Breakout Season Helps Wood Bid Farewell to WHL
WENATCHEE, Wash. – If there’s one Wenatchee Wild player who embodies the phrase “finish strong,” it might just be 2003-born forward Briley Wood. As he moved to the Wenatchee Valley from his home province during the 2023 offseason, he set a very simple goal for the final season of his junior career: take it day by day, soak in the experience and enjoy it.
Then, he set out to make memories worth looking back on. In the process, he finished his junior hockey career with a 12-month stretch that many others who follow the Wild and the Western Hockey League will be looking back on for years to come.
Wood began playing the sport in his small hometown of Rivers, Manitoba – he fell in love with the game early, skating on an outdoor rink built by his dad. Though there wasn’t much hockey in Rivers beyond his local minor hockey association, he says having that option in town gave him a good foundation to learn and begin playing the game.
“They have an old rink there that we used to play on,” said Wood. “They have a youth minor hockey team there, and I used to play all the time as a kid. It was a cold rink, but it was fun.”
Wood excelled in AAA hockey before moving on to juniors, including a 49-point season with the Yellowhead Chiefs’ Under-15 club in 2017-18. That season earned him a second-round selection in the 2018 Manitoba Junior Hockey League draft, but he was just getting warmed up – a point-per-game run through the 2018-19 season with Yellowhead’s U18 team earned him a contract the following season with the Western Hockey League’s Lethbridge Hurricanes. He made six WHL appearances in the 2019-20 campaign, and posted a 58-point campaign with the Yellowhead U18 team that season as well.
COVID complicated the 2020-21 season somewhat, but he found two teams ready for him to contribute – one was Lethbridge, where he made 15 appearances during the spring development season. The other was the Neepawa team that had taken him in that 2018 MJHL draft, where he posted four points over 10 appearances.
It was the 2021-22 season where Wood was finally able to get the full junior hockey experience, playing 58 games for the Hurricanes. Though he posted only five points that year, he says getting that full season was a major boost in his development.
“COVID put a downer on things,” said Wood. “To get back out and get that full season really helped me a lot. I improved a lot and learned a lot of new skills. It was good to get a full season in.”
The final two years in junior hockey were a whirlwind for Wood, starting with a trade to the Winnipeg ICE in August of 2022 that reunited him with an old friend – current Tucson Roadrunner Conor Geekie was already playing for Winnipeg, and grew up in Strathclair, just a half-hour drive away from Rivers. The two have known each other since they were six years old, and often found themselves on opposite sides of the ice growing up.
“Hockey is a small world. You always seem to come across guys that you played against, or played with somewhere along the way,” said Wood. “It’s definitely cool in that aspect.”
A move back to Neepawa for the majority of the 2022-23 season turned out to be a blessing in disguise – Wood racked up a point-and-a-half per game in 39 appearances for the Titans and was named first-team all-MJHL for his efforts. With a new dose of confidence and a few new skills in the toolbox, he returned to Winnipeg shortly before the end of the regular season and was a fixture in the lineup during the postseason, appearing in all 19 ICE playoff games in the team’s run to the WHL Final.
That playoff run was the first chapter of a whirlwind six-month stretch, which included a move with the team to Wenatchee, an invitation to the Colorado Avalanche development camp in July, and a follow-up invite to the team’s preseason rookie camp in September.
This past year, Wood took his game to a new level, with a 62-point total that ranked third on the Wild roster, earning a move from the bottom half of the lineup during the 2023 playoffs to a regular top-line slot during the 2023-24 campaign. From mid-December through the end of January, no Wild player was hotter on the ice – he restarted the season after Christmas with 22 points over a 12-game point streak, and of six Wild wins from December 10 to January 21, he had the game-winning goal in five of them. His first career hat trick on December 17 in a 6-1 win over the Everett Silvertips was soon followed by another one January 28 in a shootout victory over the Prince George Cougars.
His farewell to junior hockey was one that was recognized from coast to coast throughout the Canadian Hockey League – his four-goal, six-point total highlighted an 8-6 Wenatchee victory in Game 1 of the Western Conference quarterfinal series against the Kelowna Rockets that also included a comeback from an early 4-1 deficit and four Wenatchee power play goals. By the end of the six-game series, he had piled up 13 points, the most by any major junior player in a first-round series this season. After the Wild were eliminated from the WHL playoffs on April 7, Wood joined fellow Wenatchee 20-year-old Graham Sward in signing Amateur Tryout contracts for the final week of the season with the Colorado Eagles, the American Hockey League affiliate of the same Avalanche team that had brought him to its development camp and rookie camp less than a year before.
Wood’s goal of soaking in the experience of his final season of WHL hockey also meant accomplishing some specific goals on the ice in his own game, namely using his speed and size to contribute to the forecheck, along with improving his physical play and a few finishing moves in front of the net. He says as he put in the effort to polish his own game in his last year of junior hockey, he noticed lots of upside in the players who will remain in Wenatchee to put on the Wild colors in the years to come.
“We had a lot of good, skilled young guys up front and on the back end – a lot of young guys who can move the puck well and have got a ton of skill,” said Wood. “It’s really great to see as an older guy that we’ve got a lot of good young guys coming up.”