Battalion, Guelph have playoff history
NORTH BAY, Ont. – Long before the North Bay Battalion and Guelph Storm qualified to meet this season in the Ontario Hockey League Championship Series, the franchises were division rivals.
The Battalion, based in Brampton, entered the OHL in 1998-99 with the Mississauga IceDogs, starting play in the Midwest Division of the Western Conference with Guelph, the Erie Otters, Kitchener Rangers and Owen Sound Platers.
The Troops won only eight games in their inaugural season, including four against the woeful IceDogs, but scored a significant victory at home Dec. 4, a 6-4 decision over Guelph, reigning OHL champions and a team that would finish atop the division with 91 points.
“To beat a division rival was a big accomplishment for us then,” Jason Maleyko, the first player selected in the 1998 Expansion Draft, from the Oshawa Generals, and the Battalion’s captain for its first three seasons, said via telephone from his Windsor home.
“It was great to beat Mississauga since they were our expansion cousins, but to beat a team coming off an OHL championship was great.”
The Troops earned a playoff spot in their second season but were eliminated in the first round by Erie in a tough six-game series.
The Battalion and Guelph each finished with 79 points in 2000-01, with the fourth-seeded Storm earning home-ice advantage in a first-round playoff matchup because of one more win. The Troops won five of six regular-season games against the Storm, which featured goaltender Craig Andersson and forwards Dustin Brown, Daniel Paille and Martin St. Pierre and numbered among its overage complement defenceman Steve Chabbert, now a North Bay assistant coach.
“We had a pretty good rivalry with them since we played them so much through the season,” said Maleyko, who was in his overage season on the Battalion blue line. “They had some really skilled players.”
The Battalion rolled to a 5-0 win in the opener, outshooting Guelph 51-35. Raffi Torres contributed two goals and two assists and Jay McClement added a shorthanded goal to go with the shutout goaltending of Brian Finley. A clean open-ice check by Torres on Kevin Dallman, the OHL’s highest-scoring defenceman, left him with a broken jaw.
“It was a big loss for them when Dallman went out,” said Maleyko. “He was a guy who would have played 30 minutes a game for them. That was Raffi back then. He could score and bring that physical presence.”
In the second game at Brampton, McClement’s two goals paced the home side to a 4-2 victory. Torres and Rostislav Klesla each had one goal and two assists and Maleyko chipped in with one goal and one assist in a 4-2 decision at Guelph in the third game.
McClement contributed one goal and one assist and Finley made 39 saves as the Battalion completed the sweep with a 4-1 home-ice victory.
“We were able to get up in that series early and, from what I remember, the games were all hard-fought,” said Maleyko. “The toughest win in any playoff series is the last one, and for us to do it at home was great. We didn’t want to give them a chance to hang around.”
Maleyko said depth and experience were the difference.
“They had some good younger guys, but we were an older team. We’d had some injuries through the season and we didn’t have a great regular season, but in the playoffs everybody came together. We all really clicked in those games. Brian had a very good series. We had a lot of depth too, and that helped us.
“We still had a core of guys from that first season. We had a chance to beat Erie in the playoffs in the second season but we lost, and to get over the hump and win a series was an accomplishment, especially for me as an overager and for the other older guys who were going to graduate.”
The Battalion went 7-for-24 on the power play in the series while holding Guelph to two goals on 29 chances with the man advantage.
“There were probably two factors there,” noted Maleyko. “Brian was great and, if you go back to the Dallman injury, well, he would be their power-play quarterback. We really pressured them and tried to force the puck, and we did a good job at that.”
Maleyko got a glimpse into Guelph’s game plan when he encountered a Storm assistant coach at a summer camp of the Ottawa Senators, who had chosen Maleyko in the sixth round of the National Hockey League Entry Draft in 2000.
“He told me their goal was to shut down what they termed to be the Battalion’s big three: me, Torres and Klesla. We all had pretty good series, so that goal didn’t work.”
The Troops advanced to meet Erie in a second-round series but bowed out in five games.
“We thought that was a start of a long playoff run, but the Guelph series probably ended up being the pinnacle to the three years I was there,” said Maleyko, who ended his Battalion career with 23 goals and 82 assists for 105 points in 194 games.
Following his major junior days, Maleyko, 33, earned a finance degree from St. Mary’s University of Halifax and played four seasons in the ECHL. He now is a certified financial planner and scouts for the Kingston Frontenacs.
After the 2001-02 season, with the North Bay Centennials having moved to Saginaw, Mich., the Battalion transferred into the Central Division of the Eastern Conference.
