Knights play waiting game before title defence
By Aaron Bell
Danny Syvret sees a lot of similarities between the 2005 London Knights and this year’s version of the team.
In 2005 Syvret was the captain of what went down as one of the greatest teams ever iced in the Canadian Hockey League. They set a new CHL record with a 31 game undefeated streak, romped through the OHL playoffs with just two losses on their way to winning the Robertson Cup and then went undefeated in the MasterCard Memorial Cup – including a 4-0 win over the Sidney Crosby-led Rimouski Oceanic in the championship game.
That team set the bar very high for the Knights.
Since then, they have won the Midwest Division title six times, the OHL regular season championship four times and the Robertson Cup twice.
“It’s been a pretty fun experience,” Syvret told the London Free Press when he was in town a couple of weeks ago to skate with the Knights to get ready for training camp with the New York Rangers.
“If you look at the rosters of the NHL and the minors, there are a ton of London Knights that develop and produce. We’re a pretty tight-knit group and a lot of us come back and spend the summer so we’ll definitely be keeping tabs on the team this year.”
This year’s edition of the Knights also have a lot to look forward to.
They were named the host team for the 2014 MasterCard Memorial Cup, topped the pre-season CHL BMO Top-10 rankings and are getting ready to hoist their second straight Robertson Cup championship banner when the regular season opens this week. But they might just be victims of their own success.
17 Knights were invited to NHL camps this fall and they will start this season with high expectations but also some question marks.
Max Domi and Bo Horvat were huge pieces of their championship run last spring and both players were high NHL draft picks in June. Horvat went ninth overall to the Vancouver Canucks and Domi went 12th overall to the Phoenix Coyotes. Both players are making a bid to start their NHL careers early.
Defenceman Olli Maatta- also a first round pick – is with the Pittsburgh Penguins and Alex Broadhurst could be back as an overager but he is getting a look with the Chicago Blackhawks.
The Knights are moving forward after the graduation of stars Scott Harrington on the back end and Seth Griffith up front but they could have as many as five first round NHL picks in the lineup including Nikita Zadorov and Michael McCarron.
It’s natural to want to compare the current team with the 2005 group but the Hunter brothers – head coach Dale and GM Mark – know that each team has its own make-up.
“It’s always a comparison,” Dale Hunter said. “We expect that. We built for this year and we’ve got to put it all together.”
Syvret said that his edition of the Knights used challenges from the previous year to build their success on. He thinks that after making their way to the MasterCard Memorial Cup final in 2012 and the semi-final last year, this year’s team will be hungry to finish the season as CHL champions.
“We got upset the year before by Guelph and we lost (captain) Danny Bois for six of the seven games (in the 2004 Western Conference final),” he said. “If we win that, we go to the Memorial Cup.
“It sucks not to win, but you gain experience from that, and hopefully they put on a show and maybe I’ll be back in time to catch a couple of games.”
