After my draft, I reached out to Bojo and r1c3 (WKP’s GM and Co-GM, at the time). And asked if I could stay down for another season. I was really attached to Montreal, and I thought that we could do great things that season, and I wanted to be a part of it. ArGarBarGar and BluesBoy71 had a monster draft (Flak, Flacko, Jesster, and Gerrard came to us in that draft class (and possibly Andersson, now that I think about it)). I thought that we might be poised to take it all. Then, I had the breakout season that I’d never thought possible. I lead Montreal in points through the regular season, as a defenseman. I was racking up blocked shots like nobody’s business. I was on cloud 9. MTL ended up losing in the 4 Star Cup Finals, but I was still thrilled. I wished MTL luck, and packed my bags for Best Kendall.

Once I got there, everything changed. My production evaporated. The powerplay, which was where a huge percentage of my points had come from in the SMJHL, was not kind to me, and I failed to register a powerplay point until the end of my sophomore campaign in the SHL (I wasn’t on the PP unit for that entire time, but still…). In fact, I’d failed to register a single point until midway through the first 20 or so games of my first season up. Smirnov (Ohtaay, helped me through this a lot, telling me that he’d had similar challenges when he’d made the jump to the bigs, and that I shouldn’t let it get me down too much, it’d come with time.)

Even though this was a great struggle for me, I continued to do all of the training that I could, and tried not to let my disappointment affect me too much. In this, my third season, I was promoted to the 1st defensive pairing, and became WKP’s third highest producing defender for the season (behind Bojo and Smirnov, who are both 1000+ TPE players).

And therein lies my point. Despite the fact that your production may not match what it was in juniors (it really, really won’t) and you might not feel like you’re helping your team all that much, just give it time. Keep training, keep working, keep a positive attitude. The rest will come with time.

Code:

395 words

all 3 of these were great! words of wisdom!

      S76 SMJHL DRAFT 3RD OVERALL PICK     
        S77 SHL DRAFT 4TH OVERALL PICK         
                     IIHF TEAM NORWAY                      

Thanks, Kez!