A regional junior B tournament to crown the best of four western Canadian hockey leagues starts Wednesday in Flin Flon.
The 2024 edition of the Central Canada Cup will be played at the Whitney Forum from April 17-21, pitting five teams against each other in a five-day flurry of hockey.
The Central Canada Cup claims the lineage of the Keystone Cup, formerly the western Canadian junior B championship. From the mid-1980s until 2017, champions from 12 different leagues in four provinces and northwestern Ontario battled it out for the trophy, but teams in B.C. and Alberta began pulling out of the tournament in 2018, citing high costs. Teams in other leagues following suit in 2019, when only two leagues - the northern Manitoba-based KJHL and northern Ontario’s LJHL - sent teams. The tournament was cancelled in 2020 and 2021, then cancelled again in 2022 before coming back under its new name last season - once again, played for only between KJHL and LJHL teams.
This year, four different leagues will be on the ice, with five teams each aiming for the crown as the region’s top junior B squad. Those teams will play 10 round-robin games over three days, starting Wednesday, with two playoff round games taking place Saturday and a championship game Sunday.
Some junior B-level leagues in the provinces, such as seven leagues in Alberta and B.C. and the southern Manitoba-based Capital Region Junior Hockey League - itself a rebel league from the KJHL, formed in 2018 when southern Manitoba-based teams broke apart from northern teams, citing travel and accommodation costs - will not take part in the tournament.
Teams
The tournament will be hosted by the KJHL’s Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation (PBCN) Selects, who play their home games in the Whitney Forum. The Selects played their second season this year, going 26-10-0-0 through the regular season and finishing second in the KJHL standings. Paced by northern talent from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nunavut, the Selects’ top scorer this year was Embry Roberts, one of three players on the Selects who are members of PBCN - Roberts had 50 points in 25 games. Cranberry Portage’s Harlan Jacobson had 46 points in 22 games, including 21 goals, while a pair of Nunavut-born players - Rankin Inlet’s Kobe Tanuyak and team captain Owen Angootealuk from Coral Harbour - had 38 and 36 points respectively. Tanuyak led all Selects in goals with 27 in the regular season. The goalie tandem of Ethan Fechter and Paxton Moore led the league in all major goaltending categories, with Fechter winning the league’s goalie of the year award.
In playoffs, the Selects swept Norway House to advance to the league final, but their title hopes were dashed in a second sweep - this time, to the reigning KJHL champion Peguis Juniors, who won their record seventh-straight league title. The Juniors led the KJHL standings this year with a 29-5-0-2 record, then beat both Cross Lake and PBCN to win the title. Peguis’ top scorer, Lyle Murdock, cracked 100 points this season, with a whopping 58 goals and 108 points in 31 games. On average, the Juniors scored more than seven goals a game this year.
Peguis qualified for last year’s Central Canada Cup, a four-team tournament that featured only the champions and runners-up of the KJHL and northern Ontario’s LJHL. There, the KJHL finalist OCN Storm pushed through, winning the tournament and the regional title in Thunder Bay over the Schreiber Falcons. To get there, the Storm eliminated Peguis with a 7-1 semifinal win.
Three other teams will come to play in Flin Flon - the LJHL champion Current River Storm and a pair of semi-finalists from Saskatchewan’s PJHL and northern Alberta’s NEAJBHL, the Saskatoon Royals and St. Paul Canadiens.
The Storm eliminated the Thunder Bay Bandits in five games, then swept the Thunder Bay Northern Hawks to clinch their title. Like the Selects, the Storm are in their second season as a franchise - the team dominated the season, winning 30 of their 33 regular season games and scoring more than seven goals a night on average while giving up barely two.
St. Paul led their league in regular season scoring and points, finishing with a 27-4-0-0 record and more than 200 goals - the only team in the league to end the season with that many goals. That didn’t pay off for them come playoff time though, as the Canadiens swept the Onion Lake Border Chiefs in the first round but were then swept themselves by the league finalist Vermilion Tigers. The Canadiens boast their league’s reigning top scorer in Quinn Szpak, who scored more than a goal per game and ended the year with 78 points, as well as Kaden Cardinal and William Chemago, who led the team in playoff scoring.
Like the Canadiens, the Royals led the PJHL in regular season records, with a 27-7-0-6 record and 60 points, but the team couldn’t deliver in the postseason, losing their sole series to the Saskatoon Westleys in five games. The Royals gave up the fewest regular-season goals of any team in their league, only ceding 107 markers, while seven players hit double-digits in goals and five players had at least 30 points.
Schedule
The tournament’s schedule has been amended to fit around the SJHL finals - the Bombers will be hosting Games 1 and 2 at the Forum April 19 and 20, making organizers shuffle the schedule.
According to the official schedule, play got underway at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday with St. Paul playing Peguis, followed by Current River playing Saskatoon at 4:30 p.m. and Peguis facing off again with the Selects at 7:30 p.m. Five games will be played Thursday, starting at 9:30 a.m. and wrapping up with Peguis and Current River at 7:30 p.m. - every team will play two games on that day - followed by two more games Friday, with Saskatoon playing St. Paul at 11 a.m. and Current River and PBCN playing at 2 p.m.
Semifinals will be held at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday, with the tournament final slated for a 2 p.m. puck-drop on Sunday afternoon.
