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QMJHL preview: Rimouski should run away with the East in 2013-14

With the QMJHL season starting Thursday, we will look at each division in the Q and make 14 fun facts and fearless forecasts for the upcoming 2013-14 season. This is the East Division. The West Division was posted Tuesday and the Maritime Division will be available Thursday.

The East was the division of death last season, with all teams competing hard against each other and beating up on the lowly Shawinigan Cataractes. This year the Rimouski Oceanic kept just about all of their core together, while the Baie-Comeau Drakkar lost a bit and the Quebec Remparts don’t compare in talent to the Oceanic, who should have a big year. The Chicoutimi Saguenéens should be a factor, and the Victoriaville Tigres will also play well this season.

1. Chicoutimi will benefit this season from Nicolas Roy — The Saguenéens pulled off the biggest trade of the summer, acquiring first overall pick Nicolas Roy from the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles for their first round picks in 2014, '15 and '16. The deal will work out in Chicoutimi’s favour as long as they can stay strong for those years, and Roy could make that happen. Roy adds to a strong forward group led by captain Charles Hudon, centres Laurent Dauphin and Sébastien Sylvestre, and newcomer Vincent Provencher. Roy can play sheltered minutes while he learns from those players, and chips in on 5-on-5 and on the powe rplay, where he could be a force with his big frame and excellent playmaking abilities.

2. Rimouski will not benefit this season from Stefan Matteau Jr. — Rimouski bought low on Matteau, hoping his headaches last season would be worth another 50-75 point scorer to their depth chart. However, Matteau isn’t even listed on the Océanic roster and will likely spend this season with either the New Jersey Devils or the Albany Devils, after spending his 2012-13 season with the Devils bookended by stints in the QMJHL. Matteau was acquired for a second and a third round pick, which now look wasted in retrospect, since Rimouski is now banking on the Devils choosing to send him back instead of keeping him in their own developmental systems.

3. The Remparts will be far less controversial behind the bench — The big man, Patrick Roy, has left for greener pastures, leaving the Remparts to hire a new bench boss to fill the NHL legend’s shoes. The Remparts took former Océanic GM Philippe Boucher to be their new coach and GM. Boucher will be joined by Martin Laperrière, Patrick’s associate coach in Quebec who decided to honour his contract with the Remparts. The team has most of its core back for this season, including Anthony Duclair, Adam Erne, Brent Turnbull, Kurt Etchegary, Brandon Shea and Nick Sorensen, as well as defenceman Ryan Culkin and goaltenders François Brassard and newcomer Callum Booth. They probably won’t miss a beat.

4. Baie-Comeau will take a step back — The Drakkar will miss Euros Petr Straka and Valentin Zykov dearly this season. They were the leading catalysts of the Drakkar offence and will be surely missed, along with Minnesota Wildc prospect Raphaël Bussières. Gabryel Paquin-Boudreau will be called upon to lead the offence, along with steps forward from Jérémy Grégoire and Félix Girard. Goaltender Philippe Cadorette will return and hope to repeat his outstanding 2012-13 performance. One strength will be their depth, with Alexandre Ranger, Frédéric Gamelin and Alec Jon Banville heading up a solid group of secondary scorers.

5. Shawinigan will be an interesting team to watch — Rock bottom couldn’t have made a bigger noise for the Cataractes last season, after winning the 2012 Memorial Cup on home ice. They sold the farm to get the cup that season, and last year was a mighty hangover, but the Cats are back and got a couple of interesting forwards to help them out this season, Matthew Boudreau from Halifax and Francis Beauvillier from Rimouski. Beauvillier’s brother, Anthony Beauvillier, the team’s second overall pick at last year’s draft, made the team and the pair could play together. As well, 19-year-old import netminder Marvin Cüpper is back, and hopefully healed from all the puck-shaped bruises he earned last season.

6. Victoriaville will reform its strategy and make an impact — Last season, the gameplan on offence for the Tigres was get the puck to the Philippes, Maillet or Halley, and let them score. This season, they are both gone, but most of the rest of the team is back, including Angelo Miceli and super-shadow Carl-Antoine Delisle. Brandon Whitney could possibly be the best goaltender in the league not named Zachary Fucale. With that and a veteran defence corps and a smart Yanick Jean behind the bench, they could scare any team in their division.

7. Peter Trainor could lead the league in scoring — The 100-point scorer still has Scott Oke, Frédéric Gauthier and Anthony DeLuca to distribute pucks to, and Samuel Morin to receive breakout passes from. The Océanic could very possibly lead the league in

scoring this season, and Trainor will surely be a factor in that. He may not crack 100 points, but he will come close.

8. Duclair and Erne will show that last season’s issues are behind them — Last season, the pair were suspended indefinitely by the Remparts for the mysterious “conduct unbecoming of the team” blanket term, then brought back the next day by the team, saying everything is behind them. Talking to both players after the incident, it seemed that they both received the message just fine, but will issues of complacent effort and subpar play be a factor in each player’s 18-year-old season? Now that both players are drafted, they can’t afford any slip ups.

9. Nicolas Roy and Anthony Beauvillier will go head-to-head for the rookie of the year — Roy and Beauvillier went 1-2 in the QMJHL entry draft last June. The former is a big forward who is an excellent playmaker. The other is possibly the best goal scorer in the draft, and while undersized, has an excellent shot and knows how to use it. It will be fun to see these two go at it this season.

10. Victo will start to collect from the Phil Danault trade — The Phil Danault trade was the biggest trade of the trading period last season. The Moncton Wildcats acquired the Tigres captain for defenceman Gabriel Gagné and a few draft picks, some of which came back for forward Ross Johnston. Johnston could be a top-6 power forward, and Gagné, now a forward, will start the season with the team. Oh, and the Tigres ended up beating the Wildcats in five games in the first round last year.

11. Talk of a Trois-Rivières team will die down — Last year during the playoffs, talk of a team moving next door to the Shawinigan Cataractes heated up, with talk of the ownership group not getting along, to former Cataractes president Réal Breton getting a group together to put a team in Trois-Rivières, to people coming out in support of this group, to talk of a new arena. Since then, the Acadie-Bathurst Titan have been sold to local ownership and the P.E.I. Rocket have sold and rebranded as the Charlottetown Islanders. This leaves no QMJHL team in an bad ownership situation. Trois-Rivières talks will die down for this season, but will resurface as soon as another team is close to dire straits.

12. Cataractes and Sags will debut new coaches — Chicoutimi and Shawinigan went for new bench bosses over the course of the summer, and it will remain to be seen what type of impact they will have. The Cats went young with Martin Bernard, 37, who coached midget AAA in Magog last season. Bernard coached Victoriaville from 2006 to 2008, and replaced Denis Chalifoux, who resigned to spend more time with his family. The Saguenéens handed the keys to Patrice Bosch, an assistant to Eric Veilleux in Baie-Comeau last year. Bosch coached for 12 years in Quebec’s junior AAA league. He replaced Marc-Etienne Hubert, who took the vacant job at UQTR.

13. Quebec drops vintage 'wheat' and gets new duds for this season — The Cataractes are now the only team in the QMJHL without a white sweater. The Quebec Remparts dropped their vintage cream-coloured threads in favour of a more modern white jersey. The jersey swap, which is a definite downgrade in the eyes of this reporter, will see the Remparts ditch their 2006 Memorial Cup winning duds for something closely resembling the New Jersey Devils, proving to the hockey world that they really want to separate from the flamboyant Patrick Roy by emulating the look of one of the NHL's most boring teams.

14. The East will be the division of death again this year — With the expected drop of the Drakkar and the rise of the Cataractes and the Saguenéens this season, there are no weak teams in the East this year. Last season, the teams beat up on Shawinigan and roughed each other up all year. This year, there is no easy mark in the bunch, as the Cats have rebounded to respectability, the Sags added the best 1997-born newcomer and the other teams didn’t lose enough to become also-rans. Prepare for a battle any time East foes match up in 2013-14.