Junior Ontario Hockey

Rebuilding Eagles need character

For a team that's appeared in back-to-back Ontario Hockey Association Sutherland Cup provincial junior B championships, it would seem logical that its roster would need very little tinkering.

However, that's not the case for the Brantford Golden Eagles, for several reasons.

Brantford, which won the Sutherland Cup in 2009 before falling to the LaSalle Vipers in the provincial final this season, will have its work cut out for it on its quest for three straight appearances in the championship.

The first issue the Eagles must deal with is their graduating players.

Up front, Brantford loses captain Luke Van Moerkerke along with Mike Mazurek and Josh McQuade.

Van Moerkerke's rambunctious, never-say-die attitude will be sorely missed, as will Mazurek's team-first approach to everything.

It will be impossible to replace McQuade's Mid- Western Conference record 150-point season with just one player.

On the back end, the team will be without Jordan Ogilvie, Jeff Lynch and Brandon Greenside.

Ogilvie has been arguably Brantford's best defenceman the past two seasons, while Lynch is an offensive threat every time he touches the puck. Greenside plays well at both ends of the ice.

In goal, the Eagles will suffer a huge loss as Daryl Borden will no longer be eligible to go between the pipes. Borden, who helped lift the team to its championship last year, was a workhorse this season.

The other problem is that other teams will poach some of Brantford's best talent.

Following their 2009 Sutherland Cup championship, the Golden Eagles lost players, such as Dan Savelli and Marc Madarasz, to higher levels of play.

So, aside from finding and replacing players, what else will the Eagles have to contend with as they try to get back to the Sutherland Cup and recapture the championship?

Well, the team will either have to build a new identity or find the one it lost sometime during the last season.

The 2008-09 team was special because of its strong goaltending, commitment to defence from all players and its relentless forecheck and cycling. And there also was the ability of top players to be their best when called upon, its toughness and the fact that it was never out of any game because the players

had the mentality that they could win every game.

This year's team possessed some of those qualities but not consistently. That was fine until the end of the season.

When it gets down to crunch time, the above qualities win hockey games and without them, you finish second or worse.

When Brantford goes about assembling its roster for the 2010-11 season, the ability to put pucks in the net should be taken into account. But, during the past two seasons, the Golden Eagles have proven that characters is as important as scoring.

As the Eagles sign players this summer, character should be the one thing the team looks at first. They need to get players who fit into coach Scott Rex's system, players who will give up a piece of themselves for the betterment of the team.

Those players are not easy to find but general mangers Brian Rizzetto and Mike Bullard have plucked quite a few out of the bushes during the past two years.

There's a fairly strong group of players who are eligible to return next season but they must be complemented with strong character players.

Obviously the team must replace a large part of its offence and some solid offensive defencemen, not to mention a partner who can share the load with goalie Jamie Phillips as he grows into a No. 1 goalie.

But as Brantford coach Scott Rex is fond of saying, hockey doesn't build character, it reveals it.

And what this past season proved is that the Eagles need to continue to find character players who can lift this team to another championship.