The Vancouver Canucks' AHL farm team, the Utica Comets, starts the postseason tonight with Game 1 of its best-of-five series against the Albany Devils.
The series opens on the road, with puck drop at 4 p.m. PT.
After a thrilling run to the Calder Cup Final last season, the Comets are eager to show what they can do, even though they come into this series as underdogs.
This year's Comets group features eight players from that 2015 team:
• Alex Grenier
• Alex Friesen
• Brendan Gaunce
• Mike Zalewski
• Wacey Hamilton
• Travis Ehrhardt
Carter Bancks and Darren Archibald saw limited postseason action last year due to injury issues.
Last year, Bachman's season was ended by the Comets when he was outdueled by Jacob Markstrom in Utica's seven-game second-round win over the Oklahoma City Barons.
It'll be interesting to see if Travis Green can deliver an upset with the odds stacked against his team. The Comets have not matched up well against Albany in their three seasons in the AHL, with a 2-10-2-0 overall record. The good news is that the two wins happened this year.
Utica's leading scorer against Albany this season? Jordan Subban went 1-5-6 in eight games.
The Devils have opted to start Scott Wedgewood in goal over veteran Yann Danis. Wedgewood's a 23-year-old third-round draft pick of New Jersey's, who pulled off the unusual trifecta of playing games at the ECHL, AHL and NHL levels this year.
While Cory Schneider was injured in March, Wedgewood got into four games for New Jersey, posting a 2-1-1 record with a .957 save percentage and 1.25 goals-against average. Not bad!
Thoughts from Thatcher Demko
Speaking of prospect goalies, Thatcher Demko finally managed to squeeze in some interview time with the local media between his college course load.
Ben Kuzma has the story at
The Province, where Demko indicates that he wasn't thinking about becoming a free agent when he was taking his time before signing with Vancouver.
There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to sign with Vancouver at some point. The big thing for me is that I love Boston College. They’ve given me the opportunity and I thought I owed something to them to come back and finish out my four years. But I felt like this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the situation that Vancouver has and it was the right time for me to take the next step in my career.
He can see that the Canucks' current goaltending situation offers him an ideal opportunity to step in. And he says he'd like to take a shot at doing that after just one year in the AHL.
"I'm going to try and develop quickly but not rush things," Demko told Kuzma.
With that in mind, I wonder how long Jim Benning will wait before he makes a contract offer to Jacob Markstrom, who will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of next season? Even if Demko's ready to move up to the NHL after one year—and that's a big "if"—he certainly won't be ready to be a starter. If he's willing to stay, Markstrom should be a useful part of the Canucks' plans for at least two more seasons.
As I suspected, Demko has worked out a plan to fit his schoolwork around his trip to Russia for World Championships next month. "I’m going to keep up my classes in Russia at the worlds and then fly back there (Boston College) right after," he said.
Demko is majoring in applied psychology with a minor in philosophy. For now, it sounds like he's committed to finishing out his degree through summer school now that he has turned pro.
NHL Expansion Update
The next formal date on the NHL's expansion timetable will come in May, when the league's 10 owners on the executive committee will finalize a decision about whether or not to allow Las Vegas and/or Quebec to begin operations for the 2017-18 season. In
The Globe and Mail, writer
Eric Duhatschek is postulating that Vegas will likely be in, while Quebec will be out.
Duhatschek names two former players who are likely to be part of the Vegas management team if and when the expansion application is approved: Scott Mellanby and former Canuck Murray Craven. He also suggests that perhaps the biggest incentive for the owners to approve a new team might not be their share of the $500 million expansion fee but rather, the opportunity to expose some big-money players on long-term contracts in the expansion draft.
Last we heard, details of exactly how that'll work are still being ironed out—especially with respect to whether players with no-movement clauses in their contracts can be exposed, or if they'd be exempt.
Though Duhatschek says "many teams are already plotting strategy based on the possibility that there will be an expansion draft in June of 2017, which is the earliest an expansion team in Las Vegas will be ready to stockpile players to begin play later that fall," Jim Benning says that he and the Canucks are not part of that group.
Today, Gary Bettman once again recited the party line:
The Seattle arena project has taken microsteps forward this week, which loops us all the way back to what we believe is the ideal situation for the NHL—adding two more teams to the Western Conference.
Will the league's decision-makers opt to keep Vegas on hold even longer in hopes that their dream scenario could still come to pass—though it'd probably be at least thee or four years down the line?
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