Mooseheads looking for another banner year
By Aaron Bell
Zachary Fucale backed the Halifax Mooseheads to the President’s Trophy as QMJHL champions and then followed up by winning the MasterCard Memorial Cup in Saskatoon.
It’s hard to imagine what he could do for an encore but with Fucale in the crease carrying the bulk of the load again this season, a repeat performance by the Mooseheads isn’t out of the question.
Unfortunately for the Mooseheads, Fucale is going to miss the banner raising ceremonies at their home opener when the QMJHL season opens on Thursday against the Moncton Wildcats.
The big question will be how long Fucale will stick in camp with the Montreal Canadiens after being their second round pick at the NHL Draft in New Jersey in June.
“He’s been a key player the last two years and obviously we see it going the same way again in the sense that he got better from 16 to 17 years old,” Mooseheads coach Dominique Ducharme told the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. “We want to see him getting better from 17 to 18 and I know he also wants to keep improving. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Fucale could be Canada’s starter at the World Junior Championship this Christmas in Sweden and the Mooseheads know that Fucale is the key to a complicated puzzle for them this year as well.
“He’s already proven with what he did at 16 and 17 that he’s one of the best goalies in the league so we expect him to do that for us again,”
Ducharme said. “And that’s the mindset for all the guys coming back. They know they did a lot of good things last year but we want them to be better than they were.”
For the Mooseheads to find similar success to what they enjoyed last year, they will have to figure out how to replace a big pile of offence that is gone after their impressive campaign last season.
Nathan MacKinnon’s QMJHL career is cut off at two standout seasons after he was the first overall pick of the Colorado Avalanche in June. He is showing all the tools of becoming an NHL star and will start that new chapter of his career this month in Denver.
The Mooseheads could also say good-bye to the likes of Jonathan Drouin, the CHL Player of the Year chosen third overall by the Tampa Bay Lightning in June, while Martin Frk, Stefan Fournier and Stephen MacAulay will also graduate from the league. Those five players combined for 150 points in the playoffs alone last spring and will be hard to replace.
“I think everybody understands that not too many teams in the CHL will have the kind of team we had last year,” Mooseheads’ GM Cam Russell said.
“That was a pretty special year, a lot of records were broken and we had a lot of fun. But we’re still in good shape and we still have a good hockey team. We’ll be able to compete every night and I think we’re going to have a good season.”
The Mooseheads did welcome a pair of emerging European stars to training camp and hope they will help fill that big void. 16-year-old Timo Meier from Switzerland and 17-year-old Nikolaj Ehlers from Denmark combined with 17-year-old American Danny Moynihan on an International line that showed a lot of promise in the pre-season.
Returnees like Darcy Ashley, Luca Ciampini and Brent Andrews are also expecting to make even bigger contributions this season.
“I think we can do a lot this season like last season,” Ehlers said. “We don’t have Drouin and MacKinnon. Of course, we need them but we can do well without them. I think we have very good team and a young team. I think we’ll do really good.”