be an added attraction to the Princeton Ski Tournament and Princeton Skating Carnival.”

The Princeton Star noted her past accomplishments at Banff, as well as her provincial championships in the one mile, the 220 yards, and the 440 yards in speed skating, and added, “Miss Parkes is captain of the Amazons ladies’ hockey team of Vancouver.”

Doris was in fine form in Princeton, winning in both speed skating and cross-country skiing.

“Doris Parkes, all-round Vancouver star, was the outstanding figure in the minor racing events on Thursday’s programme,” reported The Province. “She won the one-mile open race for women, advertised as the B.C. championship. She carried back to Vancouver the Princeton Merchants’ Cup.

“She also won the women’s ski race in exceptionally good time, negotiating the three and a half miles in 28 min. 5 secs.”

The Princeton Merchants’ Cup made its way from Vancouver to Chilliwack, there on the shelf in my brother’s old bedroom next to a dusty record player. It’s missing any sort of engraving denoting that it belonged to Doris Parkes.

But seeing Doris on the front page of the Princeton Star is a sign that she was something of a celebrity in her day. She was legitimately famous, at least provincially.

My mom recalls her dad, Bob Butchart, being utterly astonished when he first found out that his soon-to-be son-in-law was the son of Doris Parkes. When they first met, he was momentarily lost for words.

After Doris left, he said in disbelief, “I just played cribbage against the Doris Parkes.”

Amazons make the final at the 1932 Banff Winter Carnival

The Amazons team that went to the 1932 Banff Winter Carnival was missing the Senkler sisters. The eldest, Phebe Senkler, had been with the first Amazons team to go to Banff — the last direct connection with that team. That meant the Amazons had some rookies in the lineup.

Veterans Martha Corlett, Belva Graves, and Edna Logan were at forward, with Martha’s sister, Mary Corlett, as one of the alternates. Newcomer Helen Hannay was in net, with rookie May Bell on defence. Perhaps those rookies explain why Doris was back on defence at Banff instead of at forward, even though The Province described her as a “scoring ace.”

Two more rookies, Irene Drummond and Doris’s speed-skating rival Marie Gow, were the other alternates.

It’s somewhat stunning how casually The Province reported the absence of one of the Amazons from the lineup heading to Banff: “Bev Thompson, who was picked as one of the tourists, has suffered a nervous breakdown and will be unable to make the trip.”

The Amazons came through with a clutch win in their first game at the 1932 Banff Winter Carnival, taking down a team from Canmore, Alberta. Martha Corlett scored the lone goal for the Amazons, who won 1-0 in what The Province called “a good game.”

That got the Amazons back to the final to face the Edmonton Monarchs once again. According to reports, they put up a stronger fight against their royal rivals, but to no avail: the Monarchs scored two goals early before the Amazons could find their feet, and held the 2-0 lead the rest of the way.

“The game was exceptionally fast, the Vancouver team being much stronger than in past years,” reported The Province. “The last two periods were battles royal, with neither team having an edge.”

While the Amazons once again fell to the Monarchs, Doris still made headlines, with the Vancouver Sun stating, “Doris Parkes Shows Speed in Ice Event.”

Notably, Doris won the half-mile speed skating event in Banff in the same time as the winner of the men’s event: 1 minute, 39 seconds, a legitimately world-class time in that era.

Trips to the final in back-to-back years might have had the Amazons hoping they would return in 1933 to take the Alpine Cup. But it wasn’t to be.

That was the last trip to the Banff Winter Carnival for both Doris Parkes and the Amazons.

The Banff Winter Carnival continued on for another decade, though it stumbled at times, dealing with unseasonably warm weather and waning interest, especially with no teams from B.C. making the trip to make the Alpine Cup a true championship of Western Canada. The carnival returned again after World War II, but was never as big an event as it had been in the twenties and thirties.

“Doris Wants Girls For Hockey League”

Most histories that I’ve seen, including the excellent “Women On Ice: The Early Years of Women’s Hockey in Western Canada” by Wayne Norton, end the story on women’s hockey in Vancouver with the Amazons’ final trip to Banff in 1932.

But Doris battled to keep women’s hockey going for years after that.

The September after the Amazons’ final trip to Banff, Doris was named the president of the Vancouver Women’s Ice Hockey Association, and they made plans to once again operate a three-team league with the Amazons, Beavers, and Rovers.

She was well known enough that the Vancouver Sun only needed to use one name in their headline about the league: “Doris Wants Girls For Hockey League.”

“Doris Parkes, feminine ice hockey impressario, comes to bat with an announcement that there will be a meeting of all those of the less weak sex who are interested in organizing a league at the Arena Friday night at 6:30,” reported the Sun. “Doris figures if she can get enough girls out to the meeting the hockey moguls will recognize them as a ‘sound’ organization.”

It’s that latter note that causes concern. The Amazons had been around for well over a decade at this point, but it still seemed to be a constant necessity for them to prove themselves to the male-dominated associations that controlled amateur sports in Vancouver.

The Amazons didn’t get much support from the media either. When women’s hockey first started in Vancouver, it garnered plenty of attention in the newspapers, even if it was sometimes treated as a novelty. In the twenties, their games got regular coverage, even if it was often buried beneath reports on amateur men’s games.

By 1932, reports on women’s hockey games became essentially non-existent. It’s hard to say if games happened at all, though reports in 1933 of the league returning for another season suggest that it did. The only game that made the papers was an exhibition between the Amazons and a boys team, Cyclone Taylor’s Junior Maple Leafs.

That game came at the Rotary Ice Carnival, where Doris did more than just play hockey.

“For the umpteenth time, Doris Parkes has shown a clean pair of steel skates to all rivals in Rotary’s annual British Columbia speed-skating championships at the Arena,” reported the Province on December 3, 1932. “Doris was offered little opposition in two races at last night’s big show and also turned in a stellar game on defence for the Amazon girls against the Maple Leaf junior boys.”

The races and game took place in front of 10,800 spectators, with Doris winning the 220 and 440 yards, beating her Amazon teammates Marie Gow, Belva Graves, and Martha Corlett. One has to wonder if they might have fared better against the Junior Maple Leafs if half the team hadn’t competed in speed-skating races earlier in the night.

“The men won 3 to 0, but not before Doris Parkes and her able lieutenants had given them a spirited battle,” said the Sun.

“The men would also need money”

The lack of coverage of women’s hockey in the newspapers must have been frustrating, particularly when the coverage they did get was so often coloured by sexism. One of the games in the 1933-34 season that received newspaper coverage was mentioned in a previous part of this series, but deserves another look, because it is just so brutal.

“The girls minced around, finding it very difficult to turn and tote their large sticks,” came the report in the Sun. “Occasionally they bounced into the boards and fell rather hard into positions that usually are very unbecoming to young ladies.”

Perhaps it would have been better to have no newspaper coverage at all.

It seemed that public opinion of women’s hockey had shifted in the decade since the Vancouver Amazons had been celebrated for winning the 1922 Alpine Cup. But even at that time, there were those who saw participation in hockey as unladylike.

It was also in 1922, after all, that Canada banned women’s soccer.

Canada was following in the footsteps of England as part of the British Empire. England had banned women’s soccer in 1921, seemingly as a response to its growing popularity, with some at the time making the argument that it was solely because the thousands of fans attending women’s matches meant fewer fans attending the men’s.

That wasn’t the argument that England’s Football Association made, of course. Instead, they said, “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.”

If soccer was seen as unsuitable for women by some in that society, how much less suitable was hockey?

Those social views played into another significant obstacle for the survival of women’s hockey in Vancouver: money.

The Amazons were dependent on their annual dances to raise funds, but those dances started being hosted in smaller venues, as donors became harder to find. The Great Depression surely didn’t help.

Perhaps that, more than anything, is why the Amazons stopped going to Banff — their fundraising efforts were only enough to keep hockey afloat in Vancouver, and not enough to travel.

Still, there were gate receipts from the amateur hockey nights at Denman Arena and membership fees, a portion of which went to the Vancouver Amateur Ice Hockey Association. The male-led association preferred, however, to funnel those funds towards the senior men’s league.

“Hockey Boys End Well Up,” was the headline in the March 25, 1933 edition of the Vancouver Sun about a meeting of the association. “Secretary Art Moore reported that there is a surplus of $1100 and that it would be split according to the constitution.”

Evidently, that constitution didn’t include sending any of that $1100 — approximately $25,500 today — towards the women’s hockey association.

“Doris Parkes was on hand for the girl hockeyists and put in a plea for a cut on the surplus as they wanted the money to help enter a team in the Canadian championships next season,” continued the Sun. “Doris was informed that the men would also need money as next year they would be traveling themselves.”

Doris and the Dominion Women’s Hockey Association

While women’s hockey was battling to stay alive in Vancouver, Doris was playing a role in the battle to keep it alive across all of Canada.

The “Canadian championships” mentioned by the Sun were a new creation in 1933, as women’s amateur athletic associations attempted to create a true national championship for women’s hockey. The champions would hold a new trophy donated by Lady Bessborough, the wife of the governor general at the time.

The intent was to make the Lady Bessborough Trophy the equivalent of the Stanley Cup for women’s hockey.

The Dominion Women’s Hockey Association was formed in 1933 and hoped to become the overarching organization for women’s hockey across Canada. More than that, they wanted to create a Canadian team to travel to Europe, with the goal of making women’s hockey an Olympic sport, nearly 60 years before women’s hockey made its Olympic debut in 1998 in Nagano.

“It is the first annual finals and [Ann] Clark states that it will be a big thing when it is matured a little,” reported the Vancouver Sun on March 18, 1933. “Doris Parkes has been chosen to represent B.C., and this province will probably have a team in next year’s playoffs.”

A week later, Doris was informed that there was no money to spare for the Amazons to play for the Lady Bessborough Trophy.

That didn’t stop Doris from trying to keep women’s hockey alive. In 1934, when the Dominion Women’s Hockey Association met in Edmonton, Doris was significantly involved.

“D. Parkes is Hockey Vice-Prexy,” read the headline in the April 24, 1934 edition of the Vancouver Sun. “Miss Myrtle Cook of Montreal was elected president of the Dominion Women’s Hockey Association at the second annual meeting of that body. Other officers elected were: First vice president, Miss Doris Parkes, Vancouver.”

While Doris took on a leadership role in the new national association, it’s unclear how successful she was at getting buy-in from those who held the purse strings in Vancouver.

An October 25, 1934 article in the Sun noted that Doris “made it known that the girls plan to travel to Edmonton to take part in the Canadian playoffs,” but it’s entirely unclear if the Amazons made the trip. My suspicion is that they were unable to raise the funds, but I cannot find confirmation.

The 1935 Dominion Women’s Hockey Championship was ultimately played between the Preston Rivulettes from Ontario and the Winnipeg Eatons from Manitoba, with the Rivulettes coming out on top.

The Rivulettes were a dominant team in Ontario. During the 1930s, they played an estimated 350 games — they only lost twice and tied three times. They played in every Dominion Women’s Hockey Championship during its eight-year existence, winning the Lady Bessborough Trophy four times.

The Rivulettes were only beaten once at the Dominion championship — the other times they failed to win the championship because they were unable to raise enough money to travel to play the games. Despite the Rivulettes drawing large crowds, as amateurs, they never saw any money from those gate receipts.

In other words, the same difficulties faced women’s hockey in Ontario as they did in Vancouver.

Still, Doris remained a vice president in the Dominion Women’s Amateur Hockey Association through at least the end of 1935, as she tried to keep women’s hockey alive in both Vancouver and Canada.

Then Denman Arena burned down.

TO BE CONCLUDED

Whether it’s 50+ years without a Stanley Cup, or never picking first overall in the draft, life as a Canucks fan is suffering.

The last decade-plus in Vancouver really hammered that home. The Canucks have made the playoffs just twice in the last 11 seasons, and just when it looked like they might be putting it all together, with a Norris-winning defencemen, two first-line caliber centres, and a Vezina-candidate goaltender, every possible wheel fell off the bus.

It’s fitting, then, that the suffering caused by the Canucks served as inspiration for a full-length novel: Karma Grinders by K.D. Madigan, a lifelong Canucks fan and long-suffering member of Canucks Twitter, going by the appropriate handle of @riotsurvivor.

Not only was it inspired by the eternal hopelessness of being a Canucks fan, but it’s absolutely littered with hockey-related Easter eggs, most of them related to the Vancouver Canucks.

I wanted to know more about what led Madigan to write his book and to dedicate so many elements of its surreal, madcap adventure to the Canucks. So, I met up with Madigan one evening, pulling him away from his busy schedule of sleeping and working for a plumbing wholesaler and writing his next book.

After a cup of very strong tea and a few extremely delicious brownies1, we got down to business. Unfortunately, I remember nothing of the conversation that followed, or the subsequent evening, or why I woke up the next morning half-naked in the Costco parking lot next to Rogers Arena.

Thankfully, Madigan made sure to transcribe our conversation and shared it with me, even if I don’t recall asking these specific questions.

Interview with K.D. Madigan

Daniel: If being a Canucks fan is suffering, why are you a Canucks fan?

K.D.: I was five when the Canucks drafted Pavel Bure. That should pretty much explain it.

What keeps me coming back? There’s a lot of contributing factors. Sunk cost is probably one of them.

They’re a reliable and consistent way to microdose trauma. They’re a way to connect with people when I’m drunk. I think a big one is that my cumulative emotional investment will pay off huge if they ever win anything.

Daniel: You wrote a book! Book. Book. Boooooook. “Book” is a funny word, when you think about it. What is the book about?

K.D.: We follow a group of former UBC students who dropped out of university after taking an experimental mind control psychedelic to join a cult based around inflicting maximal suffering upon themselves and the unsuspecting public, led by a charismatic psychopath named Cassandra. They believe the more suffering they inflict on people, the happier those people will be in their next lives.

Daniel: That sounds like the greatest book that has ever been written, and I am going to personally give you one million dollars. Tell me about the inspiration for the book immediately.

K.D.: I was on Twitter during a Canucks game — I don’t remember which, but pick any game in the late stages of the Jim Benning era — and we were losing, naturally. Someone made a comment about how life as a Canucks fan was pure suffering.

I replied, “We’re just grinding Karma for the next life,” which made me think it would be funny if a group of people misunderstood Karma to that extent and based a cult around it.

Daniel: You’re a genius, and you deserve a Nobel prize, a Pulitzer, and a Stanley Cup. I remember you mentioning there was another Canucks tie-in?

K.D.: So, there are fifteen main characters in the book…

Daniel: That’s too many characters. I can only count to seven.

K.D.: Oh, I know. But the characters are based on people I know from the old Canucks dot com forums from way back in the day. We’re all in a fantasy hockey league together going on more than a decade. They all even let me use their real names, except for Matej and Cassandra. Matej is based on one of the original Larscheiders, but I can’t say which one.

Daniel: This is the best interview of all time. Feels very organic. I can’t feel my face. Anyway, thank you for the interview. Now, could you share a list of the top-ten Canucks Easter eggs in the book?

K.D.: Happily.

Top-ten Canucks-related Easter eggs in Karma Grinders

10 | When scanning a massive telecom customer spreadsheet to try to uncover large-scale financial fraud, one of the Grinders notes that there are way too many Swedish people, noting “There are, like, ten Elias Petterssons in just Vancouver.”

9 | Vancouver-based rapper and noted Canucks fan bbno$, who has performed at a Canucks game, makes a brief cameo appearance when the Grinders, looking for a news broadcast, accidentally land on a TV channel playing music videos.

8 | One of the Grinders receives a mysterious package in the mail, with the return address of only “Elliotte Friedman.” Inside the package is a VCR.

7 | The Grinders spend some time at twin military outposts, the addresses being 22 and 33 Gata Road; Gata is the Swedish word for road, and the roads are later revealed to be classified as cycling infrastructure, all of which is clearly a very ham-handed tribute to the Sedins.

6 | Former CNN broadcaster Keith Olbermann, noted Canucks fan, is brought in as a news anchor on multiple occasions.

5 | At the party where the Grinders are dosed and indoctrinated into the cult, when Cassandra arrives, she requests that they play Nickelback’s Burn It To The Ground, which was the Canucks’ goal song at the time that part of the book was being written.

4 | Michael Bublé, the most famous Canucks fan in the world, makes a cameo — no spoilers.

3 | Stuck in a desolate arctic military base, the Grinders pass the time by Naming Some Guys, many of whom were playing for the Vancouver Canucks at the time the book was being written, and are no longer doing so (JT Miller, Quinn Hughes, Conor Garland and others).

2 | A theory devised by Nick, one of the Grinders, that explains the economics behind group participation when Naming Some Guys, is dubbed the John Garrett Principle, because Nick had his eureka moment when he was putting ketchup on a hot dog.

1 | The highly illegal synthetic mind control psychedelic is named Luongo, after a combination of its chemical abbreviation (236-GAA-LuO) and its developer, Viet Cong chemist Linh Ngo. LuO-Ngo

The Vancouver Canucks are rebuilding the team on the ice, but they’ll also need to rebuild some of the in-arena experience this season.

DJ Tom Fleming is moving on after five years with the Canucks, so Rogers Arena will have someone new pumping out tunes at games.

Fleming was somewhat unusual in that he didn’t have previous experience in the hockey world. Instead, his background was from the nightclub scene, to which he will be returning, accepting a nightclub residency in Bali, Indonesia. It’s an opportunity he felt he couldn’t pass up, even with how much he enjoyed his time with the Canucks.

The opportunity with the Canucks was a chance to combine two of his passions.

“Before DJing, hockey has basically been my life,” said Fleming. “I grew up playing goalie my entire childhood until DJing eventually took over.”

The Canucks were looking for a new in-arena DJ coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, Fleming had been growing his DJ career in Toronto, as well as competing nationally in Red Bull DJ competitions, and dipping his toe in the sports world at professional rugby games and with Sportsnet at the Grand Slam of Curling.

Still, Fleming had no experience DJing at hockey games when the Canucks’ creative director, Mike Pohorly, invited him out to Vancouver to audition.

“I got an email from someone else within game entertainment letting me know that one of the other candidates had previously DJed for another NHL team,” said Fleming. “It threw me off because it made it sound like they might already be leaning toward this other candidate.

“Mike immediately put that concern to rest. He basically told me he didn’t care that somebody else had NHL experience. He wanted to try something different with the Canucks and didn’t want Vancouver to sound like every other arena in the league. He wanted to see what a club DJ could do inside Rogers Arena.”

The audition went well; Fleming got the job.

It was a completely different role from his time at a nightclub, where he would frequently be mixing music together for four or five hours straight.

“In an arena, you might only have 15 or 20 seconds between a whistle and the next puck drop, so you have to approach music completely differently,” said Fleming. “You want to immediately hit the chorus, the sing-along, or whatever part everybody recognizes. I had to go through my entire library and make sure that if I suddenly needed a song, I could get to the best part of it instantly.”

There was also the challenge of reading the game and the crowd.

“Even though I grew up playing hockey, it took time to understand what music worked in all the different situations,” said Fleming, rattling off moments like a power play, big hit, or fight. “One of the hardest: what do you play when the other team scores? You can’t play something too happy, because we’re not celebrating, but you also don’t want to play something depressing.

“You’re trying to keep some optimism and energy in the building without pretending something good just happened.”

That became particularly true last season, as the team sunk to the bottom of the standings, but that also became part of what made the job rewarding for Fleming. Every game was different and unpredictable, which kept him on his toes.

He also enjoyed the challenge of mixing music for a highly varied audience, with much bigger ranges in age from his time at nightclubs.

“Every night I was thinking about the entire building,” said Fleming. “How do I play something the grandparents will enjoy, then something for the teenagers, the young adults, and the kid under ten? You’re never going to make everybody happy, but I was always trying to create an environment where as many people as possible could hear something they loved and feel like they were part of the experience.”

For Fleming and the rest of the in-game experience staff, it was about recognizing that every game could be someone’s first, and trying to create a memorable experience for those fans no matter the score.

“Maybe somebody catches a puck from their favourite player, somebody gets a t-shirt, or a whole section of the arena starts singing along to a song you played,” said Fleming. “Being one small part of creating those memories for people was really cool.

“At the end of every game, win or lose, there was always this feeling of accomplishment. We had just put on another massive live production together under pressure, with very little room for error.”

Nowhere was the pressure higher than in the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs, though Fleming said that playoff games were among the easiest games to DJ.

“The energy in the building was electric,” he said. “The crowd was already at a ten before I even did anything. I could just bring the highest-energy music I had from puck drop until the end of the game: rock, hip-hop, electronic, whatever worked.

“There were moments when the crowd was screaming so loudly I could barely even hear the music I was playing. You could physically feel the adrenaline in the building. Getting to help soundtrack that was pretty special.”

That was Fleming’s favourite experience from his five years, but he said his favourite memories will come from the friendships he built within the small game entertainment team.

“We’d show up, work out assess off together to put on the best show we could, and then afterward we could grab a beer, laugh about the night, and get ready to do it all again,” he said. “Seeing everybody on that team succeed at their individual roles — directing the show, creating the videos, programming the lighting, running the sound, and everything else that goes into a game — it made me want to be better at mine.”

Ultimately, while Fleming is excited for his new opportunity in Bali, he wouldn’t trade his time in Vancouver for anything.

“I’m incredibly grateful that Mike trusted me and took a chance on a nightclub DJ,” said Fleming. “I’m equally grateful to have spent those five seasons working with Mike, Jason Steensma, Steven van Vooght, and the rest of the game entertainment team, who trusted me, were patient with me as I grew into the role, and gave me the freedom to figure out what was possible musically inside Rogers Arena.”

PART ONE / PART TWO / PART THREE / PART FOUR

My grandma, Doris Parkes, had helped to resurrect women’s hockey in Vancouver for the 1930-31 season: women’s games became a consistent part of the sports schedule at Denman Arena, and the Vancouver Amazons returned to the Banff Winter Carnival for the first time in four years, making it to the Alpine Cup final in 1931.

The next step was bringing back the cross-border rivalry with Seattle.

The Vancouver Amazons versus the Seattle Royalettes

In 1930, women’s hockey was revived in Seattle thanks to two company teams: the Langendorf Royalettes, representing Langendorf United Bakeries, and the Octonek Knitters, representing the Octonek Knitting Company.

Those may seem like an unusual pair of companies to take to the ice, but the Octonek Knitting Company, at least, had an existing relationship with hockey. According to The Hockey News, Octonek made sweaters for several local hockey teams, including the Seattle Eskimos of the Pacific Coast Hockey League.

The resurrected Amazons, always eager for more and better competition, looked to Seattle and arranged a home-and-home, two-game series against the Royalettes a month after the Banff Winter Carnival. The series was declared the Pacific Coast Ladies’ Hockey Championship and would be decided by total goals across the two games.

The first game of the series took place in Seattle on March 9, 1931. A full report of the game is hard to come by, but the end result was a 2-1 win for the Royalettes.

Doris was quoted in the Vancouver Sun the next day under the headline, “Amazons Expect to Simply Ruin Those Seattle Royalettes.”

“It is true,” she said, “that we lost the first encounter to them by the odd goal. But total goals on the two games count, and we are not a bit downhearted.

“It was just what you call the breaks down there on Friday, so will you do right by us, Nells, and give us a nice story and ask everyone come and tell them it is only twenty-five cents?”

“Nells” was presumably the writer, but I am honestly unable to determine his full name. Bylines were rare in newspapers in those days, and I haven’t found any Sun sportswriter who went by “Nells.”

In any case, the hoped-for ruination never came to fruition. The Royalettes made the trip up to Vancouver to face the Amazons on March 13, and Seattle’s Jean Robertson scored the lone goal of the game in a 1-0 Royalettes win, taking the series 3-to-1.

“Doris Parks (sic) was seen to do some nice back-checking, but her rushes were ineffective,” reported the Sun, which also noted that she earned a rare penalty. “Parks (sic) drew the only penalty of the game. Her ardor for charging was cooled in the penalty box.”

Amateur rules and the forward pass

The most intriguing thing about the series between the Amazons and Royalettes, however, is what it reveals about how hockey developed.

As has so often been the case for Vancouver hockey teams, travel was evidently a problem for the Amazons. The Province reported that one reason for the loss to the Royalettes was that the Amazons “arrived by automobile at 5:30 and a half-hour later were in action.”

But that wasn’t the biggest issue for the Amazons. Instead, the reports indicate that the game in Seattle was played “under pro rules,” which allowed for forward passing, something the Amazons were evidently not accustomed to. The second game in Vancouver, however, was played using “amateur rules,” which did not allow the forward pass.

In the earliest days of hockey, players were not allowed to pass the puck forward, akin to rugby on ice. This meant a slower-paced game, but also emphasized the importance of strong skaters able to transition the puck up ice — such as, for instance, a champion speed skater like Doris Parkes.

The first league to allow the forward pass was the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) in 1913. Frank and Lester Patrick aimed to speed up the game, and split the ice into three zones with the invention of the blue lines, allowing forward passing within the neutral zone, then eventually the defensive zone as well.

Hockey traditionalists decried this change, claiming it would ruin the strategy of the game and lead to “loafing” — what we might call “cherrypicking” in modern parlance. But the change proved popular in the PCHA, and the Vancouver Millionaires won the Stanley Cup in 1915 with the games alternating between western and eastern rules, with the forward pass allowed in the West.

Eventually, the East relented, with the NHL first allowing the forward pass in the defensive and neutral zones in 1928, then in all three zones in 1929.

But from the reports of the Amazons and Royalettes series in 1931, amateur hockey, was still resisting the change to allow the forward pass years after the NHL made the leap, even in Vancouver where the rule had first been adopted. Amateur hockey strategy was still all about individual rushes and what they called “combination play,” where a series of backward passes would be used to open up holes in the opposing defence.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1933 that amateur hockey in Canada voted to fully adopt the “pro rule” and allow the “Patrick Forward Pass System,” according to a report in the April 10, 1933 edition of the Vancouver Sun.

“The first and most important change was from the old forward pass system to the system borrowed from Frank Patrick and now in use in the N.H.L.,” reported Jack Patterson. “This will permit forward passing inside the blueline on the attack. A player now may wait for a pass in around the goal as long as he does not obstruct the goalie’s view.”

Doris keeps the Fred J. Whitcroft Trophy

While the Amazons may have been slowed down by the Royalettes, Doris Parkes was still at top speed.

On March 5, prior to the series against the Royalettes, Doris won the annual provincial championship in the mile for the third year in a row, giving her permanent possession of the Fred J. Whitcroft Trophy.

“Miss Parkes broke on top and maintained that position to the end, winning easily,” noted The Province.

Fred Whitcroft presented the trophy to Doris personally in 1931.

Whitcroft was an ice hockey player and coach, and a dominant scorer at the rover position. In his final season as a player, he was teammates with Cyclone Taylor, Frank Patrick, Lester Patrick, and Newsy Lalonde on the Renfrew Creamery Kings. That team was dubbed the Renfrew Millionaires, and when the Patricks went West, taking Taylor and Lalonde with them, they also took the Millionaires name to Vancouver.

Whitcroft was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1962. It was a very posthumous induction, as he died on August 9, 1931 of a heart attack in Atlin, B.C., just five months after awarding Doris Parkes his namesake trophy.

“I feel like a million dollars!”

At this point, Doris was so ubiquitous in Vancouver that her name could be casually dropped into an unrelated sports column as a sort of pop culture reference, as Vancouver Sun sports editor Andy Lytle did on May 19, 1931.

“Guess I’ll go down to the Bay now and watch Doris Parkes practise her swim to Kitsilano while some broad-shouldered youth croons on the beach as he strums on the old, reliable uke,” quipped Lytle.

Along with being an elite athlete, Doris was also an organizer. Along with her work getting the Amazons back up and running, she helped form the Deep Cove Regatta Association in the summer of 1931, and helped organize multiple events that year and in the years to come.

That included the Dundarave Regatta at the end of July, 1931, where she won both the singles canoe and rowboat races, and finishing second in diving. She then went to Kelowna for their annual regatta and won both ladies diving events — standing dive and running springboard, and finished second behind Mr. W.R. Foster in the open plunge.

In the annual Sun marathon swim, Doris finished fourth among all entrants, second among women. The Vancouver Sun noted, “Miss Parkes is an outstanding figure in local ice hockey and swimming activities.”

But what was most impressive was what she did after the swim. According to the Sun, she grabbed the microphone at the Kitsilano Pool and announced, “Hello everybody! I feel like a million dollars!”

She then, just a few scant minutes after her three-hour, open-water swim, climbed up the diving platform and “did a fancy dive from the high board.”

The dive wasn’t as perfect as she would have liked. So she let the announcer know that she would do it again, which led to loud cheers from the crowd.

“A few minutes later, when she had had a short rest,” reported the Sun. “Miss Parkes came on the board and did a beautiful one-and-a-half somersault dive.”

Personally, if I had just swum in the ocean for three hours, I would be collapsed on the beach in the midst of a myocardial infarction, not doing a one-and-a-half somersault off a high dive.

“Doris and her pals”

When winter rolled around at the end of 1931, Doris was back on the ice. This time, she and the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Association expanded to three teams for the 1931-32 season: Amazons, Beavers, and Rovers.

As a sign of how well known she was by this point, the Sun referred to the hockey association as “Doris and her pals.”

Of course, Doris also cruised to more victories in speed skating, winning more provincial championships, including a team relay alongside Amazons teammates Edna Logan, Irene Drummond, and Dot Pink.

“Once again, the speed races at the annual Rotary Ice Carnival have proved in the nature of a personal triumph for Doris Parkes, speed-skating star,” reported The Province. “Last night Miss Parkes won the 220 and 440 open events and figured on the winning relay team in a great display.”

After starring for the Beavers the year before, Doris played with the Amazons in the 1931-32 season, and continued to put the puck in the net.

“The Beavers and Amazons ended a torrid battle all square 1-1,” reported the Vancouver Sun on December 15, 1931. “Marie Gow obtained Beavers’ lone tally in the first period after a scramble in front of the goal with Doris Parks (sic) tying the score with a pretty shot in the final session.”

The appearance of Marie Gow on the Beavers shows how the recruitment went both ways when it came to speed skating: several members of the Amazons became speed skaters, while Gow, Doris’s longtime speed skating rival, took up hockey in the 1931-32 season.

The Amazons also recruited from other sports.

Ethel Boyce was a well-known professional softball player from Vancouver who went to the U.S. at the age of 29 to play baseball in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league famously fictionalized by the movie and TV show, A League of Their Own.

12 years earlier, at the age of 17, Boyce played ice hockey with Doris Parkes and the Vancouver Amazons. I’ve found at least one Amazons lineup with Boyce listed, as well as a 1947 article that recalled when Boyce used to play in the Amazons/Beavers games of the past. That 1947 article indicated that Boyce was hoping to start a new hockey league in Vancouver, though I can find no further indication that a league was created.

As the Amazons prepared for the 1932 Banff Winter Carnival, it was clear that women’s hockey had become a draw at Denman Arena. In addition to the regular games between the Amazons, Beavers, and Rovers, the women were invited to play additional games on special occasions.

When the Japanese Olympic team came through Vancouver en route to Lake Placid for the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, the Amazons and Beavers were invited to play an exhibition game in front of the visitors as part of a display of winter sports.

A week later, the Amazons and Beavers were again invited to open the show when an indigenous team traveled to Vancouver to play: the Alkali Lake Indians.

“Amazons have a strong team ready for action,” reported the Vancouver Sun. “Helen Hannay, goal; Doris Parkes and May Bell, defence; Edna Logan, Belva Graves and Bet Thompson first stringers with Pat Coursier, Pat Sumner and Joan Sumner as shock troops.

“Beavers have no weak sisters when it comes to fielding a team. Laura Walls will be in goal, Mary Corlett and Bea Robertson form a strong defence, Iren Drummond, Martha Corlett and Helen Grant will comprise the regular forwards with Marie Gow, Mickey McArdle and Allie Kero on the second line.”

Doris was referred to as a “scoring ace” in a January 16, 1932 report from that game, as she scored both goals in the 2-0 Amazons win.

Women’s hockey was going strong in Vancouver as the Amazons prepared for their return to the Banff Winter Carnival. Little did they know that 1932 would be their last trip to Banff.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Vancouver Canucks kept fairly quiet on the first day of free agency and have been positively silent in the subsequent two months.

The Canucks added just three bona fide NHL players in free agency — defencemen Jamie Oleksiak and Luke Schenn, and bottom-six forward Paul Cotter — as well as a smidgen of AHL depth in Akil Thomas, Trey Fix-Wolansky, and Matthew Stienburg.

That’s it. That’s all.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. The Canucks, after all, are a rebuilding team that, ideally, would love to finish dead last in the NHL again this season and hopefully pick first overall in the NHL draft for the first time in their history. Short-term improvement isn’t really the goal.

A key component of a rebuild, however, is building up tradeable assets.

The Canucks have a handful of pending unrestricted free agents (UFAs) who could potentially be shopped at the trade deadline: Filip Chytil, Brendan Gallagher, Drew O’Connor, Paul Cotter, and Luke Schenn.

There’s an argument to be made that they could use more. After all, it’s hard to imagine getting a particularly high draft pick for any of those pending UFAs, barring a miraculously healthy season for Chytil or O’Connor erupting out of nowhere.

With a few free agents remaining on the board, should the Canucks look to sign someone else ahead of training camp?

Do the Canucks have room for a free agent?

There are a few questions that should be asked before the Canucks sign anyone.

The selling point for the Canucks as a free agent destination, beyond the money, is that you’ll get an opportunity to prove you can be helpful to a Stanley Cup contender, so that you can be traded to one.

So, the first question is, do the Canucks have holes on the roster that would allow a potential free agent to prove themselves to potential trade targets?

The second is related: can a free agent be added without blocking a spot for a younger player?

READ THE REST AT CANUCKSARMY

“Feverfew” and “Stuck in the Suburbs”

A couple of non-Canucks updates. In one of my previous newsletters, I mentioned the release of “Told You So,” the first single from my upcoming album, Into the Maw of the Storm.

I have now released the second and third singles from the album, “Feverfew” and “Stuck in the Suburbs,” which both include B-sides: a cover of “Black Coffee” by All Saints and two songs from my previous band, Minneosta Nice, “Better Wave” and “Somniloquy.”

Here are the songs on Spotify, but they should also be available on the streaming service of your choice.

The most important part of a rebuild is nailing your top-end draft picks, particularly those in the top ten.

Vancouver Canucks fans are all too aware of how that can go wrong, as the team’s previous attempt at a rebuild was hindered by a couple of high-profile missteps.

It is, of course, also nice to get a couple of hits with late first-round picks and second-round picks. Where would the Montreal Canadiens’ rebuild be without second-round pick Lane Hutson, for instance?

The Canucks can be relatively optimistic that they’ve succeeded on those two fronts in their most recent draft. Caleb Malhotra should be a foundational piece for the rebuild, and at least one of Adam Novotny, Brooks Rogowski, and Niklas Aaram-Olsen ought to be an impact player.

Combine that with the likes of Braeden Cootes, Zeev Buium, and Tom Willander, and the Canucks are off to a pretty decent start to their rebuild.

But what would kickstart their rebuild significantly is getting a hit or two outside of the first two rounds. Consider the aforementioned Canadiens: as important as Hutson and first-round picks Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky have been, where would the Canadiens have been last season without fifth-round pick Jakub Dobes stepping up as their number-one goaltender?

Or, think of whether the Canucks’ dominant 2010-11 season ever would have happened without third-round pick Alex Edler and fifth-round pick Kevin Bieksa anchoring the blue line?

So, which of the Canucks’ recent mid-to-late-round picks has the potential to be a difference-maker along those lines?

Let’s take a look at a few possibilities.

READ THE REST AT DAILY FACEOFF VANCOUVER

PART ONE / PART TWO / PART THREE

The Vancouver Amazons didn’t go to the 1929 Banff Winter Carnival, but Doris Parkes made her mark.

Already the provincial speed skating champion in the mile, 200-yard sprint, 220-yard, and 440-yard events, Doris won the 880-yard race at the 1929 Banff Winter Carnival and finished second in the 220.

As a result, Doris was awarded a hefty trophy declaring her the winner of the Ladies Open Championship, making her the speed skating champion of Western Canada. Doris Parkes was officially the fastest woman in the West.

Doris’s speed wasn’t confined to skating, either. She won the Hollyburn cross-country skiing title just a week after returning from Banff.

A month later, Doris competed in another event at Grouse Mountain: ski jumping.

The legendary Isabel “Pat” Coursier was the women’s world champion in ski jumping from 1922 to 1929, and held the world record in the event.

Doris had followed in Coursier’s ski tracks as one of the earliest female skiers in Canada to compete in solo ski jumping without a male “guide” going down with her in tandem. So, when Coursier came to visit Vancouver for the city championships at Grouse Mountain, it was only natural that Doris take on the champion in an exhibition.

Coursier won, of course. Doris was far from a specialist, and Coursier’s best jump of 74 feet was world class for the time. It’s unknown what Doris’s best jump was that day, but she had jumps of 52 and 58 feet earlier in the month.

It wasn’t the first time a world-record holder came to town, and Vancouver event organizers, when pondering what to do with such a special guest, landed on, “Have Doris compete against them.”

Speed-skating superstar Lela Brooks was in the middle of a dominant eight-year span in which she reportedly broke 17 world records in multiple sprint events, earning her the nickname “Queen of the Blades.” When she came to Vancouver as a special guest at the 1930 B.C. Skating Championships at Denman Arena, she faced Vancouver’s own speed skating star in a special exhibition.

Brooks gave Doris a half-lap head start in the half-mile race, and nearly regretted doing so, as Doris held that lead for seven of the eight laps, with Brooks only catching Doris “on the final turn,” according to The Province.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Doris had already won two B.C. championships in the 220 and 440-yard races earlier in the night. Maybe she did need the head start and was unlikely to ever hold her own against the “Queen of Blades,” but might she have fared better with fresher legs? Who can say?

Doris elected Queen of the Banff Winter Carnival

Doris was back at Banff for the 1930 Banff Winter Carnival, and crushed the competition — or, as the sportswriters of the day put it, she “showed them her heels.”

“Miss Doris Parkes made a clean sweep of the women’s skating races, winning the 220, 440, 880 yards and one-mile events to carry off the cup for aggregate points as well as four gold medals,” reported the Vancouver Sun on February 10, 1930.

She came home with more laurels than just those for speed skating, however. After finishing as runner-up in 1926, Doris was elected Queen at the carnival’s close.

There’s a reason I frequently refer to Doris only by her first name, and it’s not only because of the familial connection. According to The Province, that’s how everyone in Banff knew her.

“The new carnival queen is not only a winter sports lover but also an active winter sportswoman,” reported The Province on February 10, 1930. “She carried off first prizes in many of the ladies’ events of the carnival. She skates, skis, snowshoes, and is a clever skijorer.

“Everyone knows her as Doris, but very few in this mountain resort know her as Miss Parkes. Seven-year-olds and 70-year-olds know the one name only.”

One name, like Cher, Prince, or Beyoncé. At the Banff Winter Carnival, Miss Parkes was simply “Doris,” and that was becoming the case in Vancouver as well.

“Already reigning as one of the leading athletes in women’s sports on the Coast, Doris Parkes of Vancouver was named Queen of the Banff Winter Carnival at the conclusion of the festival Saturday,” continued The Province. “Doris, a former B.C. swimming and diving champion, is provincial titleholder in skating and skiing as well as being one of the best hockey and softball players of her sex in the city. Her victory as queen is as popular in Vancouver as it is in Banff.”

Doris would reign as Queen for the entirety of 1930, though her only real duties would come at the 1931 Banff Winter Carnival. The Queen was responsible for opening the Carnival, as well as visiting with and entertaining visiting dignitaries and special guests.

But if Doris was going to be returning to Banff as Queen, then she needed a royal retinue.

She needed the Vancouver Amazons.

Return of the Amazons

Doris’s spring and summer were full of her usual athletic activities of swimming and diving, including another Mainland Diving Championship in early November, as well as one less usual one where she acted as a guide in the Sun Marathon for 68-year-old blind runner E.C. Davison.

As Doris headed into the winter sports season, however, she was intent on bringing back women’s hockey before she returned to Banff as Carnival Queen.

Doris helped form the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Association in late November alongside veteran Amazon Phebe Senkler and new recruit Jean Porter, who competed against Doris in speed skating and was noted as a “star goalie” by The Province.

Doris served as secretary, while Porter was president and Senkler was vice-president, but the media at the time saw Doris as the primary force behind the new association.

“Doris Parkes is behind a movement to organize two girls’ ice hockey clubs,” reported the Vancouver Sun. “First practice has been called for 10 o’clock next Tuesday night, and all girls interested in the scheme are invited to be on hand.”

“We hope to get two clubs, and we are looking for some big-hearted people around the town to give us a measure of financial support,” said Doris to the Sun, adding that the women would play their games at Denman Arena on the same night as the senior amateur teams.

According to another report in the Sun, the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Association recruited “Joe Diamond” — most likely horse-racing enthusiast and sports philanthropist Jack Diamond, though I can’t find any source that ever refers to him as “Joe” — as honorary president of the organization and tasked him with bringing in other donors.

The association charged women $1 for membership — anyone else who wanted to be a member would pay “whatever price the buyer will stand for.”

“We need money to carry on,” Doris is quoted as saying, “and we hope to get it by the sale of tickets to generous-minded fellows.”

It evidently worked, as the association put together two teams for the 1930-31 season: the Vancouver Amazons were back, and they were joined by the Vancouver Beavers, a team that has been largely forgotten.

Instead of just the occasional game or tournament, as was played by the prior version of the Amazons and their predecessors, the Amazons and Beavers regularly faced each other at least once a week, albeit in shortened, two-period games.

Parkes was the “outstanding performer” for the Beavers, according to a report in the December 11, 1930 edition of the Vancouver Sun. Previously on defence, Doris switched to forward and started scoring goals with some regularity.

All the while, Doris was continuing to compete in speed skating, swimming, and diving, including the aforementioned 220 and 440-yard provincial championships in speed skating on December 6.

On one occasion, she played a game for the Beavers on December 11, won the ladies’ diving at the Lower Mainland Swimming Gala on December 12, then was back on the ice with the Beavers on December 13, scoring her first recorded goal.

The culmination of the season, of course, was deciding on a single all-star team to go to the 1931 Banff Winter Carnival as the Vancouver Amazons with Queen Doris.

The annual Amazons fundraising dance made its return to the Vancouver social season to raise the money needed to make the trip to Banff, and the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Association chose the best of the Amazons and Beavers.

That, of course, included Doris, along with some other returning Amazons. Sisters Phebe and Nora Senkler were back, this time paired together on defence, while Edna Logan joined Doris at forward. Also returning to Banff was Belva Graves, formerly of the Fernie Swastikas.

They also had some new talent: Laura Wells in net, and Martha Corlett, Mary Seville, Maxine Smith, and Bobby Haddock at forward. A few of those new teammates would become Doris’s speed-skating rivals in the years to come.

After a three-year absence, the Amazons were heading back to Banff to compete for the Alpine Cup.

Queen Doris reigns, and Amazons make the final

As Carnival Queen, Doris officially opened the 1931 Banff Winter Carnival on February 9 “from her home on the Vermilion Lake Arena,” according to The Province.

The next day, she was back on that ice with the Amazons as they dominated the host Banff team in their opening game. The weekly contests between the Amazons and Beavers appeared to pay off, as they scored more goals than they had ever before managed at Banff, winning 5-0.

Martha Corlett proved herself a true goalscorer, netting a hat trick for the Amazons, with Mary Seville and Belva Graves picking up the other two goals. The Amazons were so dominant that news reports went out of their way to point out how well the Banff goaltender played.

“Doris Douglas, in goal for Banff, saved the score from being much larger by her spectacular work,” reported The Vancouver Sun. “Every goal registered was earned.”

That win got the Amazons back into the final. Unfortunately, they weren’t the only team that had put in the work to improve.

The Edmonton Monarchs not only had their rivalries against teams in Calgary, but had a full-fledged feeder system in Edmonton, with junior, intermediate, and senior divisions. The Monarchs had younger players coming up through the system, and the senior team regularly honed their talents against the University of Alberta.

The Province described the game as “exceptionally fast,” which might have been expected with Doris and her fellow speed-skating teammates on the ice, but the Monarchs had the Amazons’ number, winning 3-0, though the third goal came with just seconds remaining as the Amazons pushed hard for the comeback.

It was part of a four-year dynasty of Alpine Cup wins for the Monarchs.

Doris, at least, was happy with how her team played, and so were the organizers of the Banff Winter Carnival, who were reportedly pleased to see the Amazons return.

“According to Doris Parkes, who returned from Banff this morning, the score was no indication of the play,” reported Province sports editor A.R. Dingman. “Officials of the carnival said it was the finest ladies’ puck game seen at the carnival for several years.”

While the Monarchs defeated the monarch in hockey, Queen Doris had a very successful 1931 Carnival individually.

In speed skating, Doris won the Western Canadian Championship in the mile, as well as the 220, 440, and 660 yards. She also finished first in the 100-yard cross-country sprint and ladies’ ski-joring, and earned second place in the 440-yard dog race and an event called “ladies’ driving” — perhaps also a dog sled race of some sort.

Doris was becoming something of a household name for those who followed sports in Western Canada. In the coming years, she would put that name to work trying to keep women’s hockey alive, not only in Vancouver, but across all of Canada.

TO BE CONTINUED

Upcoming album — first single released

Thank you for following along with what has become a much larger project than I initially envisioned. It has become something deeply personal and connected me to my family’s history in a way I didn’t realize was possible, but I hope it has also been an interesting look at the history of women’s hockey in Vancouver.

Something else that I’ve been working on for the past several years is my sophomore album, a follow-up to 2022’s The Neverknown.

The upcoming album is titled Into the Maw of the Storm and the first single is titled “Told You So” and includes a B-Side: a cover of “Giants in the Sky” by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Into the Woods.

Here is the single release on Spotify, but it should also be available on your music app of choice:

I may be dating myself here, but when I was growing up in the Fraser Valley, getting to watch the Vancouver Canucks on TV was a relative rarity.

In the mid-1990s, less than half of the Canucks’ schedule was broadcast on TV, with games split between BCTV, CHEK, CBC, and TSN. If you wanted to follow the full Canucks season, you needed to attend in person, listen to the games on the radio, and/or follow along in the newspaper.

These days, fans take it for granted that they can watch every Canucks game in a season, though as recently as 2010, some games were only available on pay-per-view.

But there was a benefit to the old way. At least the majority of the games that were available on TV could be watched for free with an antenna, at least if you were within broadcast range for BCTV and CHEK, and the playoffs were free on Hockey Night in Canada on CBC.

This season, there will be no free games for Canucks fans.

With CBC no longer carrying NHL broadcasts, fans will have to pay to watch any Canucks games this season, whether as part of a cable package or, for those who have cut cable, via streaming.

Unfortunately, Sportsnet+ is increasing its price for the third time in two years.

In 2024, the standard plan on Sportsnet+ cost $179.99 per year. In January of 2025, that went up to $199.99 per year, then increased again in September of 2025 to $249.99.

Now, a standard plan will go up again this September to $269.99 — $90 more per year from where it was two years ago.

READ THE REST AT CANUCKSARMY

PART ONE
PART TWO

After appearing as a last-minute substitute for the Vancouver Amazons at the 1923 Banff Winter Carnival, Doris Parkes became an integral part of the team that went to compete for the next four Alpine Cups.

Doris was just 18 when she was paired with Amazons captain Phebe Senkler on defence in 1924, with the Province reporting that Senkler “played a good game and was well supported by Doris Parkes.” Unfortunately, the team was defeated in overtime by the Calgary Hollies, a super-team composed of the best of the defunct Calgary Regents and the Calgary Byngs.

The Hollies, who were described as “the hardest and fastest-playing ladies’ team in the West,” eliminated the Amazons again in 1925, part of a run where they won four of five Alpine Cups.

1926 was a bit more successful, as the Amazons defeated the host Banff team 2-0 in their first game. Helen Thompson and Nan Griffith scored the two goals, while Doris and Mrs Wilson, whose first and maiden name I have been unable to determine, anchored the defence in front of Amelia Voitkevic.

“Good combination was displayed by both sides,” reported The Province of the game, “but the Amazon defence was more solid.”

But the B.C. women had more than just Albertan teams to contend with, as a team from the University of Manitoba upset the Amazons 2-0 in their next game, once again leaving them short of the championship.

Doris, however, had some individual success at the 1926 Carnival. She won the dog sled race and was nominated to be Carnival Queen, though she finished as a runner-up to Calgary’s Mary Cross.

Meeting Doris Parkes

The few photos I have of my Grandma Doris with the Vancouver Amazons were scanned from a collage of photos in my Uncle Wayne’s possession, with the originals apparently lost in a move some time in the past. As a result, they’re not the best quality, but they still provide a look into the history of hockey in Vancouver and provide a precious, tangible connection to my own family history.

The photo at the top of this article from the 1926 Banff Winter Carnival, for instance, is notable for being the first I’ve seen of the Amazons wearing hockey pants as opposed to long skirts or baggy bloomers, giving them a look more similar to a modern hockey player.

Another photo of Doris on her own from either 1926 or 1927 shows a stoic hockey player with a flat-bladed stick. A scan from an article in the North Shore Outlook that had access to the original photos provides a slightly clearer look.

But as I looked through my uncle’s scrapbook, the photo that really jumped out at me is more candid and feels like the real Grandma Doris.

For the first time, it feels like I found her.

Seeing that photo, it’s easy to imagine what hockey must have meant to her: the freedom and joy of stepping on the ice, competing with her fellow women, and leaving behind the judgements of society.

This was the Roaring Twenties, and you can see that reflected in her style, with her bob haircut. But even in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, there were still societal expectations, and plenty who frowned at the idea of women playing a physical sport like hockey.

Other photos show Doris drinking beer with friends at Hollyburn Ski Club while wearing pants and a collared shirt, far from the expectations of femininity that had restricted the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team to ankle-length skirts and limited protective gear not long before.

Doris didn’t marry my grandpa, Bud Wagner, until she was 35, at a time when women typically got married in their early twenties. Clearly, Doris was a woman who enjoyed the freedom of being a single woman.

It’s also very clear that Doris loved sports of all types, particularly hockey. But her trip to the 1927 Banff Winter Carnival threatened to be the last for the Vancouver Amazons.

Banff disappointments take their toll

The losses in Banff were disheartening for the Amazons, who were unable to repeat their triumph from 1921. Still, the annual event became the driving force for the cycle of the Amazons’ hockey season.

The Amazons would prepare by playing split-squad games at Denman Arena, giving their opposition names like the Marcels, the Ramblers, and the Patricias. They would hold their annual fundraising dance for travel expenses, then head to the Banff Winter Carnival, hoping to win the championship.

Hockey in Vancouver took a hit in the mid-twenties, as the Vancouver Millionaires, who had become the Vancouver Maroons, ceased to exist. The PCHA collapsed in 1924, but the Millionaires/Maroons joined the Western Canada Hockey League (WCHL), only for that league to collapse as well in 1926.

With no professional hockey, the amateur nights at Denman Arena drew decent crowds, and the Amazons were part of the draw alongside the senior men’s teams. But enthusiasm for hockey in Vancouver was waning, and that was reflected by a smaller fundraising dance leading up to the 1927 Banff Winter Carnival.

Despite that, the Amazons went to Banff full of hope. Scoring star Mrs. Guy Patrick (née Kathleen Carson) was back in the lineup, albeit moved to defence alongside Doris Parkes. All three Senkler sisters were on the team, along with stalwart centre Nan Griffith and veteran goaltender Amelia Voitkevic.

They were joined by Doris Ingram, recruited from the Calgary Patricias, as well as Helen Thompson, Pauline Maddison, Belle Pearson, Edna Logan, Laura Walls, and Mildred Dyke.

But the 1927 tournament was again a source of disappointment, as a 3-1 loss to the Edmonton Monarchs knocked them out of the tournament.

The Calgary Hollies went on to defeat the Monarchs in the final to reclaim the Alpine Cup.

On their way back to Vancouver, the Amazons stopped at the Revelstoke Winter Carnival and handed the Revelstoke Ladies’ Hockey Team a lopsided 8-1 loss. Griffith scored four goals, and Ingram had a hat trick in the win, with Phebe Senkler scoring the other Amazon goal.

That dominant win likely did little to soothe the wounds of another loss at Banff. The Amazons wouldn’t be back to Banff the next three years.

Doris Parkes becomes a provincial champion

While the Amazons went on hiatus, Doris was just getting started with her athletic career.

In September of 1927, Doris won the B.C. Mainland Diving Championship for fancy diving, finally defeating her rival, Maisie Lyons.

In 1928, Doris expanded her repertoire to include cross-country skiing, winning the ski race at the Hollyburn Pacific Ski Club on April 3, 1928, with what The Province reported was “the very good time of 20 minutes, 42 seconds.”

She continued to compete in swim races, regularly finishing top-five among both men and women in open-water events at English Bay. By August 14, 1928, The Victoria Daily Times noted her notoriety, calling her “a well-known mermaid of that city.”

While hockey was not in the cards, Doris kept skating. Speed skating took the place of women’s hockey at the amateur hockey nights at Denman Arena, with Doris winning a relay alongside Winnie Pearce and her Amazons teammate, Edna Logan, on January 19, 1929.

Her biggest victory came a few weeks later when Denman Arena hosted the provincial championships for the 1-mile championship in ladies’ speed skating.

The 23-year-old Doris faced a field of top speed skaters: Marion Gow, who was her chief speed-skating rival, Bea Robertson, Violet Calverley, Edna Logan, and Winnie Pierce. At stake was the Fred J. Whitcroft Trophy, a hefty cup.

Doris took the championship in the 14-lap race with a savvy performance, finishing in a flat four minutes.

“Miss Parkes raced like a veteran,” reported The Province on February 2, 1929, “allowing her chief opponents to set the pace in the last few laps until nearing the finish she jumped ahead to win by a safe margin.”

A day later, the Province noted that, in addition to the 1-mile championship, Doris held provincial championships in the 200-yard sprint, as well as the 220 and 440-yard events, won at the annual Rotary Ice Carnival.

Sexism in sports in early 20th century

While The Province was complimentary of Doris and her competitors, the report from the Vancouver Sun was coloured by sexism.

The reporter couldn’t resist commenting on the bodies of the skaters, pointing out how “slim” Marie Gow was and that Beatrice “Roberts” — not her name — wore a “close-fitting white uniform.” It was worse for Doris:

“Carrying at least twenty-five pounds more than any of the other contestants, chubby Doris Parkes showed her heels to the best in the province when she beat a classy field of six girl skaters to win the Fred Whitcroft silver cup and the girls’ one mile skating championship of British Columbia at the Arena last night.”

The first time I read this, I was infuriated, but it was sadly emblematic of so much coverage of women’s sports, at least when they got any coverage at all.

When searching through newspaper archives, reports of the Vancouver Amazons, even when competing for the Alpine Cup at the Banff Winter Carnival, sometimes received only a single sentence buried under longer reports on men’s sports. Sometimes, that was preferable to the coverage they did get.

One report in the Vancouver Sun from an Amazons game in 1930 said, “like all girls’ teams they lacked the ability to shoot,” which is hard to credit as accurate when newspapers had previously praised Kathleen Carson for shooting “like a man.”

Another Sun report in 1934 asked their readers whether they wanted “blondes or brunette on ice or do you like them at a more heated temperature? You can have both,” then introduced the Amazons roster by saying, “In case you decide there is one or two you would like to meet (we have all sizes) here is the way they will lineup.”

The report on that particular game the next day claimed, “The girls minced around, finding it very difficult to turn and tote their large sticks. Occasionally they bounced into the boards and fell rather hard into positions that usually are very unbecoming to young ladies.”

Keep in mind, the Amazons had been a fixture of amateur hockey in Vancouver for well over a decade by this point. The idea that they found it difficult to lift their hockey sticks beggars belief.

While the sexism in print seemed to be a matter of course, the bigger sexist struggle the Amazons faced was money. While men’s hockey teams received ample funding from local sports associations, the Amazons had a tougher time, depending on their annual fundraising dances to raise enough money just to travel to the Banff Winter Carnival. They depended on donors stepping up to the table; they didn’t always do so.

Perhaps that’s a bigger reason why the Amazons stopped going to Banff, more than the disappointment of coming up short to teams from Alberta and Manitoba.

But Doris wasn’t going to let women’s hockey in Vancouver fade away.

TO BE CONTINUED

READ PART ONE

In the early years of the 20th century, women’s hockey in Vancouver was a battle between the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team, the Swastika Club, and the occasional varsity club formed at the University of British Columbia.

A group of students from King George Secondary School was about to take over.

Unlike the women on the other Vancouver teams, the teenage girls who would become the Vancouver Amazons grew up skating regularly at Denman Arena rather than depending on cold snaps to provide natural ice, and they had a professional hometown team from whom to take inspiration. They were strong skaters and eager to follow in the steps of the Vancouver Millionaires, as well as those of their older classmate, Amelia Voitkevic, who started tending goal for the Swastika Club when she was still in high school.

So, they issued a challenge to the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team — a rather brash challenge at that.

According to the February 3, 1918 edition of the Vancouver Sun, they challenged the Ladies “to come and get defeated at hockey by the Amazons Girls’ club.”

“How dare they!” the secretary of the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey team was reported as saying in response. But since legitimate competition wasn’t in abundance, the team decided to accept the challenge from the teenagers.

They may have regretted it a week later. The Amazons, raised on rough-and-tumble Millionaires games, played a different brand of hockey than what the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team was expecting.

“Vancouver Won by Only Goal of the Game but Carry Highly Colored Shins as Memento of Encounter,” read the subheading in the February 8 edition of the Vancouver Sun, with the article noting that the Amazons regularly took chops at their opponent’s “shin or leg or knee, it did not appear to matter.”

It should be noted that the ladies’ hockey team had abandoned long skirts by this point. Female hockey players across Canada had begun wearing baggy bloomers in place of skirts, though some goaltenders resisted the change, continuing to wear skirts to help cover the five-hole.

According to the Sun, however, not all of the players wore shin guards during the game, making the Amazons’ stickwork particularly painful. In addition, the Amazons were eager to establish that they were a force to be reckoned with after the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team was so disdainful of their initial challenge.

“Not only did the sniff offend the Amazons, but the statement made by one of the Vancouver team that they could not think of playing a ‘bunch of school girls,’ had an awful lot to do with the number of black and blue and other highly-colored effects carried by the Vancouver club and some of the Amazons when they sat down to dinner last night,” reported the Sun.

While the Amazons left their mark, they couldn’t score a goal, and fell 1-0 in that initial game. But they had accomplished something: they had proven a bunch of teenagers could keep up with the best hockey players Vancouver had to offer.

The rise of the Amazons

It didn’t take long for the Amazons to better their elders. In fact, it took less than two months.

After a couple of rematches, the Amazons took on the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team on March 26, 1918, for what was said to be the provincial championship, though they once again failed to consult any teams in the interior.

It was a hard-fought game, with neither team able to score in regulation, and it took ten minutes of overtime before Amazons centre Nanny Griffith finally scored the deciding goal.

“Miss Nanny Griffith battled her way through the Vancouver ladies’ defence, notching the winning goal amid the plaudits of a big throng of fans,” reported the Sun, adding that each member of the winning team was awarded an engraved stickpin as the prize.

Over the next few years, the Amazons became the top team — and then the only team — in Vancouver. They absorbed players from the Swastika Club, including their former classmate, Amelia Voitkevic, who would play as the Amazons’ goaltender for years to come.

The Amazons were the first women’s team from B.C. to play a team from out of province, then the first women’s team in Canada to play in another country.

They took on the Calgary Regents, the champions of Alberta, in March of 1919, falling 2-0 to the more experienced team. A year later, they took on the Seattle Vamps in a home-and-home series, making them the first team to travel to another country to play, even if it was just a little ways over the border.

The first game was noted for its speed, with the Province reporting, “Referee Climie was kept busy keeping pace with the fast skating from end to end,” with some hard-checking and strong defence from Vancouver, but the Seattle Vamps came out ahead 1-0.

The rubber match in Seattle was another 1-0 game, this time for the Amazons, who displayed “marked superiority,” according to The Province, “playing an aggressive game and skating their opponents dizzy.” Nan Griffith scored the lone goal of the game.

The Amazons were on the rise and, two years later, they would be the champions of Western Canada.

Vancouver takes on the Banff Winter Carnival

The annual Banff Winter Carnival began in 1916 and featured numerous races and competitions: cross-country skiing, ski-jumping, ski-joring, speed-skating, curling, dog-sledding, and more.

Since the Carnival was one of the few opportunities for athletes from multiple provinces to compete against each other, these events were often declared to be the championships of Western Canada, if not Canada as a whole. And no event was more popular than the women’s hockey tournament.

Since men’s hockey already had multiple professional leagues and the Stanley Cup, the organizers of the Banff Winter Carnival quickly realized that trying to attract top-tier talent in men’s hockey was a losing proposition.

As a result, women’s hockey took centre stage in Banff, as the top teams from B.C. and Alberta went head-to-head for the trophy that became known as the Alpine Cup, which was declared to be the women’s hockey championship of Western Canada.

That was the level of competition that the Amazons craved, and preparing for the Banff Winter Carnival became the goal of every hockey season. One of the biggest challenges was off the ice, as they needed to raise funds to make the trip.

One of the most anticipated events of the social season in Vancouver was the annual Amazon fundraising ball.

“Society lent its enthusiastic patronage last night to the annual dance given by the Vancouver Amazons ladies’ hockey team, to send the players to the Banff winter carnival,” read a January 16, 1924 report in the Vancouver Sun. “The supper room was very attractive with its streams of red, black and white, the team colors, and at the supper tables individual pucks and hockey sticks of colored cardboard were charming touches, while for each lady present there was a unique sketch in silhouette of a hockey girl in action, drawn by Mr. J.B. Fitzmaurice.”1

The Amazons’ first trip to Banff in 1921 was unsuccessful in that they didn’t bring home the championship, but they did accomplish one astonishing feat: they played a full 13 periods of hockey in just three days.

Their first game against the Calgary Patricias was tied after regulation and went two full overtimes without a deciding goal, forcing them to halt the game to complete it the next day. For whatever reason, the two teams decided to play another full game instead of just continuing the overtime from the previous game. That game also went to overtime, with Kathleen Carson finally winning it for the Amazons.

Consider that at the time, it was customary for players to play the full game, only substituting if they couldn’t continue due to injury. When the Amazons fell to the Calgary Regents in the championship game, it should have come as no surprise; they were exhausted.

There was no rest for the Amazons, however. Shortly after their return from Banff, they launched into games against the Seattle Vamps and Victoria Kewpies in what the newspapers called the International Ladies’ Hockey League — the first women’s hockey league to feature teams in multiple countries.

The Amazons dominated the league games, winning all four of their contests without conceding a goal2, taking home the championship of the ILHL.

There were some consequences for the ILHL season, however, as it was determined that the players were breaking the strict rules of amateurism by playing their games on the same nights as the Vancouver Millionaires, Victoria Aristocrats, and Seattle Metropolitans of the PCHA. The efforts of Frank and Lester Patrick to support women’s hockey had backfired.

“The rules say that no amateur can play on the same ice as professionals where a gate is charged,” declared George I. Warren, president of the local branch of the B.C. Amateur Athletics Union, though he apparently equivocated when asked why it had taken years for him to come to this conclusion. He added that the players had been warned, which appeared true, as this amazing headline from prior to a game between the Amazons and Kewpies attests:

“Girls Don’t Care.” Truer words have seldom been spoken.

The main consequence was felt by multi-sport athletes, specifically members of swimming clubs like goaltender Edna Curry for the Kewpies and two of the Amazons’ top forwards: Lorraine Cannon and Nan Griffith. All three were suspended, though Cannon and Griffith successfully argued for their reinstatement, as they claimed Warren’s warning never actually reached them prior to the game.

Amazons become Western Canadian Champions

The Amazons returned to the Banff Winter Carnival in 1922, hoping they were better prepared for the grind of multiple games at altitude in a short time span.

Unfortunately, they had little practice, as the other teams in the ILHL evidently did not continue past that inaugural season, giving the Amazons little real competition apart from split-squad games. They knew their opponents would have faced stronger competition, as there were multiple Calgary teams, as well as other teams throughout Alberta.

The Amazons, however, were aided by infighting amongst those Calgary teams. A third Calgary team had formed in addition to the Calgary Patricias and Calgary Regents: the Calgary Byngs. The Patricias and Regents, however, had refused to acknowledge this new team and wouldn’t play against them.

Nonetheless, the Byngs showed up at the 1922 Banff Winter Carnival and faced the Amazons. Not only that, they handed the Amazons a 1-0 defeat, seemingly eliminating Vancouver from the tournament.

Only, it was determined that the game was merely an exhibition game, perhaps from the influence of the Patricias and Regents. The 1-0 loss didn’t count, and the Amazons continued on in the tournament.

There was one consequence from the loss, however: Phebe Senkler, the Amazons’ captain and “tower of strength on defence,” got injured and couldn’t continue in the tournament. In her place, the Amazons recruited one of the Byngs: goaltender Helen Tees, who had just shut out the Amazons, filled in on defence for the Amazons for the rest of the tournament.

The Patricias and Regents might have regretted refusing entry to the Byngs. Instead of being eliminated by the Byngs, the Amazons defeated the Patricias 2-1 in overtime on February 3 with goals from Nan Griffith and Kathleen Carson, in what the Province called, “one of the most spirited and exciting ladies’ hockey matches ever played in the West.”

Two days later, the Amazons took on the defending champion Calgary Regents for the Alpine Cup. It was a hard-fought, physical affair, with two more Amazons getting injured after the Regents opened the scoring on a lucky deflection off an Amazon skate.

“Florence Johnson was penalized for two minutes after being hit on the head by one of the Regents, to which she retaliated,” reads the game report from the February 6, 1922 edition of the Vancouver Province, illustrating that times really haven’t changed: referees always nab the player who retaliates.

“After going to the penalty box, she collapsed and had just reached the dressing-room when Nannie Griffiths (sic) was also laid out, leaving the Amazons with only six players,” continued the report. “Although shot after shot was rained in, it was impossible for the Regents to penetrate the Amazons’ goal, owing to the ‘eagle eye’ of Amelia Voitkevic, who played a magnificent game.”

Florence “Johnnie” Johnson, despite collapsing earlier, returned to the game in the second period, but left again later in the frame. Griffith remained out. Fortunately for the Amazons, Kathleen Carson was on fire.

“Kathleen Carson secured the puck, went straight down the ice, broke through the defence and by a neatly-placed shot scored the tying goal amidst great cheering from the spectators,” said The Province. “Three minutes after the overtime commenced, Kathleen Carson repeated her spectacular play by again scoring a goal, which proved to be the winner.”

Perhaps the Amazons were inspired by their injured captain, who “directed the game from the fence,” with The Province noting how her words seemed to ignite her teammates: “every member of the team put all her energy into the game.”

With the victories over the Patricias and Regents3, the Amazons were officially the first B.C. team to win the Alpine Cup at the Banff Winter Carnival. Along with the Fernie Swastikas the following year, they were the only two teams from outside of Alberta to win the Western Canadian Championship.

Over a century later, the pioneering 1921-22 Vancouver Amazons were inducted into the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2024.

Meanwhile, Doris Parkes…

As the Amazons were establishing themselves as the pre-eminent power in women’s hockey on the west coast, Doris Parkes — Remember Doris? This is a story about Doris — was beginning to establish herself as an athlete in Vancouver.

Unlike the original Amazons, Doris didn’t attend King George. Instead, she attended high school in North Vancouver in the commercial department, preparing for her future career as a bookkeeper.

In 1920, at the age of 14, Doris successfully qualified to join the Vancouver Amateur Swimming Club (VASC) by completing a one-quarter mile swim. While I can’t be certain, I believe she was the first official female member of the VASC.

An August 17, 1920 report in the Province notes that the ladies’ section of the VASC had only been “recently formed,” because, “under the laws of the Canadian Amateur Swimming Association, the governing body of the sport in the Dominion, only members of affiliated clubs are eligible to compete at the regular meets and up to this summer Vancouver girls who desired to take part in competitions were helpless because there was no club for them.”

The ladies’ section of the VASC immediately proved themselves in long-distance events, showing greater endurance than many of the male members of the club, with the Province noting that multiple men had dropped out of two open-water swims partway through, while the women who competed all finished the race, including Doris Parkes.

One of those swim galas featured a shorter, 100-yard event, where the 15-year-old Doris competed against two Amazons: Lorraine Cannon and Nan Griffith.

It would still be a few more years before Doris joined Cannon and Griffith on the ice, but perhaps this is where the seeds were first planted.

In the meantime, Doris continued to accrue plaudits in swimming, competing in lifeguard competitions and swimming galas while representing the VASC, with her fellow VASC member Maisie Lyons her main rival. She competed in freestyle swimming, long-distance events in open water, and in “fancy diving” — the old term for what is now known simply as diving.

Still young, Doris had yet to establish herself as a top-tier athlete, but that was about to change. And it started with hockey.

Away at college, neither of the Senkler sisters made the trip with the Amazons to the 1923 Banff Winter Carnival, with goaltender Amelia Voitkevic taking on the duties of captain from Phebe Senkler. Neither did the Amazons have veteran rover Betty Hinds, formerly of the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team, who had retired from the game.

Fortunately, the Amazons still had star left wing Kathleen Carson, who had become Mrs. Guy Patrick, marrying the Amazons’ manager, the younger brother of Frank and Lester Patrick.

Voitkevic and Patrick were joined by Thelma Kaye and Johnnie Johnson on defence, Lorraine Cannon at right wing, Nan Griffith at centre, and subs Ada McNair, Mayme Leahy, and Gwennie McIlwaine.

But, when the Amazons faced the Fernie Swastikas in the championship game, the listed roster included a couple of additions, perhaps due to injury: substitutes Miriam Harper and Doris Parks (sic).

The game didn’t go the Amazons way. Mild weather had led to swampy conditions on the ice surface, with several pools of water, forcing the game to be delayed a day. Hoping for cooler temperatures, the game was staged early in the morning, but this resulted in bright sunshine in the eyes of the Amazons for two of the three periods.

In addition, the Swastikas were well aware of who the most dangerous Amazon was on the ice, and double-teamed Kathleen Patrick throughout the game, keeping her and the rest of the Amazons entirely off the scoreboard en route to a 2-0 win.

It’s unclear whether Doris ever got on the ice in this game, but it’s still notable that, at just 17 years old, she had become a member of the Amazons, albeit just filling in as a substitute.

She would go on to play a much more significant role in the future.

TO BE CONTINUED

READ PART ONE

It’s not every day that you find out you’re descended from royalty.

Nearly 100 years ago, my Grandma Wagner was Queen Doris Parkes, reigning over the Banff Winter Carnival with an icy fist. It was right at the peak of her time as one of the best all-around athletes in B.C., if not all of Western Canada.

I have few memories of my Grandma Doris. I was just eight years old when she passed away in July of 1992, just a couple of weeks shy of her 88th birthday, and, since she lived on Vancouver Island and we lived on the mainland, trips to visit her were few and far between.

What little I remember is a woman who was sweet, kind, and full of life. And she loved to swim, preferably in the ocean, something that terrified and mystified me as a child who was, to be frank, a poor swimmer. As I would hesitate to dip my toe in the water, she would plunge headlong into the surf, cutting easily through the water to circle a buoy that floated far from the shore — miles to my young eyes.

I was told she swam every single day, right up until the day she died.

With Grandma Doris passing when I was so young and with so few visits, I never really knew her. And the more I found out about her, the more I regretted never truly knowing such a remarkable woman.

Century-old trophies turned into pen holders

It’s my fault: I never asked about the trophies.

The various silver cups on wooden bases ringed my dad’s barn workshop on shelves above his collection of tools, old and new. While I was a little bit curious about their origins, I just assumed they had been won by my dad in his younger years or purchased from antique stores or garage sales — we were always going to garage sales.

Or maybe it was residue from growing up as a Millennial in the participation trophy era. Everyone had a wall full of trophies, right?

It wasn’t until I was older that I found out the trophies were much older than I thought. They dated back to the twenties and thirties and were won by my dad’s parents: Grandma Doris and Grandpa Bud.

The trophies with “Bud Wagner” stamped into the cups and plates were all for canoe races (and one fishing competition), as the future Forest Ranger was an avid outdoorsman, but those with my grandma’s maiden name, Doris Parkes, were for seemingly everything.

There were trophies for swimming, diving, cross-country skiing, speed skating, and, yes, canoeing, including a couple of trophies won by her and Bud as a canoeing tandem, years before they got married.

Now the trophies sit on a shelf in my brother’s old bedroom, which has been turned into an office. The Corfield Trophy from the Deep Cove Canoe Marathon, which was won three times by Doris and Bud, allowing them to keep the trophy, now holds an assortment of pens.

It’s the kind of collection that momentarily transforms me into Indiana Jones, declaring, “That belongs in a museum!”

One sport she played, however, is missing from all of the trophies: hockey. And the more I looked into her time as an athlete, the more I realized that she’s one of the key figures in the history of women’s hockey in Vancouver.

But before I get to that conclusion, I need to start at the beginning.

Bringing “the winter sport of the Dominion” to Vancouver

The primary thing preventing hockey from taking hold in Vancouver in the city’s earliest days was the climate.

An 1895 article in The Province noted, “Hockey on the ice is by all odds the winter sport of the Dominion,” noting its popularity in Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, and Toronto. The sport was played on natural ice: frozen ponds and flooded rinks in the coldest winter months.

When Lord Frederick Stanley arrived in Canada to serve as governor general, the sport of hockey was already growing in popularity. He and his family took to skating and hockey on an outdoor rink on the grounds of Rideau Hall, the official residence of the governor general.

That’s where Lord Stanley’s daughter, Lady Isobel Stanley, organized the first known game of hockey played by women around 1890, when she would have been 15 years old. She didn’t just organize it; she played in it, and a photograph of the game is the first known photo of women playing ice hockey.

Isobel and her brothers helped influence Lord Stanley to donate the silver cup he called the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, which later became known as the Stanley Cup.

Frozen ponds were harder to come by in Vancouver, but when the temperatures did drop low enough, Trout Lake was a popular skating spot and hosted the occasional hockey game.

It’s unclear, however, if any of those games were played by women. While there are reports of women playing hockey games in Vancouver prior to 1911, most, if not all of them, were on grass. Vancouver women were supposedly the first to play the modern game of field hockey in 1896, and they formed the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Club, at times traveling across the Georgia Strait to play games against the Victoria Ladies’ Hockey Club.

In order for ice hockey to take hold in Vancouver, they needed artificial ice.

“It is a well known fact that those who would enjoy that most exhilarating of exercises, skating, in this city, are liable to be badly disappointed winter after winter if they depend on nature to supply ice,” said a letter to the editor in the October 13, 1899 edition of The Province. “A good artificial skating rink, operated on upright business lines, would be a paying thing here, and a blessing to all lovers of skating, hockey, carnivals, and the many other sports and amusements to be derived from a good sheet of ice.”

Women’s hockey in the interior

With limited access to ice in Vancouver, hockey first took root in B.C. in the interior, where frozen ponds and lakes were a little more reliable, particularly in Kootenay communities like Rossland and Nelson. And women took to the sport as readily as the men.

The Rossland Ladies’ Hockey Team was a powerhouse in those early years, dominating other squads at the annual Rossland Winter Carnival. The women wore ankle-length wool skirts and no protective equipment, which would have been considered unladylike according to the social mores of the time.

A rivalry grew between the team in Rossland and the Nelson Ladies’ Hockey Club, though it was a bit of a one-sided rivalry, with Rossland winning every game they played. But it was the popularity of the sport in Nelson that ultimately brought hockey to Vancouver.

The Patrick family moved out west to Nelson to found the Patrick Lumber Company, and they brought their love of hockey with them. Lester and Frank Patrick earned renown and induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, but their sisters — Myrtle, Cynda, and Dora — were also passionate about hockey and joined the Nelson Ladies’ Hockey Club.

When the Patricks sold their lumber company and moved to the coast, Lester and Frank staked the family fortune on hockey. They built Denman Arena in Vancouver and Victoria Arena (later Patrick Arena or Willows Arena) in Victoria, with both opening in December, 1911.

Shortly after the arenas opened, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) kicked off its inaugural season in January, 1912 with three teams: the Vancouver Millionaires, Victoria Senators, and New Westminster Royals. Frank Patrick operated and played for the Millionaires, and Lester Patrick did the same for the Victoria Senators, while the Royals lacked a Patrick but won the league championship in that first year nonetheless.

It didn’t take long for women in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster to establish their own teams. Whether because of the influence of their sisters or the simple financial need for more tenants for their arenas, the Patricks were early supporters of women’s hockey, staging women’s games prior to those of the PCHA or during intermissions.

A ladies’ league and the rise of the Swastikas

In 1914, the three teams in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster battled for what they deemed the “ladies’ hockey championship of B.C.,” according to the February 23, 1914 edition of The Province. That must have been news to the team in Rossland, who were in the middle of a 17-year unbeaten streak in the interior.

All three teams wore the same sweater colours as their male counterparts, with the Vancouver Ladies Hockey Team taking to the ice in the colours and logo of the Vancouver Millionaires, albeit with ankle-length skirts.

The trouble for the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team was finding opponents worth playing, as the nascent ladies’ league didn’t last long. The team in New Westminster folded after two years when Queen’s Park Arena was requisitioned by the military during the First World War. A year later, the Victoria Arena was likewise requisitioned.

With no other competition in easy traveling distance, the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team took to facing a varsity team of students from the University of British Columbia. In early 1917, they also formed an official club with both a senior and a junior squad, along with a new logo that separated them from the Millionaires: the Swastika Club.

While the sight of a swastika on a hockey jersey is rather alarming today, the swastika had a long history as a symbol of luck or good fortune before it was co-opted by Nazi Germany. The symbol was frequently adopted by women’s athletic clubs during this time period, including multiple hockey teams.

Along with the Vancouver Swastika Club, there were the Edmonton Swastikas and, most famously, the Fernie Swastikas, who won the Alpine Cup at the 1923 Banff Winter Carnival, which was considered at the time to be the championship of Western Canada.

The newspapers in Vancouver frequently referred to the team as the “Swastika Girls” or “Swastika Women.”

“In New York, the great craze of the season is ladies’ hockey and Vancouver is not without its ladies’ hockey team, for two of them, the Swastika Girls and the University of British Columbia Ladies battled through two periods yesterday afternoon at the Arena to a final score of two goals each,” read a report in the Vancouver Sun from January 17, 1917.

At times, newspaper reports conflate the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team and the Swastika Club as being one and the same. But, at some point they became two separate teams. For example, a schedule of hockey practices at Denman Arena published in the Vancouver Sun on Nuvember 26, 1917 listed separate practice times for the Swastika Ladies and the Vancouver Ladies.

But, as best as I can determine, the Swastika Club had its origins with the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team.

In December of 1917, the Swastika Club faced the Vancouver Ladies’ Club for what was deemed the “mainland title” of women’s hockey.

“The hockey game between the Swastikas and the Vancouver ladies occasioned a lot of genuine pleasure for the fans,” read the Province report on December 22, 1917. “The girls showed plenty of pluck and took no heed whatever to some rather severe bumps and falls. Vancouver won four to two, but the game was exciting enough to please a dyspeptic.”

But both the Vancouver Ladies’ Hockey Team and the Swastika Club were soon to be unseated by a new, younger squad whose name would, fortunately, supplant the name “Swastika” in the annals of Vancouver hockey history: the Vancouver Amazons.

READ PART TWO

This past week, we found out that a few Vancouver Canucks players will be changing their numbers heading into next season.

Marco Rossi will be taking up Alex Edler’s old number 23. Zeev Buium will nab the number 8 that was most recently worn by Conor Garland and once belonged to Chris Tanev. Filip Chytil will look to make the number 77 his own, with Anson Carter the most notable previous 77 (with apologies to Nikolay Goldobin). Finally, Jonathan Lekkerimäki will take the number 88 from the departing Nils Åman.

These four numbers all have something in common: they have been worn before by other Canucks.

Perhaps surprisingly, the number 23 has been worn by the most Canucks of those four numbers, with 20 players wearing the number 23, including Thomas Gradin, Paul Reinhart, and Martin Gelinas.

That comes up short of the number worn by the most Canucks in franchise history: the number 18, which has been worn by 33 players, including Darcy Rota, Igor Larionov, and a couple of overshadowed brothers, Steve Kariya and Fedor Fedorov.

Those four Canucks won’t be charting new territory with their numbers, nor will any of the new Canucks signed in free agency. Luke Schenn will reclaim the number 2 he wore in his previous two stints in Vancouver; Jamie Oleksiak will wear number 4 — a classic number for a defenceman; Brendan Gallagher will go with the number 7 worn by two previous short kings, André Boudrias and Cliff Ronning.

Only Paul Cotter will have a more unusual number, as he will keep wearing the number 47 he wore with the New Jersey Devils, previously worn in Vancouver by Yann Sauvé, Sven Baertschi, and Noah Juulsen.

You might even call it a missed opportunity. Any of these players could have picked a number never before worn by a Canuck and staked a claim on making franchise history.

READ THE REST AT CANUCKSARMY

I would like to apologize. It was my intention to write more articles during July, but one PITB project that is near and dear to my heart has proven to be harder to write and required more research than anticipated.

But things are coming together on that project, so hopefully, I will be publishing more content through August.

Thank you so much to everyone who has remained subscribed during these lean summer months. It is a source of great encouragement to me.

The Vancouver Canucks’ new coaching staff is going to be gaining experience right alongside their youngest players, as they’re all NHL rookies too.

Don’t get me wrong: Manny Malhotra has paid his dues, with seven years of experience as an assistant coach in the NHL — three years with the Canucks and four years with the Toronto Maple Leafs — then two years as a head coach in the AHL with the Abbotsford Canucks, winning a Calder Cup in his first year.

But Malhotra is still a rookie head coach at the NHL level. Typically, teams will hire an assistant coach or two with experience behind an NHL bench to help out a rookie head coach. But the Canucks won’t have a single assistant coach with NHL experience alongside Malhotra.

That’s not to say that the Canucks’ coaching hires lack any experience at all.

Ryan Mougenel comes with two decades of coaching experience, starting as an assistant coach in the ECHL with the Fresno Falcons and working his way up from there. For the past five years, Mougenel has been the head coach of the Providence Bruins in the AHL, where he just won the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award as the coach of the year.

Jordan Smith has 14 years of experience as a coach, starting in Junior A as head coach of the Thunder Bay North Stars and working his way up through the OHL and AHL, including two years as an assistant coach with Malhotra in Abbotsford.

Still, neither Mougenel nor Smith has ever been in the NHL, either as a coach or as a player.

Jason Krog has a leg up in that regard with his 223 NHL games as a player, even if he has the least coaching experience on the Canucks’ staff. Krog has been the skating/skills coach for the Vancouver and Abbotsford Canucks for the past two seasons, but this will be his first time behind a bench outside of the Burnaby Winter Club.

Given the rebuilding Canucks’ focus on development, having a skills coach as an assistant makes a certain amount of sense, but there will be a learning curve for Krog as he adjusts to his new role.

The Canucks aren’t completely lacking in NHL experience among their coaching staff. Goaltending coach Marko Torenius and video coach Ian Beckenstein have been part of Vancouver’s coaching staff the past two seasons. But Malhotra will be the only coach behind the bench during games with any experience as a coach in the NHL.

It has been suggested that this lack of experience might be the result of a certain frugality on the part of the Canucks. Coaches with NHL experience can command a higher salary, while those without that experience might be more willing to accept a lower paycheck to get their foot in the NHL door.

That theory is supported by the reporting of Postmedia’s Patrick Johnston, who stated that the Canucks failed to land Jussi Ahokas as head coach of the Abbotsford Canucks because their contract offer was “substantially less than what he was already making in the OHL.”

This may well be true, but it could also be argued that the Canucks are following in the footsteps of the most successful recent rebuild in the NHL: that of the Montreal Canadiens.

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The Vancouver Canucks’ 2026 development camp came and went without much fanfare, which is somewhat surprising. After all, the Canucks are committed to a rebuild, and the team’s current prospects are a key part of the success or failure of that rebuild.

Perhaps it went without fanfare because there was nothing particularly surprising about the camp. Last year’s first-round pick, Braeden Cootes, looked absolutely dominant, while this year’s two first-round picks, Caleb Malhotra and Adam Novotny, also showed their quality, along with strong performances from second-round picks Brooks Rogowski and Niklas Aaram-Olsen.

But that’s what you expect from a camp like this. The Canucks’ top draft picks should stand out amongst their peers. It would be more of a story if they didn’t.

The players I’m always most interested in at development camp, on the other hand, are the unknowns: the undrafted, unsigned invitees who are not a part of the Canucks’ organization. At least, not yet.

The Canucks invited six undrafted and unsigned players to their development camp this year, two of whom are already signed to AHL contracts with the Abbotsford Canucks. While these invitees are often undrafted and unsigned for a reason, every once in a while, there’s a diamond in the rough.

Troy Stecher was once a Canucks invitee, as was Antoine Roussel. There are other stories around the NHL of players turning camp invites into NHL careers, including some legitimate stars like Mark Giordano.

That doesn’t mean any of the six invitees at the Canucks’ development camp will be the next Giordano, but it does mean it’s worth taking a look at who they are and whether they might have the potential to earn a contract from the Canucks and join their prospect system.

Let’s take a look, starting with the forwards:

Austin Brimmer - Right Wing

6’4” - 223 lbs - Oct 10, 2001 (24)
Markham, ON, Canada
RIT, NCAA

The first invitee, alphabetically, is already signed to the Abbotsford Canucks for next season: Austin Brimmer.

The 6’4” right winger is coming off a solid NCAA career where he steadily increased his role and production, finishing with 10 goals and 25 points in 36 games in his senior year with the Rochester Institute of Technology after three years with Long Island University. At RIT, he served as an alternate captain.

After RIT’s season ended, Brimmer played 13 games with the Abbotsford Canucks last season, recording one assist.

Brimmer brought some toughness to his stint in Abbotsford, recording his first professional fight in the same game he recorded his assist, dropping the gloves with Brandon Hickey of the Henderson Silver Knights. At 6’4” and 223 lbs, Brimmer certainly has the size to hold his own physically; what else does he bring to the table?

As might be expected for a power forward like Brimmer, he gets most of his offence in and around the crease.

“Great body in front of the net, causes a ton of havoc each shift battling until the whistle and searching for loose pucks,” reads one scouting report after he first committed to LIU. “Created multiple chances for himself by forcing rebounds from his screens, turning around and finding the puck quickly. Also showed a high level of skill with his ability to make quick and crafty stick plays in tight to the goalie.”

Brimmer is also a menace on the forecheck, tracking down opposing defencemen and using his body to separate them from the puck and create turnovers. His RIT highlight reel is full of crushing hits to go along with his goals and assists.

That physical element makes Brimmer immediately appealing, but you can see flashes of skill and soft hands in his video clips that hint at something more than just a bottom-six AHL forward.

That said, Brimmer has limited runway at the age of 24, so he would need to quickly show something with Abbotsford this year for any hope of an NHL future. If not, there’s still the potential for him to be an interesting middle-six winger in Abbotsford.

Connor Dale - Left Wing

6’2” - 183 lbs - Jan 29, 2005 (21)
St. Albert, AB, Canada
Tri-City Americans, WHL

Connor Dale comes with a Vancouver connection, as he played parts of two seasons with the Vancouver Giants in the WHL. He got moved around in the WHL after that, however, playing for the Calgary Hitmen, the Swift Current Broncos, and the Tri-City Americans.

Dale didn’t break out until his over-age year, where he tallied 25 goals and 60 points in 65 games, mostly with the Americans after he was claimed off waivers.

You have to wonder if the Swift Current Broncos have any regrets about that. Dale started the season with the Broncos and recorded five points in five games, but he was released from the team and placed on waivers when the Broncos decided to go with three other overage players.

CHL teams are limited to three spots for overage players (20-year-olds), and the Broncos opted to keep local Swift Currentian Anthony Wilson, import Czech defenceman Marek Rocak, and goaltender Joey Rocha.

Dale went on to score 23 goals and 55 points in 60 games to finish second in scoring on the Americans. Wilson finished the year with 15 goals and 38 points in 61 games, Rocak suffered a tendon tear in his knee that limited him to just 16 games, and Rocha had a 5.02 GAA and .872 save percentage in 25 games before the Broncos waived him in December and he signed with the Junior A Weyburn Red Wings. They might have been better off keeping Dale.

The winger won over Tri-City fans with his speed and hustle, regularly creating breakaways out of thin air. He also used that quick acceleration to burst past defenders on give-and-gos, creating space off the rush or off the cycle in the offensive zone.

Dale pairs his quick feet with quick hands, giving him the ability to finish passes and rebounds in tight around the net. He also has decent finish from further out, with the ability to beat goaltenders with his wristshot off the rush.

The question with a late bloomer like Dale, of course, is why did he bloom so late? He had a solid overage season, but he had just 17 points in 49 games the year before. Was his breakout season a result of simply being older than most of his opponents?

Still, a 6’2” forward who can skate like Dale is well worth a longer look, making him a smart invite to the Canucks’ development camp. Dale is heading to Merrimack College in the fall, where he’ll look to prove he can continue to produce offence against stiffer competition. If he can, he’ll likely have NHL suitors beyond just the Canucks.

Bennett Schimek - Right Wing

6’0” - 187 lbs - Apr 15, 2003 (23)
Mendota Heights, MN, USA
Arizona State University, NCAA

Bennett Schimek could be the invitee with the best chance of an NHL future simply because he’s already proven he can produce in the AHL.

Schimek went undrafted despite a decent 36 points in 39 games for the Sioux City Musketeers in his draft year. He followed that up with a similarly decent 20 points in 37 games in his freshman year at Providence College.

Those points were hard-won, as his effort surpassed his natural talent.

“He’s not exceptionally skilled — his handling, shooting, and passing all grade out as below-average on our linear 1-to-9 scale — but the work rate, the fearlessness, and the

propensity for placing himself at the right place at the right time have combined to make him an effective middle-six forward in college,” reads Schimek’s scouting report from Elite Prospects after his freshman year.

That hard work led to major improvements for Schimek, especially after a switch to Arizona State University in his Junior year. He put up 37 goals in 35 games that year, then finished just outside the top ten in NCAA scoring as a Senior this past season, tallying 43 points in 35 games.

Along the way, Schimek added more skill to his game, improved his skating, and became a reliable two-way player.

“He spots teammates with quick passes off the wall, works give-and-gos in transition, and really excels at making the connective pass (get a puck inside space, immediately move it to an open teammate in more space),” reads one scouting report from Elite Prospects’ Mitchell Brown. “Not much shiftiness or quickness overall, but he has physical skills (early contact going into the wall) and defensive value (especially on the backcheck).”

Sure, it helped that he had legitimate NHL prospects as teammates at Arizona, such as Calgary Flames first-round pick Cullen Potter, but then Schimek continued to produce on a PTO with the Abbotsford Canucks.

Schimek signed a one-year deal with Abbotsford that starts in the 2026-27 season, then put up 5 goals and 11 points in 13 games to finish off the 2025-26 season.

It’s understandable that Schimek’s game translated so well to professional hockey. His hard-grinding, high-motor, get-to-the-hard-areas style is tailor-made for the AHL, and could translate to a bottom-six role in the NHL.

Even with the caveat that Schimek is already 23 — a little older than the typical AHL rookie — there’s good reason to keep a close eye on Schimek this season. If he quickly establishes himself in a top-six role in Abbotsford this season, he could earn an NHL contract in short order.

Nate Tivey - Left Defence

6’6” - 205 lbs - Mar 27, 2004 (22)
Burlington, ON, Canada
Quinnipiac University, NCAA

Nate Tivey stands out for a very obvious reason: he’s enormous. The 6’6” defenceman was the tallest player on his team last season, towering over his Quinnipiac teammate, Anthony Cipollone, by a full foot.

Beyond that obvious attribute, however, Tivey has other laudable attributes. He pairs his reach with great defensive reads and solid mobility, making him a nightmare for opposing forwards.

“He defends better than 99% of the league — great footwork for a big man, unsolvable range and great stick and body layering,” said Elite Prospects’ Hadi Kalakeche in one scouting report from his 2024-25 QMJHL season. “About as sure a free-agent signing as you can get.”

Tivey also loves to play a physical game, clearing out the front of the net and erasing rushes with big hits.

Tivey’s size and reach aid his defensive game, but he’s not just a stay-at-home defenceman. He’s calm and sure on the breakout, can rush the puck up the ice himself with his long strides, and knows how to keep the play alive in the offensive zone and when to activate into space to create chances.

“Another phenomenal game from Tivey, who continues to look like an NHLer in the making,” said Kalakeche in another scouting report. “Fluid on-puck, deceptive on breakouts and highly accurate on his exit passes, Tivey consistently made controlled plays and helped his team maintain possession.”

Tivey put up 40 points in 63 games in his overage year in the QMJHL, good for second in scoring on a truly terrible Saint John Sea Dogs team. He followed that up with a decent freshman season with Quinnipiac, tallying 8 points in 38 games in a third-pairing role behind two NHL prospects on the left side.

There’s still a lot that has to go right for Tivey to make it to the NHL, but there’s clearly some potential in his game thanks to his size and poise with the puck. He was a smart invite for the Canucks as the lone defenceman invitee.

Nils Roberts Maurins - Goaltender

6’4” - 176 lbs - Sep 6, 2006 (19)
Riga, Latvia
Omaha Lancers, USHL

It’s interesting to note that the two youngest invitees to the Canucks’ development camp are both goaltenders. Nils Roberts Maurins is one of two 19-year-old goaltender invitees on the verge of turning 20, which makes one wonder if the Canucks are looking to add another goaltender to their system to join Alexei Medvedev and Dmitri Ivchenko.

Maurins certainly has the size that the Canucks like in net at 6’4” and is respected enough to have represented Latvia at the 2026 World Junior Championships.

That could be where he captured the Canucks’ attention, as Maurins had an outstanding performance against Team Canada, stopping 36 of 38 shots in a 2-1 overtime loss, with both of Canada’s games coming on the power play.

While Maurins is capable of big-game performances, he has his issues with consistency. Maurins finished the World Juniors with an .879 save percentage after giving up six goals to Sweden.

Maurins’ numbers with the Omaha Lancers in the USHL didn’t look particularly impressive either, as his .886 save percentage was 24th among the 37 USHL goaltenders who played at least ten games, but that may be more of a result of the Lancers’ overall struggles as a team.

“Maurins has quietly been one of the best goaltending stories in the USHL this season,” said Elite Prospects’ Sean Shapiro, noting that the Lancers have been “woefully bad.”

Clearly, there’s some potential in Maurins’ game and he was a favourite of several scouts in the public sphere in his draft year in 2024.

“He has an attractive foundation to work with,” said Sportsnet’s Jason Bukala. “He’s tall, athletic, and competitive. It’s going to take patience, but drafting a goalie from Europe allows the NHL club four years of development time before having to make a decision to sign the prospect. Roberts Maurins is worth the risk.”

“With the size that he has, Roberts-Maurins prefers to stay deeper in his net and doesn’t make aggressive moves outside of the crease very often,” reads his 2024 scouting report from Elite Prospects. “He tries to limit the amount of skating he has to do, and focuses on setting his feet rather than taking depth. He succeeds with this game plan, because he is one of the better goaltenders available when it comes to puck-tracking.”

Goaltending is the toughest position to evaluate in hockey, as a player’s numbers can be drastically influenced by his environment. Maurins’ ability to come through with strong performances while facing a heavy workload should not be overlooked, but he has to develop more consistency and develop more of an understanding of when to be aggressive and rely less on his size while deep in his net.

Anders Miller - Goaltender

6’2” - 190 lbs - Oct 4, 2006 (19)
Anchorage, AK, USA
Everett Silvertips, WHL

After failing to get selected in his draft year with the Calgary Hitmen, Anders Miller did a lot of winning last season. First, after a trade, he won the starting role with the Everett Silvertips, wresting the job from Raiden Legall with a stunning .920 save percentage.

Miller went on to win 29 of 33 games with the Silvertips in the regular season, including four shutouts. Then he dominated in the WHL playoffs, putting up a .932 save percentage and winning 16 of 18 games en route to winning the WHL Championship.

The only thing Miller didn’t win was the Memorial Cup — he won 3 of 5 games and got the Silvertips to the final, but conceded five goals to the Kitchener Rangers in the championship game to finish as the runners-up.

That one blemish barely marred Miller’s season and he won over a lot of scouts with his play.

“Miller is a deeply technical goaltender with strong form in his butterfly and with his rebound control,” reads his scouting report from Elite Prospects. “He’s really strong on his posts, boasting a good seal in the RVH and transitioning well in and out of the position. His skating is a strong point, with good agility and footspeed that allow him to cut down on angles.”

At the same time, Miller has a lot to work on, which is why he was once again left undrafted this year. Elite Prospects noted that a change in his stance this season caused some struggles with his glove hand and that some inefficiencies in his movements could lead to issues with translating his game to upper levels if he doesn’t make adjustments.

If he can fix those elements, Miller has NHL potential.

“All in all, Anders Miller is a well-rounded goaltender with a strong mental game, an impressive technical foundation, and good mobility,” said Elite Prospects. “As a result, Miller should get a look late in the draft and, with those fixes, projects as high as an NHL backup should he make the necessary changes.”

Here’s an odd thing: the Vancouver Canucks have gone two full seasons without a right-shot centre in their lineup, with one very brief exception.

Last season, all of the Canucks’ centres were sinister in the classic sense: they all shot left-handed. Elias Pettersson, Filip Chytil, Marco Rossi, Teddy Blueger, Max Sasson, Aatu Räty, and David Kämpf all shoot left. Centres who only played a few games like Lukas Reichel, Ty Mueller, and Nils Åman, shoot left. Even Drew O’Connor, who filled in at centre once in a while, shoots left.

The season before that, you can add J.T. Miller and Pius Suter to the left-shooting centre pile.

To find the last time the Canucks had a right-shot centre in the lineup, you have to go back to the 2023-24 season, when the Canucks had Sam Lafferty to start the year, then added Elias Lindholm later in the season to give the team a comparative plethora of right-shot centres.

That’s a bit unusual, as teams typically like to have a mix of left and right-shot centres in the lineup. There are debatable benefits to having that type of mix, but one benefit that is undeniable is on faceoffs, especially in the defensive zone and particularly on the penalty kill. That’s where strong-side and weak-side faceoffs can be crucial.

A right-shot centre has his strong side on the right side of the ice and vice versa for a left-shot centre. This is partly because a right-shot centre trying to win a defensive zone faceoff on his backhand on the right side is going to naturally pull the puck toward the boards, away from his own net.

It’s even been pointed out that the side of the faceoff dot from which a linesman drops the puck — nearest to the boards — gives a centre on his strong side more room to maneuver.

The nearest thing the Canucks have had to a right-shot centre the past two seasons is Aatu Räty, who flips over his stick to take faceoffs right-handed when he would otherwise be on his weak side. This actually proves the point that strong and weak-side faceoffs matter, because otherwise, why would he bother?

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What does Free Agent Frenzy look like for a rebuilding team? We’ll find out today.

The Vancouver Canucks won’t be big-game hunting on Canada Day, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be busy looking for character veterans to help build the team’s culture or for younger players who could be a fit for the timeline of the rebuild.

Follow along in the Live Blog and, if you’re a paid subscriber, you can join me in today’s Live Chat:

Aside from the Live Chat, it’s the usual Meta Live Blog Spectacular here at Pass it to Bulis, where I’ll be commenting on free agent signings, but also on the meta element: how is Sportsnet covering the day, what video games are my kids playing, how’s the World Cup going?

Let’s go.

3:53 pm | Okay, okay, one last update to the live blog.

The Canucks have officially signed Jamie Oleksiak, adding the big defenceman on a two-year contract worth $5 million per year.

That’s a higher AAV for Oleksiak than I might have liked, but a two-year term is very reasonable. That immediately fills in the gap left by Marcus Pettersson at a cheaper price for less term and Oleksiak can potentially be moved in the future.

Solid day’s work for Johnson.

Heartbreaking loss for Senegal against Belgium. Tough to see it end on a VAR penalty.

3:00 pm | Unbelievable. Senegal had control up 2-0, but two quick goals from Belgium in the space of three minutes have it all tied up just as the game goes into injury time.

Sports, man. They’re good, sometimes.

Speaking of good sports, Ryan Johnson seems to have done all right in his first free agency, though a rebuilding team that doesn’t need to compete for top free agents is playing a little bit on easy mode.

Johnson traded a veteran for a first-round pick, added some leadership on defence, signed a bottom-six centre, and picked up some depth for his AHL squad. And he did it all with one-year contracts, avoiding handcuffing himself for the future.

We’re still waiting on the rumoured acquisition of Jamie Oleksiak, but I think we’re going to wrap up the live blog here. The Toronto Blue Jays are up 9-2 in the eighth inning, Belgium and Senegal are going to extra time, and I ate some leftover spaghetti.

I call that a successful Canada Day.

Thanks for joining me.

2:25 pm | We’ve got the return on the Marcus Pettersson trade. The Rangers are sending the Canucks a first-round pick!

A 2030 first-round pick.

I mean, we wanted the Canucks to take a patient, long-term approach, right? You don’t get much more long-term than accepting a draft pick four years in the future in return for one of your veterans.

2:15 pm | Senegal has stunned Belgium with another goal, taking a 2-0 lead on a fantastic finish by Ismaila Sarr.

I’m realizing I haven’t had lunch, as I’ve been waiting on confirmation of the return from the Rangers for Marcus Pettersson.

Only word right now is that it’s for a draft pick.

What’s the draft pick? When? Who knows?

I don’t mind that there’s not a player coming back in the trade. The Canucks need to take a patient, long-term view in their rebuild.

And I need to stop being patient and go put some food in my belly.

1:33 pm | Another stunning start in the World Cup round of 32, as 15th-ranked Senegal opened the scoring against 10th-ranked Belgium. Sure, there’s not a huge gap between the ranking of the two teams, but Belgium were heavily favoured heading into the match, with Senegal finishing third in their group.

Perhaps Senegal should have been given more credit with how dangerous they’ve been in the attack and the difficulty of their group.

In Blue Jays news, they’ve taken a 5-0 lead in the third inning, with Sean Keys hitting his first career home run. Marvelous.

Meanwhile, Vincent Trocheck has been traded to the Utah Mammoth, with the New York Rangers getting Sean Durzi, Cole Beaudoin, and a third-round pick in return.

1:17 pm | The Canucks may already have their Marcus Pettersson replacement lined up, as Rick Dhaliwal reports they’re looking to sign 33-year-old LHD Jamie Oleksiak.

Oleksiak has the size the Canucks are looking for at 6’7” and he’s had strong defensive results at 5-on-5, though he has struggled on the penalty kill.

Assuming he’s a one-year deal like the rest of the Canucks’ free agent signings today, it’s easy to see the appeal. They shed the long-term commitment to Pettersson and make a short-term commitment to Oleksiak, who could be a great fit and/or could be traded later in the season.

1:05 pm | Patrik Allvin acquired Marcus Pettersson using the first-round pick he acquired from the New York Rangers for J.T. Miller.

Now, Pettersson will join Miller in New York, as the Canucks are trading the lanky defenceman to the Rangers.

No word on the return just yet.

The potential issue with trading Pettersson right now is that he’s a good candidate to bounce back with Adam Foote gone. The entire defence corps struggled under Foote and Pettersson has proven himself as a legitimate top-four defenceman in the NHL.

It’s a sell-low situation, when they could potentially sell high at this year’s trade deadline.

1:00 pm | The Canucks might not be done for the day, as there are rumours that Ryan Johnson is working on trading Marcus Pettersson to the New York Rangers.

But they might be done with their free agent signings.

The Canucks made four signings today, each for just one year, suggesting they don’t want to make any long-term commitments as they embark on their rebuild.

FORWARDS
Paul Cotter, 26-year-old Centre - one year, $2.15 million
Akil Thomas, 26-year-old Centre - one year, $900,000
Trey Fix-Wolansky, 27-year-old Winger - one year, $900,000

DEFENCE
Luke Schenn, 36-year-old RHD - one year, $2.25 million

Kevin Stenlund, another player on the Canucks’ radar, has signed with the Utah Mammoth for $2.75 million on a one-year deal. There have been a handful of other signings, nothing major.

There’s a Darnell Nurse trade to the San Jose Sharks brewing, with Shakir Mukhamadullin expected to go to the Edmonton Oilers. The Sharks needed defence, but they’re adding two veterans with pretty terrible analytical profiles in Nurse and Jacob Trouba. Not sure how that’s going to work out for them.

The Blue Jays put up one run in the first inning, but left the bases loaded, which is disappointing.

12:30 pm | Sportsnet’s coverage of NHL free agenct has ended and the Toronto Blue Jays’ Canada Day game against the New York Mets has begun.

This might disappoint some Vancouverites, but I am a Blue Jays fan. They won back-to-back World Series when I was eight and nine, which is prime fan-for-the-rest-of-your-life age.

I haven’t been able to follow the Blue Jays as closely over the past while, what with covering the Canucks full time and raising three kids, but I’ve been watching more games at work at Cyclone Taylor Sports in Vancouver.

And I just got a new Blue Jays hat that I am quite fond of.

Trey Fix-Wolansky, 27-year-old Winger

12:18 pm | Trey Fix-Wolansky is a stellar signing for the Abbotsford Canucks.

The 5’7” winger is a top-tier scorer in the AHL, with four straight seasons with 26+ goals. He had 31 goals and 55 points in 72 games for the Hartford Wolf Pack last season.

He also has a pinch of NHL experience, with 6 points in 26 games, but his size is a limiting factor at the NHL level. Abbotsford fans are going to absolutely love him, though.

His two-way contract reflects that value, as he’s signed for $900,000 at the NHL level and a whopping $525,000 at the AHL level. That’s a high-end two-way contract.

Meanwhile, in other somewhat Canucks-adjacent news, Andrei Kuzmenko has signed with the Pittsburgh Penguins for one year at $5 million. Could he score 30 goals on Crosby’s wing? Maybe!

12:10 pm | Vincent Desharnais got a four-year, $16.8 million contract from the Washington Capitals.

I repeat, Desharnais got four years at $4.2 million per year from the Capitals.

Wow.

Akil Thomas, 26-year-old Centre

12:05 pm | Akil Thomas gets a two-way deal worth $900,000 in the NHL and $375,000 in the AHL. That’s a pretty high salary for the AHL, but Thomas is a solid AHL player.

The 26-year-old centre had 102 points in 63 OHL games in his post-draft year, but took a little longer to find his footing as a professional. He had 46 points in 64 AHL games two years ago with the Ontario Reign, and had 22 points in 39 AHL games last season split between the Reign and Springfield Thunderbirds.

The signing comes not long after I had a conversation with PITB co-founder Harrison Mooney about the lack of Black centres in the NHL. He had misread a scouting report on Canucks fifth-round pick Connor Davis and thought he was a centre, and excitedly texted me about the Canucks drafting a Black centre.

Unfortunately, Davis plays right wing. But it led to him pointing out the lack of Black centres in NHL history and how many Black players end up on the wing, even if they were drafted as centres. Quinton Byfield is a notable example. He has played centre for the Los Angeles Kings, but seems to always be the first candidate to be pushed to the wing when they shake up their lines.

It seems akin to the NFL and Black quarterbacks. That’s a long story that is beyond the scope of a live blog. But it’s hard to ignore that Black players have struggled to make inroads into the NHL as a whole, and have rarely played at centre, seen to be the most important forward position, like how the quarterback position is viewed in football.

Thomas is a natural centre, though he has also played on the wing at times. When he played NHL games for the Kings, he was moved around a lot, sometimes playing centre, sometimes playing right wing. The Kings praised his versatility, for being able to play anywhere, but maybe he should just be at centre.

The Canucks could definitely use some depth at centre.

11:40 am | We’ve got some action on the Canucks front.

The Canucks have signed some top-tier names. Literally, their names are great: 26-year-old centre Akil Thomas and 27-year-old winger Trey Fix-Wolansky.

Both are more likely to have an impact on the Abbotsford Canucks, but could get into games with Vancouver.

Meanwhile, Teddy Blueger is out. He’s signing with the Toronto Maple Leafs on a two-year deal worth $2.5 million per year.

There was a case to be made for the Canucks to re-sign Teddy Blueger. I know, because I made that case. He showed a lot of leadership in the second half of last season, both on and off the ice.

But with the change in management in Vancouver and Ryan Johnson emphasizing the importance of every player having a clearly defined role, perhaps Blueger didn’t quite fit Johnson’s vision.

Besides, the Leafs have been busy in free agency, with John Chayka looking to put his stamp on the team, and Blueger will get an opportunity to play for a team pushing for the playoffs again.

11:20 am | More signings.

Connor Clifton, who the Canucks reportedly had interest in, has signed a two-year deal worth $2.25 million per year with the Boston Bruins.

Colton Sissons, whose name sounds superficially similar to Connor Clifton, has signed a two-year deal worth $4.25 million per year with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Bruins have also signed Jordan Harris to a one-year deal.

11:05 am | It’s all over. No, not the free agent frenzy; England has defeated DR Congo 2-1 to move on to the round of 16 in the World Cup.

Big news: Sergei Bobrovsky is signing a three-year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

In other goaltending news, the Edmonton Oilers are trading for 24-year-old Devon Levi from the Buffalo Sabres. Levi has legitimate talent, but hasn’t been able to break through to full-time action in the NHL, perhaps because he’s undersized for a goaltender at 6’0”.

The Sabres are getting a third-round pick, which is a pretty cheap acquisition cost, but I’m not sure Levi moves the needle for the Oilers.

10:54 am | Heartbreaking for DR Congo. Harry Kane does what Harry Kane does and rips the go-ahead goal into the top of the net to put England go up 2-1 in the 86th minute.

Game isn’t over yet, but they’re in trouble now.

In the NHL, Jacob Trouba is signing with the San Jose Sharks, which adds a physical veteran to their blue line, even if his game has been in decline. Big signing for the Sharks: four years, $8.25 million per year.

The Sharks have a ton of young talent; spending some money on Trouba makes a lot of sense for them, though he isn’t the player he once was.

In other news, I’ve got half of my Beaver Buzz left. I might be nursing it along too slowly.

Luke Schenn, 36-year-old RHD

10:42 am | Big news!

England has tied up their game against DR Congo, which sits at 1-1. Tough for DR Congo, who have played valiantly, especially their keeper, but they can still potentially get the go-ahead goal or take the game to penalties.

Oh yeah, big news on the Canucks side of things too.

The Canucks have signed veteran defenceman Luke Schenn to a one-year deal worth $2.25 million.

Like the Cotter signing, there’s minimal risk on a one-year contract, and Schenn brings a lot of character and leadership to a young Canucks blue line.

Lots to like here, even if Schenn doesn’t have the most positive effect on the ice anymore outside of the penalty kill. Off the ice, Schenn is a gem and ought to be a boon in the locker room.

Paul Cotter, 26-year-old Centre

10:35 am | Paul Cotter gets a one-year contract from the Canucks for $2.15 million.

From what I’m seeing out of New Jersey, Cotter is a speedy fourth-line winger with some really nice hands, but doesn’t have the hockey sense to do anything with his skill.

Honestly, $2.15 million seems like a lot for a player who had 15 points last season and some very underwhelming underlying numbers.

But there’s little risk on a one-year deal, and it’s not like the salary cap is going to be an issue for the Canucks any time soon.

At 6’2”, Cotter certainly fits the identity that Ryan Johnson signalled at the draft: size and speed. And perhaps there’s some upside here: Cotter had 16 goals with the Devils two seasons ago and 13 with the Vegas Golden Knights in his rookie year.

Maybe there’s an opportunity for Cotter to put his skillset to better use with the Canucks and earn a larger role. As is, he’s fine as a fourth-line forward.

10:24 am | The first Canucks signing of the day!

The Canucks have signed Paul Cotter, 26-year-old winger from the New Jersey Devils.

He had 15 points in 79 games last season.

I apologize, I know essentially nothing about Paul Cotter. It’s research time!

10:20 am | The Congolese keeper, Lionel Mpasi, has been absolutely phenomenal in net against England. Some of the best saves of the tournament, absolutely stunning.

As for NHL free agency, a couple more signings.

Noel Acciari joins the other side of the Battle of Pennsylvania, signing with the Philadelphia Flyers.

Stuart Skinner signs with the Winnipeg Jets, which is a surprise to me. What does this mean for Connor Hellebuyck?

As for the Canucks, Rick Dhaliwal is reporting that they’re interested in Luke Schenn. Join the club, Canucks.

10:07 am | More signings, none from the Canucks. Which is fine.

Jack Roslovic is heading to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Mike Benning signed with the Calgary Flames.

Declan Carlile joins the Pittsburgh Penguins on a two-year deal.

Noah Juulsen gets two years from the Colorado Avalanche.

Jeffrey Viel gets a five-year deal from the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Dennis Gilbert signs a one-year deal with the Buffalo Sabres.

Ross Johnston signs for three years with the St. Louis Blues.

Viktor Arvidsson gets two years, $5 million per year from the Detroit Red Wings.

I am whelmed.

9:53 am | DR Congo is holding onto this one-goal lead against England, if only just barely, with some big saves off the line. But they’re also giving England fits with speed on the counterattack and with a surprisingly aggressive press up the field, making it tough for England to move the ball out of their own defensive third cleanly.

There was a moment of controversy when Harry Kane went down in the box after a slide from the Congolese keeper, but the referee clearly signalled that it was a dive. It went to VAR — no penalty given.

The game goes into the half with DR Congo still up 1-0. This has the potential to be a major upset, as Congo is ranked 35th in the world; England is ranked 4th.

Hopefully, Canada takes some inspiration from that as they prepare to take on the 6th-ranked Morocco.

As for free agency, teams have been busy.

Jaden Schwartz is signing with the Colorado Avalanche. Seems like a good fit for Colorado at three years, $3.25 million per year.

The Kings, still very active, have now signed Corey Perry. My goodness. Perry is nearly as old as I am!

Ian Cole won’t be coming to the Canucks, as he’s signing with the Chicago Blackhawks, who also need an infusion of veteran leadership.

According to Rick Dhaliwal, the Canucks tried to sign Cole, but he ultimately chose Chicago.

The New York Rangers traded for goaltender Joonas Korpisalo from the Boston Bruins, allowing the Bruins to avoid putting former Canuck Michael DiPietro on waivers and keeping him as the team’s backup.

9:37 am | Signings coming quickly now.

Mason Marchment is going to the San Jose Sharks for a reported five years, $7 million per year. Big veteran signing for a young team.

Goaltender Samuel Ersson is signing with the Ottawa Senators to back up Linus Ullmark.

Cole Smith, an effective two-way forward, is heading to the Chicago Blackhawks, as they look to become a little bit more difficult to play against.

As for me, I’ve signed Golden Island Korean BBQ Pork Jerky to be my snack of choice for this free agent frenzy. They had a sample at Costco a while back and I was hooked, then it was on sale when I stopped by Costco this week.

I am not being sponsored by Golden Island, but I am open to it. Hit me up, Golden Island!

9:30 am | The Los Angeles Kings have been busy. After acquiring Erik Haula, they’re also adding Mats Zuccarello and Erik Gustafsson.

At a time when it seems like the Kings should be looking to get younger after Anze Kopitar’s retirement, they’re instead getting older. Gustafsson is 34, Haula’s 35, and Zuccarello is 38.

9:22 am | One thing you’re likely to hear from Canucks fans and commentators is that the Canucks should look to sign players who they can potentially flip for assets at the trade deadline.

One thing I heard from someone who works for an NHL team is that shouldn’t be the goal at all. Instead, you need to look for good players that you want on your team. If that player happens to perform well and you end up trading him for good value, great, but acquiring players with the intent to trade them rarely works well.

He might be onto something. Part of the justification I heard from people about the Evander Kane acquisition is that the Canucks could flip him at the deadline for better than the fourth-round pick they traded to get him.

How’d that work out?

9:10 am | We’ve got our first action of the day!

DR Congo opened the scoring against England in the round of 32!

Oh, sorry, there are also a couple of signings in the NHL. Erik Haula is heading to the Los Angeles Kings and Tevor van Riemsdyk is en route to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Also, Elliotte Friedman is wearing a double-breasted suit. Bold.

9:00 am | Here we go. NHL free agency is officially open. Just how active will the Canucks be?

In the Jim Benning years, even when they claimed they were rebuilding, free agency always seemed to put that to a lie, as each offseason only really made sense if you saw it through the lens of them trying to make the playoffs next season.

I’ve got a Beaver Buzz Root Beer going, mini wheats in my cereal bowl, and the sounds of my kids playing Splatoon in the living room.

On Saturday, Ryan Johnson made his first-ever trade as general manager of the Vancouver Canucks, swapping late-round draft picks with the Ottawa Senators.

That trade didn’t exactly open the floodgates, but it at least opened the faucet, as Johnson made two more trades on Monday ahead of the opening of free agency on July 1.

First, Johnson sent Nils Höglander to the Nashville Predators for a third-round pick in 2029. Then, he replaced Höglander as an undersized winger by acquiring veteran forward Brendan Gallagher from the Montreal Canadiens for future considerations.

Höglander to Predators for a third-round pick

The trade return for Nils Höglander is interesting. It’s not exactly surprising that Höglander only returned a third-round pick, given his struggles the past couple of seasons, but it’s strange to see that pick delayed until 2029. The Canucks definitely need to keep acquiring draft picks, but 2029 is around when the Canucks will hopefully be transitioning out of a rebuild.

Still, any additional draft capital is welcome for a rebuilding team, as such a pick could be used in the draft or as part of a trade for a prospect or player in the future.

It’s tough to see Höglander leave town, as he was one of the few draft successes outside of the first round for the Canucks; at least, one of the few that was still on the Canucks roster.

It’s also a shame because it felt like Höglander rarely got the opportunities he deserved.

When Höglander set a career high in goals in the 2023-24 season, it came while primarily playing on the fourth line. He was 11th among Canucks forwards in average ice time at 5-on-5 and barely played on the power play.

His 24 goals that season came entirely at 5-on-5, and he ranked 10th in the entire NHL in 5-on-5 goals. Given his limited ice time, it’s not surprising that he ranked even higher in goalscoring rate, finishing third in the NHL in 5-on-5 goals per 60 minutes behind only Auston Matthews and Zach Hyman.

Sure, Höglander had a wholly unsustainable 20.0% shooting percentage that season, but it still felt like he had earned a larger opportunity. That’s particularly the case when you look at the chemistry he frequently showed with Elias Pettersson in the offensive zone. It felt like there might be a fit for Höglander on Pettersson’s wing.

But, while Höglander got occasional shots in the Canucks’ top six, those opportunities never lasted long.

Part of that is Höglander’s scoring dried up. After his career year in 2023-24, Höglander had just 8 goals and 25 points in 72 games in 2024-25. Then, last season, a preseason injury derailed his start, and he managed just 2 goals and 5 points in 38 games after his return.

Höglander might have been given a longer leash to work through his scoring droughts, however, if he had been better at the other end of the ice.

That was the biggest issue for Höglander. While his defensive analytics weren’t always terrible — in fact, they were sometimes quite good — he had a tendency to make big, noticeable, costly mistakes in the defensive zone that were hard for coaches to ignore.

Höglander struggled to earn the trust of a series of coaches, as Bruce Boudreau, Rick Tocchet, and Adam Foote each found reasons to limit his ice time and keep him in the bottom six, if not the press box or AHL. At some point, the responsibility falls on the player.

It seemed clear that Höglander needed a fresh start. Hopefully, he’ll get a real opportunity with the Predators, because he’s about as likable a player as the Canucks have had in recent years.

There’s an amazing story to be told about Höglander and how he worked his way from one of the tiniest towns in Sweden all the way to the NHL. If I can still get a chance to interview Höglander, maybe I’ll still get a chance to tell it.

Gallagher to the Canucks for future considerations

For weeks, there has been buzz that Brendan Gallagher was heading to Vancouver, to the point that Gallagher himself commented on it after the Montreal Canadiens were knocked out of the playoffs — a playoff run where Gallagher played just three games.

“That’s an opportunity that’s there,” said Gallagher about possibly heading to the Canucks. “I’ll sit down with my wife and figure out what’s best for our family and you go forward…But certainly, Vancouver, it would be a great place.”

Given his limited usage by the Canadiens this past season, it was clear that Gallagher would be heading elsewhere this offseason. His modified no-trade clause gave him some amount of control, and it seemed like the Canadiens wanted to do right by the veteran forward, who has previously played his entire 14-year career in Montreal.

Vancouver was a preferred destination for Gallagher, who has deep roots in the hockey community here. While he was born in Edmonton, Gallagher grew up in Tsawwassen, played his minor hockey in Delta, and then spent four years with the Vancouver Giants in the WHL. His father, Ian Gallagher, is the president, as well as the strength and conditioning coach, of the Delta Hockey Academy.

Gallagher also makes a lot of sense as a veteran culture carrier for the rebuilding Canucks.

While the 34-year-old Gallagher has lost a step, no one has ever questioned his effort or his work ethic. He played a role as a mentor in the Canadiens rebuild, giving him a front-row seat to the most successful rebuild the NHL has seen in years.

So, even if he’s far removed from being the 30-goal scorer he once was, Gallagher can still play an important role for the Canucks.

The Canucks shouldn’t, however, pay a high price for that role, and they managed to avoid doing so.

The Canadiens will be retaining 50% of Gallagher’s contract, which is heading into its final year at a cap hit of $6.5 million. The only return for the Canadiens is future considerations, which typically means an AHL-caliber player will be heading Montreal’s way at some point.

It might have been preferable for the Canucks to receive a draft pick to take on the full freight of Gallagher’s contract — the salary cap isn’t going to be an issue for the Canucks for a while — but the Canadiens were likely reluctant to part with an asset, especially since they might have gotten a more legitimate return by trading Gallagher to another team.

At least the Canucks avoided parting with an asset of their own to acquire Gallagher. It’s a fine piece of business by Johnson, even if fans might be waiting for him to do something more significant.

The Vancouver Canucks did what everyone expected with their first pick of the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, taking Caleb Malhotra third overall.

Then they took advantage of a sliding prospect, nabbing Adam Novotny with the 24th-overall pick.

The Canucks have eight more picks in rounds two through seven. Who will they take on day two of the draft? Refresh often to follow along with PITB throughout the morning and comment down below to add your thoughts on the Canucks’ 2026 draft class.

2:20 pm | That wraps things up for the Canucks at the 2026 NHL Entry Draft. Here are their nine picks this year, with links to what I’ve written about them:

1st Round
3 | Caleb Malhotra - 6’2” Centre
24 | Adam Novotny - 6’1” Left Wing
2nd Round
33 | Brooks Rogowski - 6’7” Centre
41 | Niklas Aaram-Olsen - 6’1” Right Wing
3rd Round
78 | Dmitri Ivchenko - 6’3” Goaltender
4th Round
97 | Yaroslav Bryzgalov - 6’4” Centre
5th Round
129 | Connor Davis - 6’0” Right Wing
6th Round
176 | Lucian Bernat - 6’4” Right Wing
184 | Samuel Eriksson - 6’5” Defenceman

The theme of the draft is obvious: size. Connor Davis is the smallest prospect they drafted, and he’s still 6’0”. Rogowski is a monster at 6’7” and the one defenceman they picked is listed at 6’6” by some sources.

Overall, it looks like a solid draft class for the Canucks, with their first two rounds looking particularly promising. Malhotra has the potential to be a foundational piece for the rebuild, Novotny has top-six upside, Rogowski could be a unicorn of a power forward, and Aaram-Olsen might be the most exciting player in this Canucks’ draft class with his speed and scoring ability.

I’m a little bit uncertain about the two overage picks in the fourth and fifth rounds, but they took a couple of interesting swings with their final two picks in the sixth round and added another promising goaltender to their system. The draft was a little bit light on defencemen for my tastes, but the goal is to pick the best players available — filling in needs can come later.

That’s it for the live blog this time around. Thanks for following along!

Samuel Eriksson - 184th overall

2:01 pm | In a draft that was top-heavy with top-tier blueliners, it took the Canucks until their final pick to finally select a defenceman: Samuel Eriksson.

It’s a pick that represents good value late in the sixth round, as there are those in the public sphere who had Eriksson ranked higher than 186th overall, such as Ryan Kennedy at The Hockey News (59th overall), Jason Bukala at Sportsnet (84th overall), and Elite Prospects (144th overall).

Eriksson has limited offensive upside, but has some real defensive chops thanks to his size, reach, and mindset. The left-shot defenceman is 6’5” and plays a stay-at-home game that makes life difficult for opposing forwards.

“The colossal frame plays the main role in Eriksson’s potential NHL projection,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “He has an outrageous wingspan and impressive defensive length, making it very difficult for opponents to escape him once he traps them along the boards.”

There’s intelligence to how Eriksson uses his size, with a knack for angling opponents into the boards and disrupting plays in front of the net without taking penalties — he had just 18 penalty minutes last season.

“Primarily a shutdown option, he forces dump-ins and uncontrolled play when going up against the rush, showing solid gap-control and smart angling to direct attackers to the boards, where he finishes them with deft stickwork and menacing bodychecks,” reads a scouting report from Upside Hockey. “He is energetic and physical, defends the net-front with vigour, and is a bit mean at times.”

Eriksson is also a cool customer, with scouts praising his calmness and poise.

“He’s big and stays calm, whether he has the puck or he’s defending,” said Elite Prospects’ Lassi Alanen in one report. “He doesn’t overcommit when defending the rush, doing a good job at keeping his weight centered and gapping up aggressively enough to force dump-ins while never getting beaten cleanly despite not having skating as a strength.”

Eriksson’s sound defensive game got him into one SHL game and onto Sweden’s roster at the world Under-18 Championships despite limited offensive production in the U20 Nationell — 3 goals and 6 points in 32 games.

That doesn’t mean Eriksson is useless with the puck; he’s just at his best when he keeps it simple with a good first pass on the breakout. He also has a bomb of a slap shot from the point, though that’s a weapon that might be difficult for him to find time and space to use at higher levels.

The next step for Eriksson is to improve his mobility, which will help him with retrievals and gap control. He’ll also need to develop his puck skills.

If he can take those next steps in his development, Eriksson projects as a bottom-pairing, penalty-killing defenceman, with a solid shutdown game. There’s value there at this point in the draft.

Lucian Bernat - 176th overall

1:02 pm | Barring a trade, Lucian Bernat and Samuel Eriksson were the final picks for the Canucks in the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, as they traded their seventh-round pick to the New York Rangers as part of the deal to acquire Vitali Kravtsov.

So, let’s take a moment to dig a little deeper into those final two picks, starting with Bernat.

Bernat had his believers in the public sphere. He landed in the top 100 in several draft rankings: McKeen’s Hockey (77th), Daily Faceoff (98th), The Athletic’s Corey Pronman (97th), and The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler (98th).

Bernat’s combination of size and speed is intriguing, and his production in Finland’s U20 league was solid, if unspectacular: his 15 goals and 31 points ranked fifth among first-time draft-eligible players. If he can better leverage his physicality, he has NHL potential.

“Bernát showed some power-forward flair to his game, especially whenever he played internationally,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “At his best, he leveraged his 6-foot-4 frame to power through checks, drop his shoulder and drive the net, in addition to raising fear in defencemen by applying consistent pressure on the forecheck and throwing big hits.”

A shoot-first player, Bernat isn’t much of a playmaker except on the power play, where he can set up chances from the half-wall on the left side. He’s got a nose for the net, however, and a plus shot.

“At his best, he looks like a skilled big man who can attack into his own looks and challenge goalies with the pop off his blade,” says Wheeler, and Pronman had a similar sentiment, saying, “When you catch his best shifts where he’s coming through the neutral zone with speed and making a play, he looks like an NHL player.”

Consistency was an issue with Bernat, however, which is why he was available in the sixth round.

Even if his offensive skills don’t take the next step, he could have some bottom-six upside with his physicality and two-way game.

“He works hard defensively, exerts his enormous range to dislodge pucks, and will throw his considerable weight around to stop attackers in their tracks,” reads a scouting report from Upside Hockey. “As in the offensive zone, his off-puck awareness serves him well when defending, as he’s usually in good position to harass puck-carriers, fill lanes, and disrupt plays.”

Bernat clearly fits what the Canucks were looking for in this draft: size, speed, and offensive upside, even if the latter needs a little more development than some of their other picks.

12:32 pm | The 184th pick came to the Canucks from the Boston Bruins in the Lukas Reichel trade.

The Canucks used the pick to select their first Swede of the draft, taking defenceman Samuel Eriksson.

It should come as no surprise at this point that Eriksson is a big dude. Eriksson is 6’5”, with the long reach to make life difficult for opposing forwards all over the defensive zone. Offensively…well, there’s not much there, as he had just 6 points in 32 games in the U20 Nationell, Sweden’s top junior league.

Eriksson was ranked as high as 59th overall by Ryan Kennedy at The Hockey News, so the Canucks seemed to get some value picking him so late in the draft.

12:26 pm | It was likely a lot easier for the Canucks to trade the 161st overall pick because they had two more picks in the sixth round: 176th and 184th.

The Canucks acquired the 176th-overall pick from the Washington Capitals in the David Kämpf trade and used the pick to select Lucian Bernat from Tappara U20 in the Finnish junior league

Bernat continues the Canucks’ trend of drafting size. The 6’4” Slovakian winger had 15 goals and 31 points in 37 games in the U20 SM-sarja last year, though he faltered in the playoffs with just 4 points in 13 games.

Bernat has been noticeable for Slovakia in international competition, tallying 4 points in 7 games at the World Under-18 Championship and 3 points in 4 games at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup.

12:12 pm | To kick off the sixth round of the draft, Ryan Johnson made his first trade as Canucks general manager, sending the 161st overall pick to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

In return, the Canucks received the Ottawa Senators’ fifth-round pick in 2027, which the Leafs previously acquired in exchange for Samuel Ersson. So, a bit of an upgrade in pick value overall, even if the Canucks will have to wait a year to see any fruit from the trade.

The Leafs used the pick to select Russian defenceman Yaroslav Fedoseyev.

Connor Davis - 129th overall

11:55 am | Given what we’ve seen so far from this draft for the Canucks, it should come as no surprise that their fifth-round pick is a strong skater.

“[Davis’s] motor is always going while not being a turnover liability,” notes Frank Zawrazky of The Hockey News. “He can turn on his jets to blow past defenders, and his shifty hands make that speed even more dangerous.”

“Energetic forward who had a big season with Cedar Rapids,” says Daily Faceoff’s Steven Ellis. “Had a monster end to the season — felt like he was unstoppable down the stretch.”

Davis has speed and maneuverability, and matches that with soft hands, a quick release on his shot, and a developing playmaking ability.

“A constant builder of speed, Davis’ weaving attacks kept defenders on their heels at the prep school level,” reads his 2025 profile from Elite Prospects. “He protects the puck through hip-pocket holds, targets defensive triangles, and while he struggles to consistently win inside positioning, he rarely gives up on a play, hunting wraparounds and in-tight jam chances.”

The obvious question mark for Davis is that he’s a 19-year-old who didn’t crack a point per game in the USHL this past season. Even with all of his legitimate tools, that lack of high-end production raises eyebrows when you’re taking a player in his second year of eligibility.

Still, there’s reason to believe in Davis. His explosive speed could take him a long way.

11:32 am | After drafting 19-year-old Yaroslav Bryzgalov in the fourth round, the Canucks once again went with a player in his second year of draft eligibility in the fifth round, selecting Connor Davis 129th overall.

Davis was unranked by those in the public sphere, but there’s a lot to like about the 6’0” right winger, as he has the speed, motor, and skill to potentially become an NHL player.

Davis had 26 goals and 55 points in 59 games in the USHL this past season.

11:10 am | Interesting trend for the Canucks so far in this draft is that there’s a clear focus on size, but without sacrificing speed and skill. Even Yaroslav Bryzgalov, who isn’t the fastest skater, plays fast with his quick puck-moving game.

Athleticism is another trend, as the Canucks’ picks performed very well at the NHL Combine, particularly Niklas Aaram-Olsen, who finished 1st in the standing long jump, leaping 118 inches, over an inch further than the next best prospect. That speaks to the explosive power in his legs.

Aaram-Olsen also finished tied for first in both the left and right sides of the Pro Agility test, was second in the Anaerobic Fitness - Peak Power Output test, and was third in the 10m Sprint. In addition, he finished in the top 25 in the V02Max Aerobic Fitness test, both force plate tests for explosive power, and the bench press.

That’s an athlete.

Caleb Malhotra also finished in the top 25 of the long jump at 108.5 inches, as well as the anaerobic test, and the 10m Sprint, and Malhotra, Adam Novotny, and Brooks Rogowski all finished top 25 in the agility tests.

Novotny appeared in the top 25 in a few other tests as well, including first in the Pull-Ups with 18 and third in the Isokinetic Squat. Rogowski, meanwhile, got into the top 25 in Wingspan, measuring a whopping 79.0 inches.

Yaroslav Bryzgalov - 97th overall

10:38 am | Yaroslav Bryzgalov’s size immediately jumps out, but the hallmark of his game is actually his playmaking.

“Bryzgalov, a Merrimack commit, is a big, heavy winger who can play the power game and check, but also has some secondary playmaking feel and vision that you typically don’t find in a forward his size,” says The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler. “He also quickly identifies his options when he gets the puck and does a good job pre-scanning so that he can get pucks to his teammates in space early and surprise opposing D with a heady pass.”

Bryzgalov has the ability to protect the puck to let passing lanes develop, then find an open teammate in a dangerous area for a grade-A scoring chance. It’s a legitimately high-end trait.

One knock on the 6’4” Belarusian winger is his lack of footspeed, but he’s not a bad skater. He certainly isn’t a burner, but instead lets the puck do the work.

“In lieu of footspeed, Bryzgalov zips passes to play an overall fast game,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “He makes touch passes through the forecheck, spins them off the wall, beats sticks with quick hands to set up dishes, and even manipulates defenders with look-offs and shot-passes to create cross-slot lanes.

“Whether he’s stealing pucks on the forecheck or catching them in space, he always knows the next play instantly. In his best sequences, he makes several high-skill passes in succession, building play from his own zone to the crease.”

Bryzgalov’s more modest production — 55 points in 64 WHL games — might cause some concern, especially for a forward in his second year of draft eligibility, but it’s worth noting that he put up those points in more limited minutes. Wheeler notes that he averaged around 15 minutes per game and was primarily on the second power play unit for a deep Tigers team that was led by the 100+ point Ruck twins.

There’s some intriguing potential in Bryzgalov’s game, as he has the hockey sense and intelligence to potentially put it all together with the right development. His ability to make plays while playing a power forward game makes him an overager worth taking.

10:19 am | With the first pick of the fourth round, 97th overall, the Canucks took Yaroslav Bryzgalov from the Medicine Hat Tigers in the WHL.

The 6’4” winger is in his second year of draft eligibility, and had a breakout year with Medicine Hat, tallying 55 points in 64 regular season games, then 14 points in 15 playoff games, after an underwhelming draft year in the USHL.

Bryzgalov was ranked everywhere from 59th overall to 196th overall.

Dmitri Ivchenko - 78th overall

9:58 am | Let’s take a closer look at the Canucks’ fifth pick of the draft, Dmitri Ivchenko at 78th overall.

The pick might be seen as a bit of a reach, with Elite Prospects ranking Ivchenko 127th and McKeen’s Hockey ranking him 210th. Then again, Dobber Prospects had him 76th overall, which speaks to how volatile draft rankings can be with respect to goaltenders.

“Ivchenko is one of the most projectable goaltenders in this class,” said Jean-Francois Rioux from Dobber Prospects. “He moves with clear purpose, takes intelligent routes, and rarely appears rattled by the pace of the game in front of him…The overall package is mature, efficient, and technically refined.”

Ivchenko’s technical ability was also noted by Elite Prospects in their scouting profile.

“If a team built their goaltending draft list with a focus on size and technique, Dmitri Ivchenko would be one of the first names on that board,” they said. “Ivchenko is a very disciplined goaltender, keeping square with shooters, boasting strong depth control, and strong routes to keep him positional. He also has strong hands, with great range and hand-eye coordination to make snappy glove saves.”

Where Ivchenko can struggle is in his puck tracking and rebound control. Also, as a backup goaltender in the MHL, he hasn’t been tested as much as some goaltenders, with a lighter workload facing weaker teams.

“I believe he has a pathway to becoming an NHL goaltender, but not within a tight time frame,” reads his scouting report from Neutral Zone. “He projects as a longer-term development goalie who will need added strength, improved rebound control, and exposure to higher shot volumes before he can be confidently projected into an NHL role.”

9:44 am | The Canucks acquired the 78th-overall pick from the Columbus Blue Jackets as part of the Conor Garland trade. This is the first fruit of that trade, with the second-round pick in the deal not coming until 2028.

With the 78th-overall pick, the Canucks selected their first Russian and first goaltender of the draft, taking Dmitri Ivchenko.

The 6’3” Ivchenko had a strong season in the MHL, Russia’s top junior league, posting a .922 save percentage along with four shutouts in 19 games.

Ivchenko is also quite young, as he doesn’t turn 18 for another two days, giving him a slightly longer runway to develop.

9:38 am | The Canucks traded the 65th-overall pick to the Calgary Flames as part of the Nikita Zadorov deal. The Flames used that pick for a feel-good story, picking Joe Iginla, the son of Jarome Iginla.

It is a bit of a reach, with not one public draft ranking listing Iginla, though NHL Central Scouting did rank him as the 200th best North American skater available.

That said, you never know how development will go, and Iginla is one of the youngest players in the draft, as he doesn’t turn 18 until August 13. The Vancouver Giants forward is a hard-working two-way player, who gets in on the forecheck and wins puck battles, but just doesn’t do enough with the puck once he gets it, as he lacks the skating ability to create time and space for himself.

Still, seeing an Iginla in a Flames jersey just feels right.

Niklas Aaram-Olsen - 41st overall

9:18 am | Niklas Aaram-Olsen knows how to put the puck in the net.

“Aaram-Olsen is one of the best pure goal scorers in the draft class and has been a prolific scorer at the junior level,” said The Athletic’s Corey Pronman.

The Norwegian winger lit up the U20 Nationell in Sweden this past season, racking up 20 goals and 40 points in 29 games. That was good for fourth in points per game among first-time draft-eligible prospects in the Nationell, behind three first-round picks.

He also came through for Norway in international tournaments, scoring a hat trick against Germany at the World Under-18 Championship to avoid relegation, and 6 goals and 10 points in 5 games at the D1A World Junior Championship to lead Norway in scoring and help them win the tournament to move up to the top level for the next World Juniors.

Aaram-Olsen can score goals any way you want him to.

“It was Aaram-Olsen’s shooting talent that helped to drive most of his offensive value this season,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “He was one of the main threats on Örebro’s highly dangerous top power play unit, regularly flexing his ability to shoot on the first touch, whether off cross-slot feeds or same-side passes from down low. He has a variety of other releases in his arsenal, too, being able to surprise goalies with well-placed inside leg wristers and pick corners after curling pucks around defenders off the rush.”

To go with his shooting talent, the 6’1” Aaram-Olsen can move.

“He’s a good skater who gets up and down the ice fast and is willing to track back on pucks,” said The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler. “He’s an impressive athlete who crushed testing at the Combine, though his stride does kick a little.”

The question marks for Aaram-Olsen surround his two-way game and play-driving ability, with Elite Prospects noting his current lack of B game. It’s something that will hopefully come with time and development, as he showed flashes of being a responsible two-way forward at times.

“He’s very projectable because he has speed and size,” said an NHL scout quoted by The Hockey News. “Even if he doesn’t hit his full potential, he’ll be able to go up and down the ice and be a threat with his shot.”

Brooks Rogowski - 33rd overall

8:56 am | With some time before the Canucks’ next pick, let’s take a closer look at Brooks Rogowski and Niklas Aaram-Olsen, starting with Rogowski.

It is very obvious to see what the Canucks like in Rogowski, as he has all the traits that they love. He’s huge at 6’7” and 236 lbs. He’s a right-shot centre. He skates very well for his size and plays a strong two-way game.

What’s particularly intriguing is the potential upside and room to grow, as who he was at the beginning of last season differs significantly from who he was at the end of this season, as the shock of going from high-school hockey to the OHL wore off.

“When he first came in last year, he was going from shinny hockey to learning to play the game,” said an NHL scout quoted by The Hockey News. “With his size and toolbox, he’s a good enough gamble. That wide-open shinny mindset, he shows flashes of it — but at the right times…His ceiling is high, based on how he’s developed so far.”

A natural athlete from a baseball-playing family, Rogowski didn’t commit purely to hockey until later than most top prospects, and the upside is obvious.

“We saw Rogowski as a future checker in the first half of the season, projecting that he could use his range and skating in a defensive role at the NHL level,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “But as the season wore on, he broke out of the checker mould, displaying a higher level of playmaking ability and offensive instincts than we had previously expected.”

Rogowski has the size and hands to score from in front of the net, but also has a dangerous wrist shot, and developing vision and playmaking, giving him the potential to be more than bottom-six defensive centre.

With his size, Rogowski could become a wholly unique player for the Canucks if he can put all of his tools together.

The one knock on Rogowski is that he doesn’t always use his size to its full advantage, which may be more of a mindset thing than anything else and can be developed.

“The NHL team that drafts him will have to develop the towering forward along that path, emphasizing his skill rather than his defensive potential,” says Elite Prospects. “Not every organization will have the capability, time, or space to give Rogowski the guidance he needs, but hopefully the one that drafts him will. If not, there’s still a fourth-line role waiting for him.”

8:35 am | My apologies for the delay in getting the live blog running this morning. Had some technical issues with my computer, but we should be good to go now.

The Canucks made their second pick of the second round at 41st overall, and took their first player out of Sweden, selecting left wing Niklas Aaram-Olsen. Only, he isn’t a Swede.

Aaram-Olsen is a Norwegian forward with plenty of speed and skill, who dominated the Swedish under-20 league with 20 goals and 40 points in 29 games, and got into 16 games in the SHL, but question marks about the other elements of his game.

That makes him a bit of a boom-or-bust prospect, but the potential of Aaram-Olsen blowing up makes him an intriguing pick at 41st overall.

Public draft rankings typically had Aaram-Olsen ranked right around this spot — near the end of the first round or early in the second round — though there were outliers, such as Elite Prospects ranking him 64th overall.

8:15 am | With their first pick in the second round, the Canucks took Brooks Rogowski from the Oshawa Generals in the OHL.

Rogowski is a towering 6’7” centre with a right-hand shot and a developing skillset to go with it.

Rogowski was ranked everywhere from 15th overall (Ryan Kennedy at The Hockey News) to 61st overall (Craig Button at TSN).

Heading into the 2026 NHL Entry Draft, the Canucks had picked 24th overall three times before. The first time, it wasn’t a first-round pick, as the Canucks selected Rob Murphy 24th overall in the second round of the 1987 draft.

The most recent two times they picked 24th, it was their second of two picks in the first round, just as in 2026.

In 2013, the Canucks selected Hunter Shinkaruk 24th overall after picking Bo Horvat 9th overall earlier in the night. In 2014, Jared McCann went to the Canucks 24th overall after Jake Virtanen at 6th overall.

McCann ended up being the better player of the two, but after he was traded for Erik Gudbranson, neither became part of the Canucks’ future.

The Canucks are hoping for a different story from their latest 24th-overall pick. After taking two-way centre Caleb Malhotra with the third-overall pick, the Canucks selected goalscoring winger Adam Novotny from the Peterborough Petes of the OHL.

“A potential line-elevating top-six winger”

Novotny was typically ranked much higher than where the Canucks selected him, with most public draft rankings placing the Czech forward somewhere in the 13-19 range. For those just wanting the Canucks to take the best player available regardless of position, Novotny is exactly who you want the Canucks to take at this point in the draft.

Why was Novotny ranked so highly in the public sphere?

It starts with his physical tools. Novotny is a speedy, hard-forechecking forward with an ever-burning motor, constantly moving his feet with and without the puck.

“The model of consistency, [Novotny] plays a pacey, driven game with high-end forechecking skills and NHL-calibre scoring,” reads his profile from Elite Prospects. “A potential line-elevating top-six winger.”

Novotny’s skating is a true strength, capable of explosive bursts of speed to drive up the ice and fly around defenders. He has noticeable north-south speed, but also the east-west agility to make him truly elusive with the puck.

“Novotný is a great skater, with the quick burst in his first few steps to pressure even the faster NHL defenders,” said Corey Pronman and his coworker at The Athletic, Scott Wheeler, concurred, saying Novotny has “a short but very powerful skating stride and legit speed.”

Unlike some wingers with speed, however, Novotny brings size and physicality to go with it. The 6’1”, 205 lbs power forward wins battles along the boards and in front of the net, and effectively protects the puck under pressure.

“He’s already strong, sturdy and stocky, with a thick lower half built to absorb bumps and play through contact,” said Wheeler.

“Novotný dominated the wall game in the OHL,” said Elite Prospects’ Lauren Kelly in one article. “Whether it was along the half-walls or below the goal line, he was an overwhelming force on the forecheck and in battles, successfully stripping opponents of pucks, forcing turnovers, and creating quick chances.”

His combination of speed and physicality makes Novotny a nightmare on the forecheck, tracking down opposing defencemen and either making contact to free up the puck or pursuing them up the ice, harassing them with his stick to win the puck.

Unlike a typical hard-forechecking power forward, Novotny doesn’t look to make big hits, which might explain why some NHL teams passed on him and allowed him to fall to the Canucks at 24th overall. But this doesn’t necessarily suggest he lacks a mean streak, as his forechecking game is more intelligent than just blindly chasing the puck.

“He can play a physical game, for sure,” said David St-Louis of Elite Prospects in his video breakdown of Novotny’s game, “but he’s more calculated than that. He cuts plays [off] mostly by reading the game ahead, pursuing hard and fast at the right times and by using his stick very well.”

That intelligence also makes him a strong defensive forward. He’s quick on the backcheck to pressure puck carriers and makes great reads on in-zone defensive plays. He’s also an asset on the penalty kill, using his quick, agile skating and reads to clog up lanes and close quickly on the puck carrier when the opportunity presents itself.

“He can make plays instantly off his steals”

If Novotny’s game was purely his speed, forechecking, and two-way game, that alone might get him to the NHL as a bottom-six, energy-line forward, and it gives him a very high floor. What sets him apart and makes him worthy of a first-round selection is the way he leverages his physical tools to create offence.

Novotny’s hands are nearly as quick as his feet, and his appendages work in tandem to beat opposing defenders.

“As the season wore on, Novotný manipulated defenders more frequently and consistently in transition, layering pace and weight changes, feints, lateral cuts to draw pressure, and freezing defenders by selling shots before delivering some pretty insane passes,” said Kelly.

Novotny loves to drive to the middle of the ice to create chances, and it makes him particularly dangerous off the forecheck, as he wastes no time creating chances once he wins the puck.

“What’s so great about him is that he can make plays instantly off his steals,” said St-Louis.

The one knock on Novotny, however, is the inconsistency of his playmaking. He is very much a shoot-first player, who looks for opportunities to score goals himself before looking to a teammate.

That’s not necessarily a negative, as Novotny already has a pro-level shot and a knack for getting himself into the right areas of the ice to use it, but it does somewhat limit his projection and lower his ceiling.

“He’s a north-south winger with speed, skill, and tenacity that was finding himself in scoring position often, getting plenty of chances, and driving efficient results in many key areas,” said Will Scouch, who ranked Novotny 11th overall. “I would love to see him cut down on the shots from the boards and blueline and defer to others more often, but in general, Novotny remains an interesting bet on fundamentals and underrated energy.”

Novotny’s production was solid, with 34 goals and 65 points in 58 games, good for 27th in the OHL overall. He was also fourth in points among first-time draft-eligible prospects in the OHL and was tied for second in goals.

There’s a case to be made, however, that Novotny should have scored more. He turned 18 in November, so is on the older side of first-time draft-eligible prospects, and he was coming to the OHL after playing a full season against men in the top Czech league, as well as impressive showings at the World Under-18 Championship and Hlinka Gretzky Cup.

But Novotny’s relatively modest numbers are likely a reflection of his team, rather than his talent.

“On a Petes team that plays a certain way, he has an element that…it doesn’t get stifled, but he doesn’t have as much freedom as he would on another team,” said an NHL scout quoted by The Hockey News. “But his details are so good.”

“The Peterborough Petes play a straightforward brand of hockey with limited space for creativity, especially in the neutral zone,” noted Elite Prospects. “Structured, they compete with every team in the league, but sometimes at the expense of their own players’ scoring, development, and ability to show their ultimate upside.”

“There are really no weaknesses or holes in Novotny’s game”

Overall, the Canucks made a great pick at 24th overall, nabbing what appears to be the best player available at the time. Novotny has all of the physical tools to play in the NHL for a long time, with the hockey IQ to make the most of those tools.

NHL teams crave players like Novotny, which is why it was such a surprise to see him slide to the Canucks. With his speed, motor, and determination, he’s going to become an NHLer. The only question is if he has the upside to be a play-driving top-six winger, or if he’ll be more of a complementary piece lower in the lineup.

But with the context of the diminishing offence in the OHL as a whole and the highly structured system the Petes play, Novotny seems like a high-upside bet worth making.

“There are really no weaknesses or holes in Novotný’s game. While he may not have as high a ceiling or be quite as dynamic as other forwards in this draft class, few operate with as much efficiency as him,” said Kelly. “Few prospects in this 2026 draft class have games that are this scalable to the NHL.”

Ryan Johnson has officially made his first pick as general manager of the Vancouver Canucks, selecting Caleb Malhotra from the Brantford Bulldogs of the OHL.

Making your first pick is a big deal, especially for a GM of a team embarking on a rebuild. Johnson must believe that Malhotra can be a foundational piece. He might be right.

First picks by Canucks GMs

Bud Poile - 1970, Dale Tallon
Hal Laycoe - 1973, Dennis Ververgaert
Phil Maloney - 1974, Ron Sedlbauer (2nd round)
Jake Milford - 1977, Jere Gillis
Harry Neale - 1982, Michel Petit
Jack Gordon - 1985, Jim Sandlak
Pat Quinn - 1988, Trevor Linden
Brian Burke - 1998, Bryan Allen
Dave Nonis - 2004, Cory Schneider
Mike Gillis - 2008, Cody Hodgson
Jim Benning - 2014, Jake Virtanen
Patrik Allvin - 2022, Jonathan Lekkerimäki
Ryan Johnson - 2026, Caleb Malhotra

In a vacuum, Malhotra makes sense for Canucks

Malhotra is a legitimate top prospect, with a few even ranking him above Gavin McKenna and Ivar Stenberg, who went first and second to the Toronto Maple Leafs and San Jose Sharks. Even those who are not as high on Malhotra typically view him as at least a top-ten pick.

With his sound two-way game and surging offensive upside, Malhotra makes a lot of sense for a rebuilding team like the Canucks. At least, in a vacuum.

But there’s an interesting context to the Canucks selecting Caleb Malhotra with his father, Manny Malhotra, recently installed as head coach.

That’s an intriguing, if not entirely unprecedented, dynamic. It’s also one that the Malhotras have been navigating for a while, even if Caleb hasn’t been playing under his father directly.

“We’ve had a very clear understanding in my household that first and foremost, I am Dad, who also happens to be a professional hockey coach,” said Manny Malhotra. “So, when we are talking about hockey, there’s a decision by my kids if they want to talk to Dad or Coach. So, we will continue to have that rule in my house, and it’s served us well as a family.”

Malhotra has the potential to be a first-line centre in the NHL, especially if he can continue his astronomical growth over the past year. He went from struggling with the Chilliwack Chiefs in the BCHL to leading the Brantford Bulldogs in scoring in the OHL playoffs.

That kind of growth stems from Malhotra’s approach to the game, constantly working on the minute details that make a player better. That’s the kind of prospect that’s easy to believe in.

Here’s hoping, as far as first picks by a Canucks’ GM go, that Malhotra is more of a Trevor Linden than a Dale Tallon.