It’s a scene that repeats itself every spring: being eliminated and left to wonder what could have been.
“Players get over loses easier than coaches do,” Barrie Colts general manager and head coach Marty Williamson said a day after his team bowed out of the Ontario Hockey League playoffs with a 3-0 loss to the Oshawa Generals in Game 6 on home ice.
It was an honourable showing by Williamson’s team, giving the top-seeded Generals a run for their money, which included Oshawa needing a fortunate video review in Game 2 that, in retrospect, may have tilted the series.
“What can you do?” Williamson asked rhetorically of his team being denied a chance to go into overtime on Easter Sunday and the possibility of heading back to Sadlon Arena with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.
“You can’t go replaying games, people make mistakes … we can control the effort, you can’t control luck," he added.
It has been generally (pun intended) accepted around the league that the Colts got jobbed, but there was also no guarantee that they would have won the game in overtime.
“It sucks,” second-year centre Cole Beaudoin said in the shortest and best description of what took place in Game 2 and the series.
The Colts now bid farewell to 20-year-old Thomas Stewart, whose junior career ended in the saddest way imaginable, by having to leave the game with an ankle injury, and homegrown goaltender Ben West, who is also 20.
While significant, both of those loses will be assuaged by the return of defenceman Beau Akey on the blue line and the emergence of netminder Sam Hillebrandt, who was outstanding in goal against the Generals.
Akey, who may take some time to adjust from shoulder surgery, Beaudoin and captain Beau Jelsma, who is expected to return as an overager, could all be in the top 15 or so players in the league in 2024-25. They will play in front of Hillebrandt, who should be one of the top goalies.
Moreover, the Colts have played since January without imports after Eduard Sale was traded at the deadline and Swiss forward Endo Meier returned to Europe. Another potential overage player, forward Brenden Sirizzotti, failed to turn up in Barrie.
Add it up and the Colts played the last half of the season without three potential top-of-the-lineup contributors, will get another one back in Akey, against just two who are departing.
The favourable roster math, combined with the assumption that the team’s in-house players will improve, underpinned the optimistic tone at locker clear-out day on Monday.
“If we add some pieces, (we) can kind of make a run for it,” said Jelsma, while counting the potential departures with what's expected to be additions this off-season, starting with the draft.
The Colts could add an immediate contributor when they pick fifth overall in Friday’s OHL Priority Selection and another when the CHL Import Draft takes place later in the spring. That process will be bolstered by allowing Russians and Belarussians to be picked for the first time in three years.
There will almost certainly be a surplus to requirements and the Colts could use their excess bodies and draft picks to bring in a top-end player that can make an already good lineup even better.
Colby Barlow, anyone? The Owen Sound Attack sniper, Orillia native and Winnipeg Jets prospect also has family in Barrie. It’s natural that Barlow will want to end his junior career on a high, but the Attack are heading for a rebuild.
Continuing with the spit-balling, when Colts fans dream their dreams, Will Moore would look nice in the uniform playing with, say, Jelsma and/or Beaudoin. And, hey, rookie forward Riley Patterson led all first-year players with 29 goals after deciding to play in the OHL rather than going to Michigan State of the NCAA.
Moore grew up in Mississauga, but, as a dual citizen, plays for the U.S. development program and is presumed to be heading to college. The Colts own his rights and he doesn't need to look far to see what Patterson has done by foregoing college.
Williamson was not speaking specifically about Barlow, Moore or any other player, but he acknowledged that moves are coming.
He also acknowledged that his team would like to avoid the scenario that played out last season when his club was forced to wait on Brandt Clarke’s status returning from the NHL's Los Angeles Kings. Clarke was eventually sent back to junior, but it came too late for the Colts to fully load up at the deadline that fell just a few days later.
“We didn’t find out early enough that we were getting Brandt Clarke back,” explained Williamson. “L.A. really kept us on the ropes there … with all the moves that we could have possibly made.”
Going half-in in 2022-23 undoubtedly played a role in losing Game 7 on the road to North Bay and watching helplessly as Peterborough won the OHL title with a team that finished well below the Colts in the regular-season standings.
The hard facts are not pretty when assessing the Colts post-seasons for most of the last decade. Good teams in 2016, 2018 and 2023 all saw their playoff aspirations wither away after some initial optimism.
Rebuilding cycles — which included getting the No. 1 overall pick (Ryan Suzuki), the No. 4 selection (Clarke), wrapped around the one-year presence of Andrei Svechnikov — have not gotten the Colts anywhere near a league championship.
The last time Barrie got close was 11 yeas ago and they only lost the league title on, well, video review in Game 7 to the London Knights. It came on the same day the team found out that they lost the rights to host the 2014 Memorial Cup — to the Knights of all bloody teams.
Bad luck, as it turns out, is all relative. A fair argument says that you make your own luck.
The Colts will soon get an opportunity to show how it’s done.
