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GCool · 06-24-2021, 09:38 AM

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA -- After an optional team skate last night, John Donair made himself available for some questions. The Panthers' season starts later today against the Buffalo Stampede.

Interview

John, good to hear from you. It's been a while. How have you been doing?

Not too bad! I haven't really had much time to talk to the media all the way through my rookie campaign. I've been doing some work on the side with Danny Foster and Foster's Gym out in LA, and I've occasionally gone back to Anaheim to skate with my old teammates (and welcome the new guys) on the Outlaws. Fortunately I have a pretty good situation in Los Angeles where the two teams are so close to each other, my managers don't mind me spending an off day there.

Interview

Is that something you had worked out with managers before you were drafted?

Nah, not at all. It's one of those things, y'know, comes with the Outlaws still being so close to where I happened to get drafted. More of a convenient coincidence. If I played for Maine in [the Juniors] or ... I dunno, Manhattan, it wouldn't have even come up. But I'm a former Outlaws captain despite it being in a rather turbulent year for the franchise, and I made quite a few friends as I grew up there, so it's really cool that it worked out like this.

Interview

It's your second full season in the SHL, starting [today]. What are you hoping to improve on the most?

I think I'm actually doing pretty well as it is. Obviously there's a lot of room to grow, I think we as a team need to figure out a little more consistency on the offensive side. We can't leave Booth out there standing on his head trying to keep us in a game we only get 20 shots in. And when shots are that low, I take that personally. I'm out there crashing the net for as long as coach keeps me out there, and if we can't get shots on goal whenever I'm out there we aren't doing our jobs. That's something that I can already do pretty well at the SHL level, so I want to accentuate that moving forward. Obviously the new update scale is going to turn training on its head for the entire league for a little while, but I look forward to that challenge.

Interview

To that point, the update scale - that's a big change. So is expansion. What's a bigger deal to you, in your opinion?

Well frankly I remember seeing that Montreal color scheme on another Montreal team, but we'll see if this team has a little more longevity than that one. I also didn't know that Philadelphia had ties to forges, maybe a 5-hour drive west is where that Forge came from? At any rate, I'm excited for a bunch of new players to start with a franchise and I think it's good for the league with the number of players who are actively trying to go out there and get better every day. There simply isn't room for a lot of great players who are trying to work their way through the SHL ranks, and this is the best way to mitigate a possible loss of interest from players who aren't getting the playing time they want. I happen to know someone on one of the expansion teams pretty well, and before expansion, he was pretty down in the dumps. He didn't like his team or his role on the team. He was getting tired of coming to work every day or checking in even once a week. Then, he was drafted, and the excitement in that new locker room has sparked a new fire in him to train and play. That's the best part about this upcoming season. The update scale's big, but ... we won't know what it's really doing to help parity for a few seasons, and everyone's still on the same playing field so I'm not too sure it's going to actively mess anybody up that bad, y'know? Time will tell, though. I very well could be wrong about that.

Interview

You were an honorable mention for the S59 Jesster Trophy, given to the SHL's top rookie. Do you think you were snubbed?

Not in the least, honestly. I was actually really happy to have gotten the honorable mention. It was a nice surprise to get that clip of the awards show sent to me. Some nominator was like ... I was the most efficient? Something like that. But yeah, I knew I wasn't really getting the minutes that some of those bigger names were, so when I finished toward the top in points I thought for a split second, 'oh hey I could get a nomination', but I absolutely never thought I had a chance at winning it. Mat Smith did phenomenally in goal as a rookie, he played almost the whole season. I was really pulling for [Vaseline] Pod[calzone] out of Seattle, since we're both in Russia together, but Xavier Doom was a great pick. He was getting mauled all year in New Orleans, that team fucking blows. But he persevered and scored a lot of points and did what he could in a truly terrible situation. And then, uh ... who was the other one?

Interview

Evangelos Giannopoulos, from Hamilton.

Ah yeah, that's right. He was on the top pair, wasn't he?

Interview

To my knowledge, yes.

I pretty much forgot he was a rookie, honestly. But hey, good for him. He did very well in his own right, his name just didn't stick out to me at the end. I'd put him at 4th and me at 5th when it came to voting or rookies or whatever.

Interview

Moving on to your draft class, you've definitely climbed the TPE ranks and are now hovering around the top 10. What do you attribute that to?

Well for the most part I'm just putting in the work week in and week out. I think throughout SHL history the S56 class will be considered relatively ... weak? For most teams, at least. But the Panthers cleaned up. We have Festinator, by FAR the highest earner in S56, myself, and Grape Fruit, who's catching up to me more and more every day. We're all flirting with top 10 out of a 50-something person class, and the Panthers did not pick us all up in the first half of the first round. You do the math as far as how much ground LA gained in that one draft year. I'm ready to see how Fruit handles more time and hopefully we can get some chemistry going on the same line together.

Interview

Any other predictions for Season 60? The Casino has the Over/Under for LA at 38.5 wins, which would be good for 1st in your new division.

That's an interesting way to look at it. Well, let's see, we got Seattle ... Calgary ... who else?

Interview

Also the Blizzard and San Francisco.

I think it'll be interesting to see who starts out the gate hot first. We play Buffalo twice in the first four, which could actually work a little bit better for us given the disparity in TPE gain and all that stuff. But we don't play the Blizzard til about 10 games in, which could be good for us also because we've had a good sample size at that point when it comes to our strategy. We're changing quite a bit up when it comes to personnel toward the bottom of our roster, myself and the other rookies included, so we need that little bit of time. The Blizzard are strong, don't get me wrong, but this might be our time. We've been JUST on the edge of doing well for the last few seasons, and I've been watching from afar while enduring it last season. I want to win now. I'm excited for Season 60.

DeletedAtUserRequest · 06-26-2021, 12:10 PM

Nice read!

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