By Matthew Gourlie
The Swift Current Broncos ended the Moose Jaw Warriors in Game 7 of the first round of last year’s playoffs at Mosaic Place.
On Tuesday, the Broncos opened the 2017-18 Western Hockey League pre-season with a 4-0 win over the Warriors in the team’s annual rookie game.
Ben King, selected 13th overall in the 2017 WHL Bantam Draft, scored a hat trick to pace the Broncos. Their 2016 first-round pick, Logan Barlage, opened the scoring and added an assist.
Joel Hofer made 12 saves and Ethan Hein stopped 10 shots as the Broncos goalies split duties to earn the shutout.
Moose Jaw’s Ethan Fitzgerald stopped 23 of the 27 shots he faced.
Power plays were a big part of the story as the Broncos finished 3-for-8 on the power play and the Warriors were 0-for-4. The Broncos’ first three goals came on the man advantage and their third came on a two-man advantage. They also earned seven of the first nine power plays.
Chase Hartje and Matthew Benson continued to impress on defence for the Warriors. Brayden Tracey, the Warriors’ first round pick in 2016, struck iron twice. Vetrans Jaxan Kaluski and Tate Popple both had solid nights and veteran Jaeger White had a few dominant shifts as he looks to get back into the league for his 19-year-old season.
The Warriors also iced a quartet of players who signed their WHL standard player agreements earlier in the day: defencemen Drae Gardiner and Brenden Kwiatkowski and forwards Levi Thiessen and Cameron Sterling.
Gardiner is a 5-foot-8 2001-born defenceman who was the Warriors eighth round pick in 2016.
Kwiatkowski is a 6-foot-2 listed defenceman who was born in 2000. He played midget AAA with Grande Prairie and also played three games in the AJHL with the Grande Prairie Storm last season.
Sterling is a listed 2001-born centre who played minor midget last season in Calgary and had 28 goals and 63 points in 36 games.
Thiessen is a right winger from Winnipeg who was their fifth round pick in the 2017 bantam draft.
The Warriors will play Swift Current Thursday in Regina (3 p.m.) and then meet the Pats Saturday (7 p.m.).
Before the game, the Warriors held a moment of silence for Graham Tuer, a longtime NHL, WHL and minor hockey coach, manager and scout who died Tuesday morning at the age of 87.
Tuer was the father of former Warriors head coach Al Tuer and was inducted in the Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame on July 22.
