The BC Division of the Western Hockey League has been running at full speed for the past month, and all five British Columbia based teams have completed more than half of their seasons. How do the Giants stack up against the rest?
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Through fourteen games in the Remax Hub, the Giants are sitting in second place with a 9-5-0-0 record with 18 points. They find themselves four points behind the first place Kamloops Blazers (11-2-0-0) and eight points ahead of the third place Kelowna Rockets (5-2-0-0).
Last week, the WHL announced there will be no playoffs in the 2021 shortened season. Each team in BC will play 22 games, with the exception of Kelowna, who will play 16 after having to quarantine for two weeks after positive Covid tests came back in their locker room. Instead of traditional best-of-seven series until one team remains, the league will award the top team in each of the four divisions opposed to the usual two division winners.
At the moment it looks as though nobody can catch Kamloops, who have only lost twice in thirteen games. However, both of those losses have been to Vancouver, and they face off head to head twice more in the season, so things are not as open and shut as they might seem.
Speaking of shut, Giants goaltender Trent Miner leads the league in shutouts, has a 1.56 goals against average, and is a huge reason why the team is where they are. The Colorado Avalanche draft pick has played ten of the team’s fourteen games so far this season and has recorded a staggering four shutouts. Towards the start of the season, he went 234:31 without allowing a single goal, under forty minutes away from the all time record. Even more impressive, for the first twenty-nine days of the season Miner shut out three of the four other teams in the hub, the Prince George Cougars being the only team to solve him in that time.
If the Giants want to make a push for the Blazers, Miner needs to continue to be huge for the team. The Giants have losses in their last two and play the Blazers at 7:00 on Tuesday, April 27th, a game that could decide the BC division’s champion. You can tune in live to this game, and every game live on watch.chl.ca.