Return of defensively talented, yet small, Joe Hicketts provides boost for Victoria Royals

Midway through Friday's contest between the Vancouver Giants and Victoria Royals at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in downtown Victoria, the public address announcer turned the attention of the game's 5339 fans in attendance to one of the private suites. The parents of Royals players had been brought in to enjoy the back-to-back home weekend set, and the polite applause from the fans turned to giddy laughter as a woman in the suite began dancing, and unfortunately for her son on the ice, turned around to display the name on the back of her blue Royals jersey: HICKETTS #2.

"Everybody knows Lee-Gaye now," said Joe Hicketts with a wide smile when asked about his mother's brief five-second clip on the jumbotron. Hicketts is a 17-year-old draft hopeful who made his return from a shoulder injury Friday night. "They mentioned the parents were here and everybody kind of knows her now. It was something special for me to see on the bench."

The timing worked out perfectly for Lee-Gaye, who had travelled down from her home (and Joe's birthplace) in Kamloops. The timing of the trip coincided with Hicketts' first two Western Hockey League games since October 26 and he scored three points, including an incredible goal on an individual effort in the overtime of the Saturday game in front of a sellout crowd.

Hicketts is not built like most defencemen. He is built like few hockey players are. He's 5-foot-8 and listed at 186 pounds, and to put it kindly, not all of that appears to be muscle. Despite this, he's physically-imposing on the ice, and talented to boot. He was one of the better players on the ice for either team in both games of the set, with the ability to skate away from forecheckers and connect on long stretch passes. One of those, in the first game, led directly to a Logan Nelson goal, with Hicketts finding Nelson through a maze of players and hit the overage forward perfectly on the tape with the puck to set up a clear two-on-one.But he can do more than move the puck. In the words of Corey Pronman, the prospects writer for both ESPN and Hockey Prospectus, Hicketts "while he's sub 5-foot-10, he hits like he's 6-foot-1". In the dying minutes of regulation on Saturday in a tie game, Hicketts caught Giants forward Dalton Sward (who is not small at 6-foot-1 and 182 lbs) with a clean shoulder check with Sward entering the zone, sending the crowd into a frenzy. It was the first we'd seen of Hicketts' hitting since returning to the lineup, admitting after that game that he was feeling much more comfortable with himself as he adjusted to the game speed. "It was quicker than I thought."

Early in overtime, Hicketts began skating with the puck in his own end and brought it along the right wing, cutting around Giants forward Cain Franson. Despite losing the puck behind the offensive net, Hicketts won a battle against the defenceman Tyler Morrison and in a flash, backhanded the puck over goaltender Jared Rathjen's shoulder on the far side, giving Victoria the win.

While nobody other than Kelowna was expected to compete in the B.C. Division this season, the Royals, after the weekend's action, sit third in the WHL's Western Conference, two points up on Seattle, and have added a potential gamebreaker to the lineup with Hicketts' return.

Funny enough, while the goal capped a weekend of strong play for the Royals (despite losing in a shootout on Friday and being taken to overtime Saturday, the Royals decisively out-played and out-chanced the Giants both nights) Royals coach Dave Lowry was the first to pump the brakes on the Joe Hicketts bandwagon.

"He's able to create. He's an intelligent player. He reads the ice well," Lowry said. "But we were going to ask him, if he didn't score [in overtime], would he have been able to make it back?"

"Everybody has a tendency to come in and want to be the difference-maker. I think the strength of our group is we've been able to move forward when he hasn't been a part of it, and to make sure we brought him through patiently."

Apparently by the end of the game, there was enough of a waiting period and Hicketts began to take his chances.

For Lowry, there's some pressure to give Hicketts the minutes he needs and the opportunities to show scouts what he can do. In the NHL's Central Scouting midterm rankings, Hicketts was left off the North American skaters list thanks to "limited viewing". Scouts, however, have a pretty good idea of his talent level. Pronman has him at 45th. One scout had him in the 4th round with potential to move up, but the most glowing praise came from Ross MacLean, head scout of International Scouting Service, who suggested Hicketts might be targeted in the second round in June:

At 17, Hicketts' credentials are ridiculous. He was drafted 12th in the 2011 Bantam Draft, captained Canada Pacific's silver medal squad at the World U-17 challenge last year (and captained Canada's team at the 2012 Youth Olympic games) and scored two points in five games at the Ivan Hlinka for Canada this past summer, winning gold. But defencemen built like Hicketts don't get an awful lot of respect when it comes to the draft. Belleville's 5-foot-9 Jordan Subban, a talented skater and defenceman, was ranked 55th by Central Scouting among North American skaters and was scooped up in the 4th round by Vancouver. In 2012, 13 defencemen were selected in the first round, none smaller than 5-foot-11. Eventually, in the third round, Boston used its 85th overall pick on a 5-foot-9 USA National Development Program player named Matt Grzelcyk, who has starred for the United States in consecutive World junior championships. In Hicketts' lifetime, only one defenceman has ever been drafted in the first round at 5-foot-10 or shorter: the Windsor Spitfires' Ryan Ellis in 2009.

(Sidebar here: 151 defencemen have been drafted in the first round since 1996. Only eight of those have been shorter than 6-foot, and three from the past two drafts: Mat Dumba, Derrick Pouliot and Josh Morrissey. The other five are all regular NHL players: Keith Ballard, Thomas Hickey, Kevin Shattenkirk, Nick Leddy, and Ellis. Comparatively, every year or so an NHL team spends a first rounder on a monstrous blueliner like Samuel Morin, Jamie Oleksiak, Dylan McIlrath, Boris Valabik, Alex Plante or Sasha Pokulok. Not all of those work out.)

The message for Hicketts from Lowry is that if the Royals keep winning, the scouts will take notice.

"You definitely want to do a bit more," said Hicketts, referring to his draft season after having missed half the year. "But you have to realize that your teammates are going to help you along the way. Dave's been there all along, 'don't worry too much on the draft, it's as much as helping the team win'."