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Vancouver Giants cut import-select Ales Kilnar, punctuates tough start to WHL season

Cam Charron

The Vancouver Giants have had a particularly rough opening to the season, starting 1-3, not getting their first win until a Sunday evening win over the Spokane Chiefs thanks to a goal with 5:53 left to play by Trevor Cheek.

It started this offseason, when the Giants lost 1991-born goaltender Adam Morrison to age and traded Jackson Whistle to Kelowna to open up space for prospects Liam Liston and Payton Lee to take over. Lee was sent back to Junior B, and the team brought up walk-on Tyler Fuhr to be Liston's backup.

Liston has a WHL-low .776 save percentage through three games, and Fuhr has hardly fared better with a .870 save percentage. Few teams, just Everett, Brandon and Regina, are worse off at giving up goals in the season's early going.

The team took another hit today. For the second time in the last two seasons, the Giants have cut ties with their first round pick from the CHL Import draft. Steve Ewen of the Vancouver Province reports the team has cut ties with 19-year old Czech winger Ales Kilnar.

This is, according to Ewen, symbolic of a worry the Giants' have faced since the graduations of Michal Repik and Mario Bliznak—the team has yet to have two consistent import players since that time.

Slovaka defenceman Juraj Valach (3-1-3-4) was picked up via trade with the Tri-City Americans prior to the 2007-08 season. He lasted three games. Bliznak was shipped back to the Giants by the Vancouver Canucks from the minors a few days later for his 20-year-old season and final one alongside Repik, but GM Scott Bonner said at the time that wasn't related to the Valach trade.

Slovak winger Andrej Kudrna (72-18-20-38) was a Vancouver import pick before the 2008-09 season, and scored 18 goals that year as 17-year-old, but was sporadic defensively and was dealt five games into the following year, shipped to the Red Deer Rebels for Cass Mappin. [Vancouver Province]

Ewen also mentions other European players that haven't stuck it out with the team. Misha Fisenko, then a rare overage import in Milan Kytnar, Sebastien Svendsen, Casper Carning, Alex Kuvaev and Finnish goaltender Jonathan Iilihati, selected at the behest of the Vancouver Canucks, who selected him in the 2011 NHL Draft.

Other than that, it is just Tomas Vincour, who spent half a season with the Giants (scoring 22 points in 24 games) before going pro, and is now a strong checker with the Dallas Stars, a team that has the WHL figured out more than anybody. Currently, the team is on its third season of Marek Tvrdon, a Slovakian winger and Detroit Red Wings-select who has doubled as the Giants' best offensive player over the last two seasons.

But that consistency is important to find. The Giants teams of 2006-through-2008 spoiled Vancouver junior hockey fans as they routinely got to watch their team pummel unprepared squads. Repik and Bliznak, along with Milan Lucic, Evander Kane, Spencer Machacek, and puck-moving defencemen like Jonathan Blum and Cody Franson is about as close to a modern dynasty as you can get, and the young franchise won a WHL Championship in 2006 and a Memorial Cup as hosts in 2007 after coming within a goal of a second-consecutive Ed Chynoweth Cup that season as well.

So, yes, compared to those squads, the current Giants have something to be desired, but having Kilnar let go isn't indicative of a failure at the organizational level. I think the trap that some fans and analysts can get into is the trap of reading too much into early season sample size.

The Giants, for instance, have out-shot their opponents' 116-77 despite being out-scored 12-16. Statistical analysts at the NHL-level employ an indicator known as PDO (it doesn't stand for anything) to tell whether a team's record can be explained by unsustainably low shooting or save percentages.

The team's shooting rate, for instance is 10.3% (12 goals in 116 shots) and the team's save rate lies at .792 (61 saves in 77 shots). Adding the two numbers together yields the Giants an approximate PDO (this is usually counted only at even strength, but those figures aren't available to the public) of .896. Over the course of the season at the NHL-level, this number tends to regress closer to 1.

So the Giants' fortunes are primed to be turned around, probably due to improved goaltending. That save rate is exceptionally low and can possibly be explained by one or two bad bounces in the early going of the season, bounces that won't necessarily always go against the Giants. While it seems like a big-market team like the Giants ought to have two strong imported players, keep in mind the Western Conference Champion Portland Winterhawks of last year had one of their import slots tied up with Nino Neiderreiter who stuck with the New York Islanders. Only Sven Bärtschi played with them. The 2011 WHL Champion Kootenay Ice didn't even go into the playoffs with an imported player, and the 2010 Calgary Hitmen only had Misha Fisenko, a player Ewen describes as not having worked out in Vancouver.

Perspective is needed on fronts like this. The Giants have had a rough start to the season and made a bad pick in the Import Draft, but they're still likely the second best team in the BC Division and the season still has many games ahead.