NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
Medicine Hat Tigers head coach and general manager Willie Desjardins blows a whistle to start a warmup drill during practice Friday at Co-op Place.
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
The Medicine Hat Tigers have some difficult decisions ahead.
The Tigers enter their Saturday contest at Co-op Place against the Lethbridge Hurricanes with some big decisions looming. Medicine Hat opened their preseason Tuesday with a 7-3 win on the road against the Hurricanes. Head coach and general manager Willie Desjardins thought Lethbridge outplayed them early Tuesday before they pulled the game back their way.
Looking at his group over the past week and in that game, he says it was important to see the veteran Tigers step up as they continue to evaluate and make roster decisions.
“You need the old guys because that’s the present and for us, we will need our older guys going; but saying that, it was great to see the young guys play,” Desjardins said.
“We still have an awful lot of guys in camp, so we still have some competition for spots and that’s a hard thing. I don’t know if guys realize how many guys we have, so our competition will be hard. There’s lots of guys who can play but we can only have so many guys on the roster.”
There are 36 players listed on the Tiger preseason roster, five of them are 2008-born prospects who are not eligible to play full time in the WHL this season, leaving Desjardins and staff with 31 options for their 2023-24 roster. By positions, there are five goaltenders competing for two spots, 12 defenceman for starting jobs and 14 forward for 12 starting roles, with room for a couple spare players for injury replacements.
Those decisions are made difficult with the Tigers having five 20-year-old players, forward and captain Owen MacNeil, goaltender Beckett Langkow and defencemen Dru Krebs, Rhett Parsons and Bogdans Hodass. There are three import players signed for two spots with Hodass competing with fellow Latvian blue liner Bruno Petrovics and Czechia forward Vasyl Spilka, who will report to the Tigers sometime in the next two weeks Desjardins says due to a shoulder injury suffered at the Hlinka Gretzky tournament.
There are no easy decisions for Desjardins entering his 13th season at the helm of the Tigers. He says they will start releasing players after Saturday’s contest, getting themselves closer to an opening night roster. If he could, Desjardins says he’d want the exact amount of players needed for a roster instead of this many players and this many hard choices.
“These decisions are just hard decisions and there’s never any fun letting guys go,” Desjardins said. “Saying that, it makes your team better if you have tougher decisions to make, because that means you have more competition.”
Tuesday’s lineup at Lethbridge was rookie and prospect heavy for both teams with Saturday’s roster likely to be older for both sides as they evaluate their organizations. Desjardins says games like that are no different than practice because they expect each players best every time they’re on the ice.”
“Lethbridge will be pushing, they’ll have a better group that’s a little older,” Desjardins said. “We’re evaluating but for us, the most important thing is we get the right people in our lineup and that that’ll be hard. So we have to look at some guys a little bit more.”
After Saturday’s contest, the Tigers have four days of practice ahead of a home-and home-series with the Swift Current Broncos to wrap up their preseason. The Tigers will host the Broncos at Co-op Place on Friday before heading to Swift on Saturday to finish the exhibition calendar.
